AK, A.K.A. the Emperor

Akira Kurosawa has rather spoiled a lot of people for samurai films. Deemed by the cognoscenti as more "western" than his contemporaries, his films found there way west quicker or more easily. His occidental manner may be a myth or an exaggeration, but nevertheless, Kurosawa placed a high value (more than just a commercial value) on clarity, unlike many of his colleagues. His films aren't "arty" in the sense of, say, Bergman, reaching for some higher metaphysical truth via non-traditional narrative and imagery, or like Kurosawa's successors, such as Oshima, but he had ideas, observations, opinions, and the mantle of humanist realism or existential humanism rests comfortably on his shoulders.

But if all you're seen is AK samurai films, than you might be likely to assume that all the others are like AK's. Kurosawa did set a high standard, both in production values and in narrative sheen that other studios couldn't necessarily afford, and in addition some directors rejected Kurosawa's approach (viewed as pandering?), or had their own visions or style.

A good means to see the variety of non-AK samurai films is to pick up the Criterion Collection's recent REBEL SAMURAI: SIXTIES SWORDPLAY CLASSICS (four discs, $99.95, Tuesday, October 25, 2005), which contains a quartet of "alternatives" to Kurosawa by masters of the samurai genre. In chronological order they are Hideo Gosha's SWORD OF THE BEAST, Masahiro Shinoda's SAMURAI SPY, Masaki Kobayashi's SAMURAI REBELLION, starring Toshiro Mifune, and Kihachi Okamoto's KILL! with Tatsuya Nakadai. The set comprises a great introduction to "adult" samurai films and a convenient means of expanding one's knowledge of the genre beyond Kurosawa's breakthrough films. Looking back on him from the perspective of just these films alone, AK looks a lot different.

SWORD OF THE BEAST [Kedamono no ken] (The Criterion Collection, No. 311, 1965, 85 minutes, black and white, 2.35:1 enhanced, DD mono, eight page insert with an essay by Patrick Macias, static musical menu with 15-chapter scene selection, keep case, $29.95, Tuesday, October 25, 2005: all four films also available in one box for $99.95) starts with a bang, getting the whole set off to an energetic beginning. Gennosuke (Mikijiro Hira) is in flight. His pursuers are closing in. But that doesn't stop him from attempting to get a little nookie from a hustler who has found him among the tall reeds. But she betrays him. And then, again within two minutes, he is on the run again.

The film then proceeds to play catch up, recounting the pursuit of Gennosuke by his nemesis while filling in the background via unannounced flashbacks. There we learn that Gennosuke was a once loyal soldier who was exploited by his very masters to perform an assassination after which they betrayed him. Now he is in flight, and his former allies must bring him down both to keep their secret and to squelch his example as a ronin.

Gosha constructs some interesting oppositions in the film. Gennosuke is continually liked to a beast, a hunted animal. But he is more moral and "civilized" that the corrupt elites after him. Besides the animal - human opposition, Gosha and his cinematographer, Toshitada Tsuchiya, often obscure his central characters behind obstructions: vegetation, boulders, buildings, as if the whole human race is occluded.

If Gosha is interested in exposing the thin veneer of civilization that separates us from bestiality, then Masahiro Shinoda is drawn to the complex societal rules and regulations that twist us into mere vestiges of what our potential holds for us. In SAMURAI SPY [Sarutobi] (The Criterion Collection, No. 312, 1965, 99 minutes, black and white, 2.35:1 enhanced, DD mono, 10 page insert with an essay by Alain Silver, static musical menu with 24-chapter scene selection, keep case, $29.95, Tuesday, October 25, 2005), Shinoda's story (based on a novel by Koji Nakada) is set in warfare-ridden 1614; Sasuke Sarutobi (Koji Takahashi), of the Sanada Clan, is given the task of locating Tatewaki Koriyami (Eiji Okada), who has fled one rival clan for another. On his journey, he learns that forces greater than he have a stake in the outcome of his search.

