This week on “Picture Perfect,” carve out some time for music from the films of Akira Kurosawa. We’ll hear selections from three historical classics by the influential Japanese director.
“Seven Samurai” (1954) concerns a band of ronin who come together to defend a farmers’ village against invading brigands. The simplicity of that synopsis doesn’t begin to hint at what a marvelous achievement it really is. In fact, “Seven Samurai” is regularly included on lists of the greatest films of all time. It was remade in the United States as “The Magnificent Seven.” And though “The Magnificent Seven” enjoys great popularity, a terrific cast, and an unforgettable film score by Elmer Bernstein, the movie itself stands only knee-high to the original. The music is by Fumio Hayazaka.
“Seven Samurai” was Kurosawa’s first, full-out samurai film, but a samurai does feature as one of the characters in his earlier, break-out international hit, “Rashomon” (1950). In this instance, the discovery of a murdered samurai leads to a series of courtroom-style examinations, during which everyone present at the killing gives his or her own account of what transpired – including (through a medium) the murdered man himself! The conflicting testimonies reveal the slippery subjectivity of what we understand as “truth.” The film, the first from Japan to receive wide exposure abroad, had such an impact that the term “Rashomon effect” entered the English language.
Kurosawa had great respect not only for American movies, but also Western classical music. This led him, on occasion, to request of his composers that they emulate certain well-known pieces. In the case of “Rashomon,” Hayazaka was encouraged, during one of the segments, to channel Ravel’s “Bolero.” “Rashomon” was remade as, among other things, “The Outrage,” a middling western starring Paul Newman.
Masura Sato sought out Hayazaka as a teacher on the merits of his music for “Rashomon.” Following his master’s early death from tuberculosis at the age of 41, Sato stepped in to fill the void as Kurosawa’s composer of choice. Sato would score eight of Kurosawa’s films (his first, a completion of Hayazaka’s score for “Record of a Living Being”). He too could be called upon to conjure the spirit of Western composers, with the ghost of Verdi hovering over “Throne of Blood,” Haydn and Brahms coloring “Red Beard,” and in the case of “Yojimbo” (1961), Franz Liszt lending attitude to masterless samurai Toshiro Mifune, who wanders into a remote town and sets about playing two rival families off one another to his own profit.
“Yojimbo” provided the basis for the first of Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns, “A Fistful of Dollars.” What’s interesting about that is not only Leone’s reliance on the scene-by-scene structure of the plot, but also that its composer, Ennio Morricone, emulated the kind of goofy juxtapositions and unexpected orchestrations used by Sato in the original film. Kurosawa himself was inspired by the western tropes of John Ford movies and the pulp fiction of Dashiell Hammett.
As a bonus, I will include just a little music from one of my least favorite Kurosawa films (beside “Rhapsody in August”), “Dodes’kaden” (1970). “Dodes’kaden” marked a break with Kurosawa’s classic style. It was his first film shot in color, for one thing – truly lurid Technicolor – and the first made after his break with Mifune (who was brilliant in “Rashomon,” “Seven Samurai” and “Yojimbo,” among others). The title can be translated, roughly, as “clickety-clack,” the sound of an imaginary trolley car in the fantasy world of a mentally-challenged boy who literally lives in a dump. Though it earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Film, its commercial failure drove Kurosawa into a deep depression and even to attempted suicide.
For as much as I personally dislike the film, the composer of its soundtrack, Toru Takemitsu is regarded as one of Japan’s most important classical concert composers. Interestingly, like Sato, Takemitsu was a protégé of Kurosawa’s friend and frequent colleague, Fumio Hayazaka.
I hope you’ll join me for an hour of Kurosawa classics (AND “Dodes’kaden”), on “Picture Perfect,” music for the movies, now in syndication on KWAX, the radio station of the University of Oregon!
Clip and save the start times for all three of my recorded shows:
PICTURE PERFECT, the movie music show – Friday at 8:00 PM EDT/5:00 PM PDT
SWEETNESS AND LIGHT, the light music program – Saturday at 11:00 AM EDT/8:00 AM PDT
THE LOST CHORD, unusual and neglected rep – Saturday at 7:00 PM EDT/4:00 PM PDT
Stream them, wherever you are, at the link!
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