2012 Film Challenge #9: Yojimbo

"In this town I'll get paid for killing...

...and this town is full of men who are better off dead."


The 2012 Film Challenge returns to the work of Japanese director Akira Kurosawa with 1961's Yojimbo, or The Bodyguard. It is a another samurai film, but it is rather a bit different than The Seven Samurai, as there is no noble cause or grand sweep of the human condition here. There are only four kinds of people in Yojimbo: the wicked, the innocent, the lone Samurai and the dead. 


The year is 1860, and a solitary warrior, the masterless samurai, walks down an empty road. By chance he finds his way to an isolated town and immediately discovers that the political situation is primed to explode. The government is corrupt and two rival gangs of criminals are fighting for control; on one side is the pimp Seibei and on the other is Ushitora, Seibei's ex-lieutenant. With the help of the town's two amoral businessmen, who themselves are also at war, each has a formed an army of "bodyguards." Two gangs of evil men...and one samurai in the middle. 

If this all sounds familiar, it's because you might have seen it before. Yojimbo was influenced by both the detective novels of Dashiell Hammet and the Hollywood western, and it became a real (well, sort of) western when Sergio Leone made an exact copy three years later entitled A Fistful of Dollars. Thirty-two years after that it was remade again, this time as a gangster movie, as Last Man Standing. 


There's little surprise that the film was copied, since it is famed for its dazzlingly ingenious plot. The story has more twists than a snake in a hurry, and in the middle of it all is the legendary "Sanjuro," a gruff, solitary soldier whose skill with his sword is only matched by his cunning. The character is, of course, played by the great Toshiro Mifune, one of my favorite actors, and his performance has been often imitated but never equaled. He scratches at lice and rubs at his beard with an artlessness that hides his quick wits, but he is a man with a conscience too, and he winces in pain when he is reminded that destruction is his only stock and trade. 


Overall the film is grand entertainment on a larger-than-life scale. We thrill at the swordsmanship and cunning of the samurai as he tests his mettle against the lawless and unjust; when the action does come, it is a controlled explosion, a flash that lasts a moment but burns furious in the mind's eye like the afterimage of a lightning strike. They are the assured, economical movements of a virtuoso, but they are as devastating as a fireball. There is a grim irony and dark humor here, though, because catharsis comes at a price. 


How did it hold up? It's a great movie. Personally I may have seen the story one too many times, though—both in Yojimbo itself and in A Fistful of Dollars. As fantastic as the acting, directing and cinematography are, it's the plot that's center stage, and once you know it backwards and forwards it takes a little bit away from the enjoyment. Still, though, if you've never seen the movie, run out and give it a shot. You'll be in for a treat.

Lunch Hour Comics: Science Fiction

Inspired by a discussion of the film Prometheus. Enjoy!

2012 Film Challenge #8: Psycho (1960)

Foreword: if you haven't seen the original Psycho and also don't know anything about the story, you should totally drop everything and go watch it right now without reading anything more about it, because you are one of the few people in the world who can see it and actually be surprised about what happens on the screen. The only reason not to do this is if you really, really don't like scary movies, in which case you should not watch it because you will probably crap your pants.

Even if you have a fairly good idea of what takes place in the film but haven't actually seen it you might want to stop reading now, because there are going to be some spoilers in here.

Anyway, this all gets to the heart of the problem of a movie like Psycho, which is that it is a film that suffers from its own fame; the movie is full of shocks and surprises, but most people who sit down to watch it for the first time already know what's really going on and what the most famous scenes are. Heck, I could understand a 2012 viewer even being a little bored by some parts of the film, because the first twenty-five minutes are all misdirection. We are meant to think that this is a movie about a pretty girl stealing forty thousand dollars, and if you are watching it in this context, the fairly long scene where she's quietly freaking out at a user car lot is tense; if you're watching the same scene wondering why the hell she isn't at the Bates Motel already, it's dull.

It's also worth mentioning that while a 2012 viewer will be patiently anticipating the shower scene, the whole Marion-Crane-getting-murdered thing would have been extremely surprising to 1960 audiences, because Janet Leigh was the lead and the only well-known face in the film aside from Anthony Perkins. I mean, think about it: she is ostensibly the star of the movie, you follow her every move for a half an hour, and then all of the sudden she's dead? Uhh...what are we going to watch now?

My own first experience with the film was probably back when I was around thirteen or so. My parents were and are big Alfred Hitchcock fans, so if one of his movies was on TV or we found it at the video store, we would all sit down to watch it together. I was also really interested in the horror genre at the time, reading every Stephen King novel I could get my hands on and keeping tabs on all the scary movies that came out, so Psycho made a pretty big impression on me. I don't recall how much I knew about the story going into it, but I remember being scared silly by the scene where the private detective goes up the stairs and the bedroom door slowly opens....

