AK 100: The Men Who Tread on the Tiger's Tail

[In celebration of Criterion's AK 100: 25 Films by Akira Kurosawa box set, GreenCine Daily will be looking at four rare films only now available on DVD this week.]

There's a moment early on in 1945's The Men Who Tread on the Tiger's Tail where you're looking not at Akira Kurosawa's third film but peering 35 years into the future. Up to that moment, the tone's been one of busy comedy. Lord Yoshitsune (Shubo Nishina) and his retainers are fleeing from Yoshitsune's brother Yoritomo, who's trying to kill him. Disguised as itinerant monks, they're being trailed by a pesky, noisome porter (Kenichi Onomoto) whose chattering and urge to please/fear of death make him a stock counterpoint to the stoic samurai, who only have two modes: glowering bad-assery and hearty laughter. The porter has informed them that they're not going to make it across the border: Yoritomo's messenger is already there, knows their disguise, and is fully prepared to wipe them out. In that moment, the film—up to that moment lively, in motion and stylistically kind of anonymous—suddenly stops as Kurosawa pulls back to a master shot: all the samurai sitting in a semi-circle, the porter to their right, dwarfed by trees and the mountains in the background. We're now in the realm of Kagemusha and Ran, Kurosawa's late-period masterpieces: serenity and ritual in the midst of violence, in the generic vicinity of Mt. Fuji.

That's no coincidence: before making Tiger's Tail, Kurosawa was originally working on The Lifted Spear, which was to be his first period film. As Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto writes, "The last scene of the film was supposed to show the Battle of Okehazama (1560), in which the feudal lord Oda Nobunaga defeated his rival Imagawa Yoshimoto. In the last days of the war, however, no horses were available for the battle scene, and Kurosawa was forced to abandon the project at the preproduction stage. It took him thirty-five more years to show Oda Nobunaga engaged in a grand battle in Kagemusha."

So the stylistic link is a harbinger, not a freak: even in 1945, Kurosawa had some very definite ideas about the formal idioms needed to show feudal Japan properly. For much of his career, Kurosawa was criticized for not being "Japanese enough"—in style and content—both at home and abroad: openly acknowledging his love of John Ford, being fast and modern, not paying lip service to Japanese rituals and customs. You could, indeed, make an argument (in my opinion, a partially specious one) that Kagemusha and Ran weren't so well-received just because of their obvious mastery, but because here, at last, was a truly "Japanese" Kurosawa, steeped in history and piety.

That was all nonsense. Tiger's Tail wasn't released in Japan until 1952, in part because one of the wartime censors was angry Kurosawa had chided him about his lack of knowledge of Japanese customs, and the film is nothing if not embedded in a long historical/cultural tradition. This context is important because, without it, this is an awfully slight film. You should click and read on the Yoshimoto link above, which does much to place the film in a wealth of context that makes it clear exactly what Kurosawa was up to: it's a long and fascinating read (excerpts are, anyway) of how the film operates as a critique of Noh/Kabuki traditions and so on.

Pace the "Historical Context Shouldn't Matter" crowd, as a visceral/aesthetic experience Tiger's Tail is engaging but utterly bizarre and almost impossible to make sense of. What actually happens is fairly straightforward: the men, aided by the porter, bluff their way through a border confrontation, drink some sake and do some dancing. When the porter wakes up from his stupor, the men are gone and he's left with his material reward. In different hands, we might be in "Was it all a dream?" territory—which is stupid, but suggests how disorienting this straightforward-seeming film really is. (Another unnerving thing: a raft of opening titles bluntly tell us we're coming way after the conventional stuff of drama—battles, brother vs. brother, et al.—has taken place, and the film ends after, essentially, one incident, filmed in a style that's partly prep for the later masterworks and partly expedient drama with blustery music cues.)

I have my problems with a lot of Kurosawa's filmography, but this is a crisp, watchable, well-acted hour that veers expertly between comedy and drama. But do I know what to make of it? Not really: the argument (and there is one, something patently obvious even without reading one word about it) is too specifically local. Which isn't to say the film isn't watchable on "its own terms," but Kagemusha this isn't; there, context fleshes out an instantly compelling drama. Here, the aesthetic battles Kurosawa's fighting really are the narrative, more so than what's actually on-screen.

Posted by ahillis at December 8, 2009 10:12 AM