Shinoda, another modernist, favors jagged edges and modern music to Gosha's fluidity and striking images. He is interested in the oppression of the individual and in support of that thesis the janglyness and uncertainty of the world Sarutobi finds himself in is one in which no attachments can last for long.

But an even bleaker view of life is found in SAMURAI REBELLION [Joiuchi] (The Criterion Collection, No. 310, 1967, 120 minutes, black and white, 2.35:1 enhanced, DD mono, eight page insert with an essay by Donald Richie, static musical menu with 24-chapter scene selection, keep case, $29.95, Tuesday, October 25, 2005). A variation on Kobayashi's HARIKIRI, it tells a similar story of a man, in this case the hen pecked retiree played by Toshiro Mifune, who seeks an elaborate revenge when society fails to live up to its half of its bargain with its citizens. SAMURAI REBELLION (it's actual name is simply, REBELLION), has all the austerity and obliqueness of the earlier film, and like it slowly, inexorably builds tension until it resolves itself in yet another stunning swordfight.

KILL! [KIRU] (The Criterion Collection, No. 313, 1968, 114 minutes, black and white, 2.35:1 enhanced, DD mono, eight page insert with an essay by Howard Hampton, static musical menu with 24-chapter scene selection, keep case, $29.95, Tuesday, October 25, 2005) is probably the most "conventional" of the films in the set. In essence it concerns two wandering friends who end up on different sides of a clan of yakuza at odds with itself in a small village. Kihachi Okamoto is the satirist of the bunch, using wit and parody to undermine the absurdities of society and the samurai code that the others are at pains to expose as hollow or inhuman. If Gosha is the Arthur Penn of the bunch, offering tales of haunted, hunted figures, and Shinoda its Fritz Lang, in which society conspires against the individual, and Kobayashi its Boetticher with his portrayals of dignity maintained quietly in a degraded society, than Okamoto is the Peckinpah of the lot, the witty Peckinpah of CABLE HOGUE.

Kurosawa always said that his favorite directors were Ford, Capra, and Wyler. He might as well have added George Stevens to round out a group of mostly middlebrow mainstream directors in the Hollywood tradition of quality. Though capable of good if not great films, they were, with the exception of Ford, bereft of a strong, consistent, identifiable visual style. Kurosawa's style, by contrast, is as vivid as Hitchcock's. What must have attracted him was the interest these directors had in big ideas, and to varying extents, socially conscious films (Kurosawa probably valued the Ford of THE GRAPES OF WRATH over the Ford of TWO RODE TOGETHER). Though Kurosawa's "ideas" are generally more noble and nuanced than Capra's rah-rahism or Ford's cult of manly sentimentality. Kurosawa's fluid blend of ideas and imagery is what makes him one of the top five film directors in film history.

Since the 1960s, Kurosawa has been one of the cornerstones of, first, Janus Films, and now of one of its corporate colleagues, Criterion, which has already released nine of Kurosawa's films and over the past 12 months, has added an additional five. Chronologically, the new batch begins with STRAY DOG.

I always thought that STRAY DOG [Nora inu] (The Criterion Collection, No. 233, 1949, 122 minutes, black and white, full frame, DD mono, 16-page insert with Kurosawa on STRAY DOG from his memoir and an essay by Terrence Rafferty, static musical menu with 18-chapter scene selection, keep case, one discs, $39.95, Tuesday, May 25, 2004) would make a terrific Dirty Harry film.

The premise is perfect for the rogue cop. Imagine that it is an unusually hot, humid summer in 'Frisco. Harry, in the middle of one of his typical opening set pieces, loses his Magnum! Someone perhaps filches it from the hood of a car or something in the aftermath of the rescue. Soon the thief is using the gun to commit crimes and it drives Harry crazy. He descends into the 'Frisco underworld to track down the piece based on what meager clues he has derived from the incidents of its use. Eventually, he corners the thief, who turns out to be not all that much unlike Harry.

