Obscure Japanese Film #48
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Tomokazu Miura and Kumiko Akiyoshi
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
