Cinema: A Japanese Apocalypse

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Looped in a soggy kimono, crusted with stubble and sweat, gliding like a tiger, scratching like an ape. he presents a ferocious and ironical portrait of a military monk, a Galahad with lice. Behind Mifune stands a script that develops with the intricate symbolic logic and violent inevitability of a folk epic, and behind the script, behind the actors, behind the camera stands a major talent and a massive moral force: Kurosawa.

To look at him. nobody would believe it. Tall, lithe, springy, togged in a sports shirt and a battered sailor cap turned inside out. Kurosawa at 52 looks more like a golf pro than a genius. But underneath the sailor cap stands a quiet, intense and stubbornly determined man who for a quarter century has labored unremittingly at his art. Trained as a painter. Kurosawa got into the movie business almost by mistake. At 26 he casually entered an essay contest sponsored by a Japanese film studio, composed a shrewd polemic against the industry, was hired as an assistant director.

By 1950 Kurosawa had made ten pictures of his own—most of them crude, none of them weak. Then came Rashomon and with it prestige. Suddenly the slightly disreputable, startlingly productive Japanese film industry—which last year churned out 535 pictures while Hollywood was making 254—had an international reputation on its hands. "Emperor Kurosawa," they called him. and the emperor made ruthless use of his authority.