That's the plot of STRAY DOG, only with AK regulars Toshiro Mifune as a cop in early postwar Tokyo and Takashi Shimura as his boss. However, whatever criticism you have heard of STRAY DOG is probably accurate. In its NAKED CITY style aspirations toward hitting the street and showing reality, the fundamental story ends up too slight for its running time, and there are long semi-documentary passages that tax patience. The final images are probably a tad too obvious in their meaning (hunter and hunted are one) for the weight given them, though they fit in well with Kurosawa's developing grander vision of life.

The film comes in what the box says is a new "high-definition digital transfer, "with restored image and sound. Extras include an informative audio commentary by Stephen Prince,(THE WARRIOR'S CAMERA: THE CINEMA OF AKIRA KUROSAWA), and other extras include 32-minute documentary on STRAY DOG from a Japanese TV series called AKIRA KUROSAWA: IT IS WONDERFUL TO CREATE.

It's always painful to express some disenchantment with a particular Kurosawa film, but think about how disappointing it is for the viewer, especially in a critical context in which the Master can do little wrong. But THE LOWER DEPTHS [Donzoko] (The Criterion Collection, No. 239, 1957, 137 minutes, black and white, 1.85:1 enhanced, DD mono, eight page insert with an essay by Keiko McDonald and Thomas Rimer, static musical menu with 21-chapter scene selection, dual keep case, two discs, $39.95, Tuesday, June 22, 2004), a film apparently close to Kurosawa's heart, if not his aesthetic. Or at least Gorky, the author of the film's source, was close to Kurosawa. Kurosawa was continually drawn to western sources for his films, which must have irritated the more conservative members of the critical community in Japan. From Shakespeare to Ed McBain, he liked tight, crisp sources that he could then radically alter into deliberate, long, talk-filled meditations on the human condition.

In THE LOWER DEPTHS, the cruder aspects of Kurosawa's occasional humor come to the fore and it isn't pretty — or funny. But then, Shakespearean "humor" isn't funny, either. THE LOWER DEPTHS tells a long, rather convoluted tale of impoverished people living under the thumb of a noxious landlord. Gorky's broad analogy for the conflicts between the state and the people becomes here a treatise on a larger unfairness of life between haves and have nots, between the ignoble masters and the noble lower orders, simple in their faith but stoic in the face of adversity. There is a little too much "acceptance" of the disparity within the film for my taste.

Still, Criterion has done a good thing with the film, pairing it with the other famous adaptation of Gorky's play, the one by Jean Renoir (which I'll review in the new future when I do a bunch of Renoir films).

Extras include a sympathetic audio commentary Donald Richie and a 33-minute documentary on THE LOWER DEPTHS from AKIRA KUROSAWA: IT IS WONDERFUL TO CREATE, and cast bios by Stephen Prince.

If the earlier THRONE OF BLOOD was adapted freely from MACBETH, and the later RAN from LEAR, THE BAD SLEEP WELL [Warui yatsu hodo yoku nemuru] (The Criterion Collection, No. 319, 1960, 135 minutes, black and white, 2.35:1, DD mono, 16-page insert with essays by film critic Chuck Stephens and director Michael Almereyda, static musical menu with 32-chapter scene selection, keep case, one discs, $29.95, Tuesday, January 10, 2006), as others have noted, perhaps following the lead of Donald Richie, is Kurosawa's HAMLET.

Blithely rearranging the story to suit his purposes, Kurosawa and his co-writers move their equivalent of the mousetrap scene from the center of the play to the start of the film. This, to paraphrase Tarantino, puts the answers first, and postpones the questions. In an opening sequence that almost everyone agrees is brilliant, Kurosawa shows a formal, seemingly Western-inspired wedding continually but quietly disrupted by everything from the lame bride stumbling to the arrest by police of the reception's MC, all under the acerbic views of a passel of reporters (whose manner and intrusiveness must certainly have influenced Kaufman's clutch of reporters in THE RIGHT STUFF).