The movie also made a big impression on me because around this same time I was beginning to take an interest in film craft. What makes one scene more effective than another? What makes a scene seem more interesting, genuine or memorable than another? In the case of a horror movie, good technique translates to a visceral experience—i.e., what makes one scene scarier than another? In this respect, Psycho seemed to be the ultimate in film technique, because back then everyone would readily agree that it was pretty much one of the scariest movies that anyone had ever seen.

How did it hold up? Psycho is the movie that has been in my top-whatever list the longest, but watching it now I can see that the film's not perfect. For starters, the dialogue tries very hard to be clever and often misses the mark; it's awkward and unnatural-sounding, and there are some lines that I only finally understood for the first time viewing it this week. The prize-winning clunker is "if it doesn't gel, it isn't aspic, and this isn't gelling." Holy cow, was that ever a thing that people really said? I sure hope not.

On top of that, Simon Oakland's performance as the psychologist at the end of the film is a bit hammy, to say the least. Why didn't all those policemen arrest him for being an insufferable boob? Or is it possible that psychologists were really like that back in 1960? Maybe, I guess. It would certainly explain how people got so crazy.

On the other hand, I still continue to be amazed at the masterful precision of the film's best moments. Of course one always thinks of the Eisensteinian shower scene, but really the entire sequence leading up to that moment—the meeting of madman and victim and their meal in the parlor—is virtuosic and precise, like a piece of music, with the tension and eeriness slowly ratcheting up until the final terrible moment when the bathroom door silently swings open.

Excruciatingly perfect too is Lila Crane's exploration of the Bates residence at the end of the film, with the ornate creepiness of the rooms, the jewelry box with the folded hands, Norman's garret with its weird stuffed animals, the way that Lila flinches from the balusters when Norman enters, and then notices the cellar door below.

I don't know if I would still consider Psycho a favorite; there are too many moments that seem false, and I'm not sure that the movie has any special meaning to me outside of nostalgia. I'm even a little uncomfortable now about watching a woman get knifed in the shower for entertainment purposes. The great scenes are still among the best ever shot, though, and so I'll always recommend a stay at the Bates Motel to those who have never been...and who aren't too afraid of the dark....

2012 Film Challenge #7: La Dolce Vita

Federico Fellini's great films of the 1950s were gritty, realist tales of people at the edges of society—street performers, con artists and prostitutes. Though not unremittingly negative, the films do not shy away from hard facts; throughout there is the struggle for money, the threat of poverty, and fear for the future. The characters have generous and brave aspects, but they have their dark and ugly aspects too, and we understand this and forgive them because it is not an easy world and they are at the bottom of it.

What a shock it must have been in 1960 when the director's next film turned out to be the exact opposite. La Dolce Vita, or "The Sweet Life," tells the tale of Marcello Rubini, a successful, handsome, talented and charming journalist who hobnobs with heiresses and movie stars. He has a fine car, his nights are spent in cafés and nightclubs, and he lives with a beautiful woman who loves him passionately. Wealth, glamour and gaiety are everywhere. 

And yet none of Fellini's movies is more cruel.

Like Nights of Cabiria, La Dolce Vita is episodic; what drives the story forward is not a unifying plot thread but Marcello's character, first our discovery of it and then its change and evolution. We meet Marcello at the height of success, literally flying high in a helicopter over a city where people know his name and admire his work. He longs for more, however; he knows in his heart that what he writes is ephemeral and unimportant, and he feels the pull to create something meaningful. At the same time, he is entranced by the upper-class world that he has gained access to, full of people that swim in beauty and freedom. The draw of the beautiful and free is epitomized by the most famous image from the film, that of the bosomy blonde American actress playing like a child in the Roman fountain. Marcello is entranced by her, sees in her all that life should be—a sweet, joyful, sensuous feast. 

However, there is a darkness creeping in at the edges. In his role of observer Marcello also sees sadness and folly, human frailty and the specter of meaninglessness. It turns out the feast is poisoned, and the more we gobble it down, the sicker we get. Too much freedom is as bad as too little; with nothing to hold us, only the very strong or the very hard survive. The weak evaporate like water. Fellini's Cabiria is knocked to the ground, but in the end she is still able to find joy in the world. We imagine that if only she had money, if only life were easier, she could know true happiness. This fantasy is what makes La Dolce Vita terrifying, because Marcello only rises higher, and yet as a man he is all but destroyed. 

The movie is long, but it has to be, because if it weren't we could laugh it off, we could choose to only remember the images we like and not those we don't. It immerses us in Marcello's life, so much so that we see the truth in it all—we have walked that road with him, every step, all the way to its conclusion. In the end we are as harrowed as Marcello—we're harrowed because we like Marcello—we're harrowed because Marcello could be us. 

La Dolce Vita is a slap in the face, stinging all the harder because at the moment of impact we are not recoiling from ugliness but leaning in for a kiss. 

Netflixxable? Yes to disc, no to streaming.