The Magnificent Ronin

The partnership between Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune is one of the screen’s great director-actor collaborations. Between 1948 (“Drunken Angel”) and 1965 (“Red Beard”), they made 16 films together, some of them--”Rashomon,” “Seven Samurai,” “Yojimbo,” “High and Low”--among the masterpieces of world cinema in the post-World War II era. In the introduction to “The Emperor and the Wolf,” his endless dual biography of these two artists, Stuart Galbraith IV evokes John Ford and John Wayne, Ingmar Bergman and Max Von Sydow, Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro for comparison’s sake, and the analogies are by no means misplaced.

Yet these comparisons falter at a crucial point. Unlike their peers, Kurosawa and Mifune stopped working together after “Red Beard” (which also belongs on the list of their finest films), despite the fact that Kurosawa went on directing until 1993, and the increasingly marginalized Mifune continued acting until 1996. The question of what went wrong between these two proud and mysterious men haunts all considerations of their lives and work. It is the question that Galbraith fails to answer.

Possibly that’s because there is no answer, except a sort of existential drift in different directions that was occasioned by two factors. One was the chaos that came upon the Japanese film industry in the ‘60s (organized, in imitation of the industrialized American system, around biggish studios) when television, international finance and celebrity folly struck with a crushing impact. The other was that Kurosawa and Mifune were--despite being taller than the typical Japanese and sharing a lack of formal education and a propensity for strong drink at the height of their careers--totally opposite personalities.

Kurosawa claimed a samurai heritage and, more immediately, a downwardly trending middle-class background. He trained as an artist, but once he found his way to film (he was an assistant director and screenwriter in the prewar and wartime years), he became an austere and driven man, difficult to approach, essentially humorless. He often had to shut down production because his intensity made him ill. He was very much the “emperor” of Galbraith’s title and was so called by his casts and crews.

Mifune was entirely different. Yes, people thought of him as the “wolf” because of his demonic screen presence. But he was, in fact, an agreeable, accommodating man, eschewing entourages and pretentiousness. Of the working class, he had served in the war as an aerial cameraman (though never under fire) and thereafter went to Toho, Japan’s most important studio, looking for photographic work.

Instead, he was placed in a “new faces” program at the studio where everyone, Kurosawa included, was struck by the intensity of his acting. “Mifune had a talent I had never encountered before,” Kurosawa once said. “It was above all the speed with which he expressed himself that was astounding. The ordinary Japanese actor might need ten feet of film to get across an impression; Mifune needed only three feet.”

In short, he had what Kurosawa needed: the instinctive intensity to shake up and humanize with humor, athleticism and basic good nature the director’s rather austere films. In return, Kurosawa offered Mifune something he could not find elsewhere: roles with a kind of intellectual coherence. The samurai Mifune played for him were all ronin, the Japanese word for members of a doomed (and, by Kurosawa, deeply mourned) soldierly class who had been cut loose from their masters and now wandered the countryside, freelancing their deadly skills while trying to retain their complex code of honor.

When Mifune worked in modern middle-class garb for Kurosawa--”High and Low,” “The Bad Sleep Well”--issues of honor and correct behavior in morally ambivalent circumstances remained central to the film. Kurosawa was something of an anti-Communist, ever a humanist, ever attuned (doubtless because of his family’s fall from economic grace) to class issues. In Mifune’s edginess, anger and puzzlement in the face of social forces he could not comprehend, he had found the perfect embodiment of his major preoccupations.

Whereupon, the ‘60s--recasting class issues in new terms--happened. More to the point of these lives, both Kurosawa and Mifune were now internationally known figures. The latter--with Kurosawa disapproving--opened his own studio and sold himself short in all kinds of films--the good, the bad, the irrelevant--in order to support it. He appeared, amazingly, in 126 of them (not counting television work). Latterly, he was often to be found standing around in military epics, playing generals and admirals (the tragic Isoruko Yamamato, reluctant architect of the Pearl Harbor attack, was a particular specialty).

Meanwhile, Kurosawa, whose work had been deeply influenced by Western film and literary influences (Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, and, yes, Evan Hunter), was lured into feckless attempts to make Western-financed films (“Runaway Train” and “Tora Tora Tora” most notably). When, after these failures, a return to Japanese themes (the flawed but nevertheless underrated “Dodes’ka-den”) also flopped, he attempted suicide and made only one film (in the USSR) in the ‘70s, before returning to something like his past form with his epics of the early ‘80s, “Kagemusha” and “Ran.”

These films, supported by admiring younger American filmmakers (Lucas, Coppola, Scorsese), are very beautiful and carry intense meaning in their imagery and the way it is orchestrated. But, yes, they could have used Mifune’s energizing presence, if by then he was capable of mobilizing it.

In the end, Kurosawa and Mifune had, each in his way, become ronin himself, roaming an empty world in search of work worthy of his gifts. In this they were both disadvantaged by their inability to speak any language but Japanese. And the mutual contempt in which Kurosawa and the Japanese press held each other--the critics mistrusted his reliance on occidental source material, the ease with which foreign critics accepted him and the fact that his work was so casually (if often clumsily) knocked off by American and European directors--leaked westward and rendered Kurosawa even more remote and difficult to approach. Through the years, rumors of a reunion between Kurosawa and Mifune occasionally surfaced, though nothing came of them. Indeed, Galbraith, try as he may, can find no evidence of a definitive quarrel or unforgivable break between them. With one exception--a Mifune outburst--they always spoke well of each other. Their breach remains a mystery, a sadness to us in the audience, an incalculable loss to film history.

This loss is blatantly visible to Galbraith, but he can only mourn it, not analyze it. He seems to be one of those mad-fact collectors who shovels useless information in lieu of thoughtful insight. Joan Mellen, in her wee essay (one of the invaluable British Film Institute series about the world’s most significant films) does better. She may devote too much space to a shot-by-shot analysis of “Seven Samurai’s” key sequences, thereby imparting excessive intentionality to the often accidental processes of movie making, and she falls to quarreling with younger Japanese critics who cannot grasp Kurosawa’s towering strengths.

But eventually she makes the case for his humanism, for the sheer kinetic and moral power of his best work, for his near-tragic class-consciousness, which far transcended narrowing ideology. He was a great master--and Mifune was his great instrument--precisely for the reasons the Japanese have most often criticized them: because their ability to universalize complex emotions make them instantly movingly recognizable to disparate cultures the world over.