David Kehr, whom I am increasingly coming to respect as a writer who can fit the most insights into the least space, puts it well when he wrote in the NEW YORK TIMES last week that, "As sometimes happens with Kurosawa, brilliantly designed set pieces (like the opening sequence, in which predatory reporters, sniffing a scandal, lurk outside a wedding banquet) compete with numbingly explicit dialogue scenes in which the characters extensively analyze their emotions and motivations."

Extras consist of another episode from the Japanese TV Kurosawa series, this one a 33-minute documentary on the making of THE BAD SLEEP WELL, plus the original theatrical trailer.

A sort of transitional film, KAGEMUSHA [The Shadow Warrior] (The Criterion Collection, No. 267, 1980, 162 minutes, color, 1.85:1 enhanced, DD stereo, 50-page insert with AK art, essays by Donald Richie and Peter Grilli, and a SIGHT AND SOUND interview with Kurosawa, static musical menu with 20-chapter scene selection, dual keep case, two discs, $39.95, Tuesday, March 29, 2005) is also Shakespearean in its ambitions. It's a long, slow film that could easily have been an hour shorter, but it serves as entree into "late" Kurosawa.

This is a bleaker person than we are used to. AK was capable of taking on depressing themes (IKIRU, I LIVE IN FEAR) but with a measure of robust optimism, intrinsic, perhaps, in his existential humanism. But after DERSU UZALA Kurosawa appears not to have any use for humanity and its excesses. Still obsessed with justice and its ironies he settles for simpler, bleaker endings, as he does here. Someone may come along and compose a rousing defense of late Kurosawa, linking his last 7 films together stylistically and thematically in a manner like, say Mark Le Fanu in his brilliant book on Mizoguchi. That person will have to grapple with the weird politics of RHAPSODY IN AUGUST and the incoherent self-absorption of DREAMS.

He will also have to deal with Kurosawa's reduced creative circumstances. What's powerful and moving about KAGEMUSHA is the way prominent film directors gathered around him to help gain financing for the film. Kurosawa's solution to the problem of short funds was, for example to show the aftermath of the final battle rather than the battle itself, but still, Kurosawa remains as cinematically loquacious as ever.

In probably what is the best package in this batch of Kurosawa films we see the result of this: interviews with George Lucas and others about their encounters with the aged idol, and the commercials for Suntory that Coppola made with Kurosawa as a means of raising additional money. These spots have long been part of modern movie lore, and obviously served as some of the foundation for Sofia Coppola's LOST IN TRANSLATION, and it is a delight to finally view them, even in the rough shape they come to us on this disc. The disc includes five of them.

Other supplements include a respectful audio commentary by Stephen Prince, the theatrical trailers and teasers, a 41-minute documentary on the making of the film from the Japanese TV series on AK, "Image: Kurosawa's Continuity," and a gallery of storyboards painted by Kurosawa contrasted with the finished product.

Kurosawa's third to last film, RAN (The Criterion Collection, No. 316, 1985, 160 minutes, color, 1.85:1 enhanced, DD stereo, 32-page insert with an essay by Michael Wilmington and interviews with Kurosawa and composer Toru Takemitsu, static musical menu with 23-chapter scene selection, dual keep case, two discs, $39.95, Tuesday, November 22, 2005), an epical personal exercise long in the making, should be a crowning achievement, but in the actual viewing it feels a lot like THRONE OF BLOOD, only with too much dawdling. Kurosawa is still, temperamentally speaking, in a sour mood, seeing at this late stage of his life and career very little use for human beings and humanity. People are awful, they fuck things up, and destroy the few good people.

One could argue that this pessimism has always been a facet of Kurosawa's worldview, and that it was unleashed by old age and the lapsing of the commercial restraints early in his career. From THE BAD SLEEP WELL, there is a gradual darkening, and RED BEARD, the real crowning achievement, at least of the existential humanist thread of Kurosawa's aesthetic, now seems the anomaly among the late films.

