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The opening twenty minutes have been rightly acknowledged as a master class, the wedding banquet is a grim farce with a Greek chorus of reporters and a firing salute of champagne bottles, lines and figures in deep-focus space plus a citation from Stroheim in the limping bride (Kyoko Kagawa). "Best one-act I've ever seen." "This is just the prelude." The accusatory cake-maquette (wheeled towards the camera in a foreglimpse of 2001: A Space Odyssey) is typical of Akira Kurosawa's abstruse transmutation of Hamlet, mostly however his furious view of corporate culture is founded on Polonsky's Force of Evil. A newspaper headline summarizes the graft racket ("Underlings sacrifice themselves to contain scandal"), corrupt interiors are no different from the fulminating landscape where a flunky (Kamatari Fujiwara) staggers, rescued by the groom (Toshiro Mifune) who needs him for his vengeful plan. The vice-president (Masayuki Mori) is an avuncular father-in-law except when he's ordering another executive to literally take the fall, "that's what it means to be on top." To recognize your part in a crooked system is to witness your own funeral, says Kurosawa, darkness illuminated by headlights might reveal a ghost or your killer. The infiltrator is the son of the scapegoat who was pushed out of a window, the destructive goal of his mission is understood and accepted: "I'll use myself for dynamite." Under the rubble of a munitions factory are wartime catacombs, the company officer (Takashi Shimura) is locked there until he divulges evidence of malfeasance in exchange for ham and eggs on toast. All for naught, the upshot is a mangled car on the train tracks and a phone call from the unseen kingpin, "so simple and yet so foul!" The heir is Rosi, The Mattei Affair and Illustrious Corpses in particular. With Tatsuya Mihashi, Ko Nishimura, Takeshi Kato, Seiji Miyaguchi, Ken Mitsuda, Chishu Ryu, Koji Mitsui, Nobuo Nakamura, Susumu Fujita, Koji Nanbara, and Natsuko Kahara. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |