A Man I'd Like You to Meet

Near the end of February, a friend asked me to borrow his Net-flicks account. Asked. I gave the request about two seconds of deliberation. How could I deny a favor to a friend?

Anyway, for the past six weeks, I have been using it to watch the films of Akira Kurosawa. I don't know how deep your awareness of movies goes, but critics count this Japanese director among the all-time greats. Many Kurosawa films influenced American ones. Yojimbo inspired A Fistful of Dollars, one of the movies that made Clint Eastwood famous. And you may not believe this but Hidden Fortress inspired Star Wars. These facts come from Roger Ebert, not myself, and can be found in his review of Seven Samurai in the first volume of The Great Movies.

Consequently, if ever a director was indebted to another, George Lucas owes Kurosawa. Consider the difference in quality between the earlier Star Wars films, the ones that borrowed from Kurosawa, and the newer films, the Star Wars prequels that Lucas wrote himself. The difference is not that Lucas dropped in quality; the difference is Kurosawa. (If any Star Wars die-hards are reading this, I'm probably moments from being blaster-shot, light-sabered, and Force-choked.)

To be fair to Lucas, Kurosawa also borrowed from the greats, especially Shakespeare. His Throne of Blood adapts Macbeth, and in Ran he uses the storyline of King Lear. (Both are the best adaptations of any Shakespeare Tragedies I have seen put to film.) And since I am getting most of this information from Ebert, I guess it is hypocritical of me to criticize Lucas. I just know the power of a Kurosawa film and want you to experience it.

Unfortunately, I think two factors deter the average movie fan from his films. First, all of his movies require subtitles. And second, most of them are about Samurais. Though the subtitles are unavoidable, the social practices, despite their unfamiliar eastern-ness, actually strengthen his movies. The culture of Japan and the code of the Samurai provide Kurosawa with a particular myth, by which I mean a shared set of ways a society establishes. (Unfortunately, our society has lost such a shared understanding about the most important things.)

Though his films most often occur in an eastern nation of the past, they view honor, social etiquette, the place of men and women, and religious ceremony specifically. This grounding in detail enables his films to achieve the universal. An American may know nothing about a Samurai, but seeing the specific way his society define integrity allows a Westerner to relate to such a figure, to recognize an honorable as well as a dishonorable Samurai.

If then these are issues keeping you from Kurosawa, I encourage you to overlook them. I don't have a Netflicks account to offer you, but I do have a recommendation. Try Ikiru, which to me seems to be based on The Death of Ivan Ilyich, a novella by Leo Tolstoy. It's about a middle-aged, city official who discovers that he has cancer in his stomach and only a few months to live. Mortality confronts him with the vanity of his life, and he responds with a search for something meaningful. What he discovers is real hope, a reward greatly worth the effort.