The problem with tragedy is that though you know where it's going, you have to be entertained or edified by the trip. There is something willed, almost reveling in the disasters that befall the lord and his sons. Yeah, I'm making RAN sound like a downer, and it is, but ultimately, one would rather spend time in Kurosawa's dark mood than most other filmmakers'.

Supplements divided between the two discs include an exhaustive audio commentary by Stephen Prince, a video intro to the film by Sidney Lumet (is this a hint that certain Lumet films may figure in later Criterion releases?), the theatrical trailers, A.K., a 74-minute film by director Chris Marker, the Toho Masterworks series Akira Kurosawa, IT IS WONDERFUL TO CREATE, on RAN, a 35-minute video that is part of the series IMAGE: KUROSAWA'S CONTINUITY, and a new video interview with actor Tatsuya Nakadai.

Like India, Japan has a whole huge catalog of movies very few of which proportionately have made it onto Region 1 DVD (much less US screens). An initial enthusiasm for the mass of popular, commercial films might eventually be tempered, however, by the reality that most of them are pretty bad. The search for undiscovered gems among the exotic and unknown may be hampered by the sheer mediocrity of the mass, uniform output. Such films fall far off the scale from Kurosawa's prestigious output, and inevitably offer a very "alternative" view of Japanese culture.

Panik House, the new company specializing, so far anyway, in sexy violent youth oriented Japanese films from the 1960s, has hobbled by no such discretion. So far the company has released four films on DVD, four of them in one big exotic package. The series began with SEX AND FURY [Furyô anego den: Inoshika Ochô] (Panik House, 1973, 88 minutes, color, 2.35:1 enhanced, remastered mono, animated musical menu with 24-chapter scene selection, transparent amaray box, $19.95, Tuesday, September 27, 2005). It's a crazy tale about Ocho (Reiko Ike), a gambler and pickpocket in the 1800s on a quest for revenge against the three men who killed her father. In broad strokes the film resembles LADY SNOWBLOOD, but with impoverished production values and a taste for explicit nudity and frequent sex. In one of the film's many crazy tangents, Ocho eventually also comes into conflict with a European spy (played, no less, by Swedish dish Christina Lindberg, of THEY CALL HER ONE EYE).

The film can't but provide a peek into Japanese sensibilities, or at least into what the director Norifumi Suzuki, takes them to be. Here, men are all pigs; power corrupts absolutely. Despite the sex and violence of the subject matter, this, and all the other Panik House films, are surprisingly female-spectator oriented. The men are gruesome, except when they are hunks, and the emphasis is really on the tensions and virtues within the society of ladies.

Panik House doesn't just lavish attention on the packaging of its discs. The platters themselves are loaded with supplements. Here, Chris D., the American Cinematheque film programmer and author of OUTLAW MASTERS OF JAPANESE FILM, provides the informative (if somewhat spotty) audio commentary track. In addition there are bios of Suzuki and Ike bios and a helpful Christina Lindberg bio and gallery, Finally, there is the original theatrical trailer, a poster and stills gallery, production notes, and a special insert sticker,

SEX AND FURY's release companion is FEMALE YAKUZA TALE: INQUISITION AND TORTURE [Yasagure anego den: sôkatsu rinchi] (Panik House, 1973, 89 minutes, color, 2.35:1 enhanced, remastered mono, animated musical menu with 24-chapter scene selection, transparent amaray box, $19.95, Tuesday, September 27, 2005). Also starring Ike, this one is directed by Teruo Ishii, (who made the eight "Joy of Torture" films) and concerns a woman kidnapped by a drug-smuggling yakuza gang that tortures her until she effects her escape, whereupon she sets out on a mission of revenge.

What runs inconsistently with conventional Hollywood filmmaking (but not with pornography) is how the plot stops to dwell on the torture sequences. This is the interesting juncture that always confounds viewers or critics who aren't "in on" the real reason for the film's existence. Which came first, the story or the exploitation scene? Isn't the movie really built around the scene or scenes of sex or violence? You can feel the intensity in the film heighten as it approaches the sex scene and then blossoms as the filmmakers dwell ecstatically on what turns out to be the film's raison d'etre.

