Obscure Japanese Film #48
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| Tomokazu Miura and Kumiko Akiyoshi |
Sanshiro Sugata (1943) was, of course, the directorial debut of a certain Akira Kurosawa, who had persuaded Toho Studios to buy the rights to Tsuneo Tomita’s just-published novel of the same name. Sugata is a fictional character based on Shiro Saigo (1866-1922), an early practitioner of judo who became one of the masters of the art. Tomita himself was the son of another judo champ, Tsunejiro Tomita, who had been an associate of Saigo’s. Kurosawa’s commercial instincts had proven sound on that occasion – so much so, in fact, that the studio pressured him into making a sequel, which was released just as the war was coming to an end. Between that film and this 1977 version, there had been a further four remakes, including a 1965 film produced by Kurosawa himself. This was apparently a scene-for-scene remake of the first two films, but it was not well-received by the critics and seems to have all but destroyed the career of its young director, Seiichiro Uchikawa, whose previous film (Samurai from Nowhere) had shown definite promise.
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| Kihachi Okamoto (right) on set |
Kihachi Okamoto was an eccentric and often brilliant director whose work suffered a sharp decline in quality as the ‘60s ended and the ‘70s began. The reasons for this are debatable, but in my opinion none of his films from 1970 onwards really work, and his talent became less and less evident as time went on. This is a pity, because his mid-period movies such as Sword of Doom, Oh Bomb! and The Human Bullet are stunning. Unfortunately, his remake of Sanshiro Sugata (newly released on DVD in Japan) proves not to have been a return to form. In fact, it copies a great deal from the Kurosawa original, from the blurry point-of-view shot seen through the eyes of a nearly knocked-out opponent to the climactic fight on the windswept hill. There is one scene in which Okamoto subverts our expectations – in the original, Sugata had thrown away his geta (wooden sandals) when volunteering to drive judo master Shogoro Yano’s rickshaw; Kurosawa had used this to create a striking montage sequence in which we see what happens to one of the geta with the passage of time. In Okamoto’s version, he is about to throw them away, but thinks better of it and ties them to the rickshaw handle. Some of the fight scenes could be said to be an improvement on Kurosawa’s, but the shot of an opponent flying through the air worked in 1943 because it was so brief, whereas Okamoto makes it completely absurd by extending the shot and adding a ridiculous sound effect. Indeed, this Sanshiro Sugata, with its pop song theme tune, jaunty score and broad performances suggests that the intended audience was 10-year-old boys. Incidentally, the lame music is by none other than Masaru Sato, who had once given us one of the great film scores of all time for Kurosawa’s Yojimbo.
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| Tatsuya Nakadai |
That Okamoto assembled an all-star cast mostly goes for very little. Tatsuya Nakadai is fine as Sugata’s teacher, Shogoro Yano (played by Toshiro Mifune in 1965), but it’s hardly one of his better roles. Nevertheless, he clearly did some of his own stunts and looks more convincingly formidable than Denjiro Okochi did in the 1943 film. We also get Kumiko Akiyoshi as the love interest, Tomisaburo ‘Lone Wolf’ Wakayama as her father (Takashi Shimura in the original), Kyoko ‘Woman in the Dunes’ Kishida as an older woman who tries to seduce Sanshiro, Atsuo Nakamura as Gennosuke Higaki (the main villain of the piece), Kunie Tanaka as Sanshiro’s best friend and Tetsuro Tanba in an especially thankless role as a senior member of Yano’s school.
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| Daisuke Ryu |
Nakadai’s real-life acting student Daisuke Ryu also makes his film debut as one of the attackers whom Nakadai hurls into the canal. The lead is played by the boyish Tomokazu Miura, a teen heartthrob type who could act a bit; he’s adequate, but never really convinces as a man of the 19th-century and I prefer Susumu Fujita in the original.
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| Kunie Tanaka, Akiyoshi and Miura |
The film was mostly shot with a handheld camera long before it became de rigeur, but I can’t say it adds much and it’s really only the fact that it’s in Panavision that prevents this looking like a TV drama. The screenplay was co-written by Okamoto and Nakadai’s wife, Yasuko Miyazaki. The first hour and 40 minutes follow the first Kurosawa film, while the final 40 minutes feature the karate-schooled brothers of Gennosuke Higaki who are out for vengeance and appeared in Kurosawa's 1945 sequel. The role of the heroine has been greatly expanded (the character was little more than a cipher in Kurosawa’s films) and the new character of Sanshiro’s best friend is given quite a few scenes, in one of which he is brutally attacked by Gennosuke Higaki and left with a permanently twisted arm. No longer able to fight, he later turns up with a gun! One wonders if this role was created especially for Kunie Tanaka, who must have been double-jointed as his broken limb is so convincing and is, in fact, the highlight of this otherwise disappointing movie.
Watched without subtitles.
