Purely Joyful Movie!

Good movie, but best of all time? Hardly . . .

Brilliant and touching

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

Kurosawa's screen version of Dostoevsky's novel "The Idiot" runs for almost three hours and yet it still feels under-nourished and more than a little confusing. I'm not sure up-dating it and transferring the action to post-war Japan was such a good idea. The romantic entanglements that make up most of the plot are not only hard to follow but are overtly melodramatic and not in a good way, nor is it helped by the distinctly off-kilter performances of most of the cast, (Mifune, in particular, goes way over-the-top). Shot in grim monochrome in a snow-covered Okinawa, it's also a distinctly ugly-looking picture and as literary adaptations go, this has to be considered something of a misfire.

Japanese screenwriter, film editor, film producer and director Akira Kurosawa's ninth feature film which he edited and co-wrote with Japanese writer Eijirõ Hisaita (1889-1976), is an adaptation of a novel from 1868-1869 by 19th century Russian author and journalist Fyodor M. Dostoyevsky (1821-1881). It was shot on locations on the Island of Haikkado, the largest and northernmost prefecture of Japan and is a Japanese production which was produced by film producer Takashi Koide. It tells the story about Kinji Kameda, a soldier who due to his experiences during the Second World War has been staying at a sanatorium in Okinawa for several years. After being released, more or less recovered, the uncommonly compassionate Kinji returns to his home place and during that winter in the 1950s he meets a woman named Ayako who is the youngest of a wealthy man's three daughters and a kept woman named Taeko whom he becomes emotionally involved with. The young man is looking for a woman to spend the rest of his life with, but things change when he learns that his friend Akama is in love with one of the two women.Distinctly and precisely directed by Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa (1910-1998), this heartrending and profoundly humane fictional tale which is narrated from multiple viewpoints though mostly from the main character's point of view, draws an afflicting portrayal of an emotive and trusting man's return to society after serving his country and his relationship with two women. While notable for it's atmospheric rural milieu depictions, picturesque black-and-white cinematography by cinematographer Toshio Ubukata, production design by Japanese production designer and art director Takashi Matsuyama (1908-1997), the fine editing by Akira Kurosawa and use of sound, this character-driven, dialog-driven and literary love triangle about human dignity, human cruelty, social distinctions and love, depicts an in-depth and internal study of character and contains a prominent score by Japanese film score and classical composer Fumio Hayasaki (1914-1955).This somewhat melodramatic, romantic and involving psychological drama from the early 1950s which has an incomplete narrative structure due to a studio that shortened the filmmakers original cut from 265 minutes to 166 minutes, is impelled and reinforced by it's voice-over narration, at times trance-like and colorful characters, substantial character development and the fine acting performances by Japanese actor Masayuki Mori (1911-1973), Chinese-born Japanese actor Toshirõ Mifune (1920-1997) and Japanese actresses Setsuko Hara and Yoshiko Kuga. An empathic, poignantly atmospheric and epic story.

It's pretty difficult to judge this film fully. The first half is erratic, and filled with jolting edits, characters that appear and disappear without any introduction. It's a damn shame. The scatological nature of this epic project, adapted from the Russian classic by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, was due to it being horrendously cut down by the studio that funded it. Originally, Akira Kurosawa had created a 266 minute cut of the - incredibly faithful to the source novel - was shortened by 100 minutes. Unfortunately, it would seem that the world may never see the original version, as even when Kurosawa hunted for the missing scenes in the vaults several decades later, he was unable to locate them.As it is in its now 166 minute format (the longest version available), it is still an incredibly important piece of melodrama. After the devastation of the war, Kinji Kameda (Masayuki Mori) and Denkichi Akama (Toshiro Mifune), travel back to a remote island. Kameda claims that he suffers from an illness, cause by the suffering of war, and simply referred to as idiocy - when expressed on film, this idiocy seems simply to be an innocent, and fundamentally naive view of people. He simply only sees good in people, even if this is not the case. On arriving they both seem to fall for a disgraced woman, Taeko Nasu (Setsuko Hara), who was someones concubine since the age of fourteen, and is being offered for marriage at a price.What ensues is a strange love triangle that divides not only the two male protagonists, but the community. The film is beautifully shot in black and white by Toshio Ubukata, who had worked with Kurosawa on his previous film, Scandal (1950). It is unfortunate that the films first half suffers so evidently due to extensive cutting. However, it is the relationship between Kameda and Akama that provides the climax (which is seemingly more intact) that provides the films central theme, and its most poignant elements.www.the-wrath-of-blog.blogspot.com

First and foremost, I love Kurosawa films. He is in my opinion one of the world's greatest film makers, bar none. His ability to tell compelling stories is legendary. So, when I rate this movie a 5, I do so only because of respect to Kurosawa, if it were someone else I would rate it even lower. The reason I am disappointed with this movie is because of the horrendous editing that left the viewer, me, wondering why so many characters reacted to different situations. I think a person who understands this film has had to have read Dostevyski's novel because he certainly didn't 'get it' from viewing the film. I have been told that the studio whacked half of the film on the editing room floor. In so doing, the studio left the viewer in a lurch as to why things happened, more-so in the beginning of the movie than the end...but, it requires too much to ask of an audience to understand or infer what is going on with the movie when it should be crystal clearly developed and the audience should KNOW why things happen, rather than guess. Kurosawa is by far too good a communicator to have knowingly allowed or directed this in a fashion that the audience is lost, which is exactly how I felt after viewing this movie...lost, lost in translation, lost on the editing room floor.