Once again Chris D. provides the yak track. In addition there are star bios, the original theatrical trailer, a poster and stills gallery, production notes, and a special insert sticker.

The crowning achievement for Panik House, at least thus far in its short career, is THE PINKY VIOLENCE COLLECTION (Panik House, color, 2.35:1 enhanced, remastered mono, animated musical menus, CD of Reiko Ike, 24 page undetachable booklet with a detailed essay by Chris D., and many illustrations, plus cast and crew and transfer information, pink folding case, $99.95, Tuesday, December 6, 2005), an elaborately packaged set of films and music from '70s exploitation cinema. All originally released by Toei, each of them is a representative entry of a vein of similar films popular at the time: bad schoolgirls, motorcycle girls, yakuza girls, and reform school girls.

DELINQUENT GIRL BOSS: WORTHLESS TO CONFESS (Zubekô banchô: zange no neuchi mo nai) (Panik House, 1971, 86 minutes, audio commentary by Chris D., poster and stills gallery, stars: Reiko Oshida, Tsunehiko Watase, Junzaburo Ban, Tonpei Hidari, Yuki Kagawa, Yukie Kagawa; director: Kazuhiko Yamaguchi) is the fourth and last in a Toei series about delinquent girls all staring the cheerful Reiko Oshida.

Here she is released from a reform school and takes up a job in an auto repair shop. But when her boss is assassinated by yakuza, she teams up with her former fellow prisoners for a lavish sword fight in the gangsters' nightclub. DELINQUENT GIRL BOSS is funny, fast paced, sentimental, and action filled all at once. In that regard, it is slightly different from the others, in that its view of society is less harsh or despairing.

CRIMINAL WOMAN: KILLING MELODY (Zenka onna: koroshi-bushi) (Panik House, 1973, 83 minutes, audio commentary by Andy Klein and Wade Major, poster and stills gallery, stars: Reiko Ike, Yumiko Katayama, Chiyoko Kazama, Masami Sôda, Miki Sugimoto; director: Atsushi Mihori) is more long the lines of Panik's other earlier releases. Here, Reiko Ike plays a hapless woman who ends up in prison, where she forms a team that comes in handy when she is free again and seeking revenge. It is apparently also the first of the Zero Woman series, much in the news these days thanks to the release of RED HANDCUFFS.

The third in Toei's Girl Boss series, GIRL BOSS GUERILLA (Sukeban gerira) (Panik House, 1972, 84 minutes, commentary track by ASIAN CULT CINEMA’s Wyatt Doyle and Panik House President Matt Kennedy, poster and stills gallery, stars: Miki Sugimoto, Emi Jo, Chie Kobayashi, Linda Kimoto, Naomi Oka; director: Norifumi Suzuki) has great potential but is inconsistent in tone and unfocused narratively, as it tells of a girl (Miki Sugimoto) whose biker gang eventually takes over a town. If you have a problem with low Japanese humor this one may be your least favorite.

Finally, TERRIFYING GIRLS' HIGH SCHOOL: LYNCH LAW CLASSROOM (Kyôfu joshikôkô: bôkô rinchi kyôshitsu) (Panik House, 1973, 88 minutes, audio commentary by Chris D., poster and stills gallery, stars: Miki Sugimoto, Seiko Saburi, Misuzu Oota, Rie Saotome, Yuuko Mizusawa; director: Norifumi Suzuki) is the most brutal of the films, with the high school girls of the title being virtual vampires as they attempt to drain the blood of their victims with huge suction devises.

Taken all together, the Pinky Violence set is a delightful immersion in a vastly unknown and ignored aspect of Japanese culture that offers up a whole new slate of cool heroines, interesting directors, and clever camera tricks.

