Cinema: The New Pictures, Jan. 7, 1952

• Share

(2 of 2)

Brilliantly acted, Rashomon bulges with barbaric force. The bandit (Toshiro Mifune) is an unforgettable animal figure, grunting, sweating, swatting at flies that constantly light on his half-naked body, exploding in hyena-like laughter of scorn and triumph. But, more than a violent story, the film is a harsh study of universal drives stripped down to the core: lust, fear, selfishness, pride, hatred, vanity, cruelty. The woodcutter's version of the crime lays bare the meanness of man with Swiftian bitterness and contempt.

Then, as if unwilling to end on so despairing a note, Director Akira Kurosawa tacks on a hopeful epilogue: the three men in the rain-drenched ruins discover an abandoned baby, and, by the unselfish act of volunteering to adopt the child, the woodcutter restores the priest's faith in humanity. Though the film could hardly have found a better example of a compassionate saving grace, the scene seems an arbitrary afterthought that does not fit the story.

Rashomon has other failings. Its slow pace is deliberate and consistent enough to be accepted as a matter of style, presumably designed to the Japanese taste, yet U.S. moviegoers are likely to find much of it draggy. One long sequence is spoiled by a musical score that borrows freely from Ravel's Bolero, and Director Kurosawa, though obviously gifted, sometimes becomes self-consciously infatuated with the look of his own images. For all that, Rashomon is a novel, stimulating moviegoing experience, and a sure sign that U.S. film importers will be looking hard at Japanese pictures from now on.

Weekend with Father (UniversaI-International) is put together with the simple precision of an equation in Algebra I. Van Heflin is a widower with two children (girls) and a dog. Patricia Neal is a widow with two children (boys) and a dog. Widower meets widow in Grand Central Terminal while seeing the children off to summer camps. Result: a swift courtship and a drive up to Maine to break the news of the engagement to the kids.

The two dogs get along as well as their owners, but the children resist each other and their prospective stepparents. Heflin suffers pratfalls at the hands of Patricia's boys and an embarrassing visit from an old flame (Virginia Field). Patricia, goaded by jealousy and split loyalties, is wooed by the head counselor (Richard Denning). It appears that widower may lose widow, but the children, ever wise in grown-up ways, trick their parents into getting together again.

The sum of these used parts is a trifling little number that Hollywood calls a family comedy. This one is just a fraction better than most such because of Actor Heflin's smooth performance and Actor Denning's amusingly obnoxious portrait of a hearty bore with big muscles and a zest for wheat germ and yogurt.