My favourite thing ever.
I didn't know anything about this movie, and only picked it out because it's directed by Akira Kurosawa, and stars Toshiro Mifune.
Well, essentially, it's based on a book by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, but since you knew who the director and one of the actors were, you indeed
knew something about it! I know, I'm nit-picking.
Like The Magnificent Ambersons, this movie was dramatically cut against it's director's wishes. It is still 2 hours and 45 minutes long, but there were 100 minutes that were taken out and lost.
Yeah, it's always a terrible thing when censors destroy director's vision. Same happened to numerous von Stroheim films, but I believe The Greed was the one that was butchered the most. Originally, the movie was 8 hours long, but the producers massacred it to 2.5h. It is said that von Stroheim cried when he found out. I don't know, if Kurosawa reacted as emotionally, but he probably wasn't too happy about it neither. Anyway, In 2003 Russians made a 9 hour long mini-series very faithful to the book.
I had a hard time following what was going on. Some of that could be due to the cut, but more than likely part of it was just me having a tough time. When characters that were offscreen were being talked about, it was difficult for me to understand who was who.
I can't remember the movie being hard to follow.
Now I kind of feel like she was limiting herself by being in so many Ozu films, and in a way, playing the same character.
That's a very popular misconception. Hara is said to have appeared in more than 100 films (maybe not as many as all-Japan champion Hideko Takamine said to appear in at least 200 films, but still impressive) from 1925 (although her breakthrough migh've been either Priest of Darkness in 1926, or a German-Japanese co-production The Daughter of the Samurai one year later [she even visited Berlin and had a photo taken with Goebbels himself]) to 1962 (she starred with Mifune and Shimura in a chambara epic Chushingura). Then she gave up acting completely. What's more striking is that the period of time she wasn't an actress was much longer than the period of time she was one. There's a lot of interesting trivia about her that shatters the image of perpetual virgin so often assigned to her (although she never married, that's true):
Tatsuya Nakdai recalls the nervous tension around the studio during the shooting of kissing scene in “Daughters, Wives and Mother (1960)”, while Kyoko Kagawa tells us the story behind the set of “Tokyo Story”. Setsuko Hara surprised them with her frank personality, quite different persona from the screen. She loved beer, little gambling, countered young Ryo Ikebe’s off-color joke (”You have a big butt like a stone mill”) by kicking him.
Early Summer
Yes, there was a kissing scene in that film. Two of my favourite actors (favourite male and female actor) kissed on screen. Now imagine that! Daughters, Wives and Mother is just a special movie. Maybe I will write more about it some time. It even has an aerobic-nanny Chishu Ryu appearing in two scenes (including the last one, which is the best thing ever)! The movie only needed Toshiro Mifune to be the best the-most-stars-in-one-movie film in history.
Sadly, a lot of Hara's films are very, very, very hard (if not impossible to get). I heard about a propaganda movie, in which she played a Chinese girl with a terrible Chinese faux-accent and about many more. There are some photos that shed new light on her (I know I'm exagerrating, but it sounds cool), in case somebody's interested:
The Daughter of the Samurai (1937)
Premiere of the film ‘The daughter of the Samurai’ Ruth Eweler, Joseph Goebbels, Setsuko Hara, and Japanese ambassador Mushanokoji Kintomo.
Toshiro Mifune and Setsuko Hara for ‘Tokyo Lover’, 1952
Don't know the movie title, but sure looks interesting!
Then the dude from Ikiru showed up and I was even more excited. As great as these three were, they were only a small part of a large cast that was phenomenal.
You forgot to mention Masayuki Mori, whose performance, in my opinion, overshadowed Mifune. He's yet another veteran of Japanese cinema, already familiarized with Setsuko Hara since 1947, when they both starred in Ball at the Anjo House. He had roles in films of Kurosawa, in Mizoguchi's Ugetsu as well as a fair number of Mikio Naruse flicks (co-starring with Takamine and, again, Hara). However, although always good, he never appeared as good as in The Idiot.
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