In the 1960s when a budding film buff wanted to immerse himself in information about Japanese film there was only one source to turn to: Donald Richie. Though he also wrote fiction and journalism, Richie is most renowned for his series of general surveys on Japanese film and his two director profiles. His book on Kurosawa was probably the second film book I read (after Truffaut on Hitchcock), and his later book on Ozu made Richie an essential point man into that still hard to find terrain. In addition he's done some five successive books on Japanese film history, the first co-written with Joseph Anderson back in 1959, and the most recent, A HUNDRED YEARS OF JAPANESE FILM (Kodansha, 320 pages, $22.00, ISBN 4 7700 2995 0), published just in 2005, the second edition of a book that came out first in 2001. Updated, and now with Beat Takashi on the cover instead of Oshima's GOHATTO, it's probably the second best general intro to Japanese film (after Richie's 1959 book), and it's great that Richie stays current. Even at this late date he appears to have seen everything. His views on hot topics such as Miiki are likely not to impress young fans of that director and his contemporaries, however. For that you'll have to turn to Fab Press, or the Midnight Eye book and other titles from Stone Bridge Press.

Richie may be "old fashioned" or out of touch to some young film buffs but to this reader anyway, he has a prose style that is soothing and deceptively simple. It is a delight to immerse oneself in his prose that has a cleansing, clarifying quality (I don't know of any other way to put it). In the last couple of years other Richie books have been rushing into print, among them the THE DONALD RICHIE READER: 50 YEARS OF WRITING ON FILM (Stone Bridge Press, 238 pages, $19.95, ISBN 1 880656 62 2), which is an excellent survey of his entire career, and the fascinating THE JAPAN JOURNALS: 1947 - 2004 (Stone Bridge Press, 496 pages, $29.95, ISBN 1 880656 91 4).

Richie appears to have met everyone of important both in Japanese arts and society but also among visiting artists. I don't know how he did it (he doesn't address the issue in his diary entries) but he had a knack for getting close to Japanese elites such as Yiukio Mishima. Editor Leza Lowitz explains in the intro that Richie kept his diaries for manifold reasons, not unlike the reasons that the similarly significant Edmund Wilson kept his lifelong journal, that is, partially to record momentous events, partially to do first drafts of ideas and scene settings. At one point Lowitz notes simply that as Richie came to be known outside Japan for his writings he consequently met interesting visitors. Thus Richie is able to rub shoulders with visiting Anglo cultural dignitaries such as Philip Johnson, Cecil Beaton, and James Merrill. Richie is appreciative of these artists, but isn't starry eyed. He can be critical. His views on Capote, in town to interview Brando on the set of SAYONARA, are not only illustrative of Richie in critical mode but an accurate harbinger of what we all have come to know about the writer, who blended bovine indifference with cocktail party level acerbic wit. "What I did not understand about Truman was how anybody could go to a foreign country, any country, and pay so little attention to it." Richie's diaries are also surprisingly frank, and he offers heart-wrenching insights into his ill-conceived marriage as well as later relationships. Richie's over all career is salutary. Though obviously a film nut, he wasn't just a film geek, but evinced an interest in art, dance, opera, poetry, drama, fiction, and music.

But it is almost impossible to be a film geek without trying to make a few movies yourself, and indeed Richie had a phase in which he dabbled in the short film form. A DONALD RICHIE FILM ANTHOLOGY (Marty Gross Films, 1962 - 1968, 127 minutes, black and white, full frame, DD mono, static silent menu, keep case, $80, Tuesday, September 28, 2005) gathers together six films made over a span of seven years (1962 - 1968). As he says in a video introduction, he didn't intend that the films be viewed publicly, and they are highly personal, perhaps privately encoded, endeavors.

The first one, WARGAMES, follows the oblique activities of a bunch of schoolboys on a beach (the ocean figures in almost all of Richie's films), and is obviously a LORD OF THE FLIES style disquisition on war. The second, ATAMI BLUES, the most conventional, concerns a man and woman who rendezvous along the shore (it was scripted by Richie and his then wife, and he shot it over the course of two days). The brief BOY WITH CAT (1967) is presented as merely an equipment test, but its loving examination of a boy's body and the cat in the vicinity makes it invariably personal. DEAD YOUTH (1967) is the first of his increasingly odd and outrageous films, all of which owe something to Maya Deren and Kenneth Anger, in showing a family picnic devolve into cannibalism as a protest against consumerism. FIVE PHILOSOPHICAL FABLES is a series of oblique vignettes. Finally, CYBELE (1968) is a series of episodes that evince a form of woman-horror, featuring a troupe of performers who struck Richie's fancy.

No, they aren't very good in the conventional sense, but as emblems of Richie's interests we can see that he is not at all the middlebrow mode of thought that some might tae him for based solely on the subjects of one or two of his film books. In Japan he was able to keep up with trends in modernist and independent art and both be influenced by them and respond to them.

At first Richie had few "competitors" in the realm of film studies focusing on Asian film. But as film studies itself took off in the academy in the late '60s, inevitably others wanted to contribute their views, often dancing around the monolithic Richie. Among these writers were Joan Mellen, Noel Burch, and Alain Silver, whose THE SAMURAI FILM (EXPANDED AND REVISED EDITION) (Overlook Press, 320 pages, $50, ISBN 1 58567 596 2) has just been reissued in a lavishly illustrated new edition.

Like a great film review, a great film book isn't "just" about the movie or movies at hand, it says things applicable to other films, other fields, to the very culture itself. Here, Silver doesn't just give us the historical background of the samurai era and its codes of honor and behavior, nor just a survey of key films, filmmakers, and sub-genres: in the remarkable second section of chapter one (starting on page 42), Silver also sits the reader down for a mini-master class in how to watch a film. Addressing narrative conventions and visual style, he lays out how audiences interact with samurai films. The precepts and lessons he provides here are applicable anywhere. In being shown how to watch a samurai film, by implication we learn how to view all Japanese films, if not cinema in general.

Even the footnotes can be fascinating. On page 314 Silver offers up a mini essay that disputes the notion that YOJIMBO is unofficially based on Hammett's RED HARVEST. Noting that there are narrative similarities, Silver traces the critical history of the belief and asserts that the connection is bogus.

The book is less a revision of text than an expansion of design. Exploiting the advantages of modern image reproduction and layout the book is rich in illustrative frame enlargements. In terms of text the most substantial addition is chapter seven, which takes the long view and also updates the reader about new developments. Here, Silver shows that he isn't easily cowed by current fashions. For example, Silver doesn't particularly like Kill Bill, indicating that it essentially deconstructs the genre well in the wake of some home-grown directors who have already accomplished the same task a lot earlier. It evokes for me memories of James Naremore's surprising dismissal of L. A. CONFIDENTIAL in his equally excellent book on film noir, MORE THAN NIGHT, and when guys this brainy find something unworthy you need to sit up and take notice.

And incidentally, if you are interested in KILL BILL, you might find my new book, KILL BILL: AN UNOFFICIAL CASEBOOK useful. It is now available in fine bookstores everywhere, or from Amazon.

Not only that, I've got a new book out on an aspect of film noir I call film soleil, titled simply FILM SOLEIL. It is sure to alter film criticism as we know it to its very core. Order it now!

And if you are interested in what I sound like, I can be heard on KBOO radio (90.7 FM) the second and the fourth Wednesday of the month, at 9 AM in the morning (Pacific Standard Time) on Ed Goldberg's show MOVIE TALK along with Dawn Taylor. It's available via streaming audio (in 20 Kbps Stereo). The next broadcast is Wednesday, January 25, at 9 AM.

COMING SOON:FILM GEEK, THE PRODUCERS, RENT, a package of Hitchcock movies and TV shows, FLIGHTPLAN and REDEYE, DEAD AND BREAKFAST, REMINGTON STEEL and other TV mystery shows, many STAR TREKS, the third annual DVD Tray of Horror, and more!

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