If the story were longer, perhaps, with a first act that could show the conflict which forced Yoshitsune and his crew to flee for their lives, we might have the necessary connection to the characters and their plight which would make the porter character unnecessary. The Men Who Tread on the Tiger’s Tail was eventually released in Japan in 1952, some seven years after it was produced. Kurosawa was not keen on making the film, but its subject matter of feudal loyalty and bravery in the face of defeat was appealing to Japan’s military authorities.
( Log Out / The first is the magistrate, Togashi. To make the border guards believe that Yoshitsune is simply an incompetent porter and not a feudal lord unused to carrying such heavy loads, Benkei beats him severely for his poor work practices and it’s all the comedy porter can do to leap upon Benkei to stop his attacks. ( Log Out / The group as a whole is on a mission, and there is nothing that will get in their way, and when the porter arrives, he becomes just about the only character in the entire film to show any real emotion. A number of factors – the aforementioned seven-year delay, its rushed production and its brevity (59 minutes in total) – have conspired to make The Men Who Tread on the Tiger’s Tail an extremely obscure movie.
Denjiro Okochi is marvellous as Benkei, and does a wonderful job of showing the audience his fear of being discovering while maintaining to Togashi that he is who he claims to be. What must it have been like for Kurosawa, his cast and his crew, making Tiger’s Tail within weeks of Japan’s surrender? It’s the only moment in the film where the story feels truly alive.
In 1185, the Heike family fights against the Minamoto family. Change ), You are commenting using your Google account. He over-emotes every possible beat, sometimes even looking directly at the camera. In a stroke […] They fought together in a campaign that would make Yoritomo to become the shogun, a sort of military dictator. Yoshitsune is barely seen: Kurosawa deliberately hides his face from the audience, leaving us to focus instead on the porter and on Yoshitsune’s loyal commander Benkei (Denjiro Okochi). This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. ( Log Out /
As a result Yorimoto called for Yoshitsune’s arrest, and the younger brother was forced to run for his life.
The play, based on a true event from the 12th century, followed a disgraced feudal lord as he crossed a heavily guarded border with his retinue disguised as itinerant monks. Kurosawa instead gifts the character with an unexpected amount of warmth and intelligence. Kurosawa, however, chooses to add a comedic porter.
The censors described the Tiger’s Tail screenplay as ‘a travesty of the classic theatre’. In the end that makes it so slight that it barely evens registers.
Halfway through production, however, Japan surrendered to the Allied forces. They fought together in a campaign that would make Yoritomo to become the shogun, a sort of military dictator. The Men Who Tread on the Tiger's Tail is a 1945 feature film (barely, 59 minutes) directed by Akira Kurosawa.. It was the international audience that flocked to his now-legendary films that gave Kurosawa his much-deserved salvation. It isn’t particularly contentious to state that, all in all, The Men Who Tread on the Tiger’s Tail is a vastly inferior film to Rashomon. Change ), Scattered thoughts on Clay Pigeons (1998). The film was seen as too “American” in style, something not too surprising given that Kurosawa was more than any of his predecessors deeply influenced by American film. The true story of Yoshitsune is that he was eventually captured, and from my limited research of the film it seems this would have been common knowledge amongst Japanese audiences. At the same time he focused on Japanese history, culture and identity within his films, and that gave his films novelty and a near-unique selling point for foreign audiences in the 1950s and 1960s who responded positively to something striking and fresh.In the context of the Japanese cinema industry Kurosawa occupied a more ambivalent position. Their conversation is, for me, the most enjoyable part of the film. There were no horses available, for example, for the film’s battle sequences. Togashi lets Yoshitsune go, despite such an action being directly against his master’s orders. While his films were often popular and certainly very highly acclaimed, he gradually fell out of fashion with audiences and the major film studios. There is, for me at any rate, an overwhelming sense of defeat in the temporary glow of victory. Internationally there has only ever really been one name: Kurosawa.
It wasn’t until 1960 that the film was seen in America. Kurosawa's film "The Men Who Tread on the Tiger's Tail" (alternate titles exist) brings to the screen many of the themes the master director will explore fulsomely in later films. Maybe this made the film more accessible, a manner of bridging the gap between the feudal time period and present audiences. The Men Who Tread on the Tiger’s Tail is brief and unspectacular, but there is a moment of inspired filmmaking during the only consequential moment of the film, the border crossing. At the same time the comedy porter intervenes because he thinks it dishonourable to strike one’s superior, yet his interference means that he has in turn done exactly that: strike his superior. This early piece is charming, particularly rewarding for fans of classic Japanese film.
Within Japan a number of directors are widely noted as the masters of the screen arts: Ozu, Mizoguchi, Naruse, and so on. Learn how your comment data is processed.
The USA’s Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) awarded that film an honorary Academy Award. Kurosawa personally went to the censors to argue his case, finding them – like much of Tokyo – burning their furniture as firewood to keep warm. They had wanted something that espoused the merits of an honourable feudal tradition; instead Kurosawa interrogates those traditions.
In a career spanning 57 years Akira Kurosawa directed 30 films, many of which were the first Japanese films to achieve significant distribution outside of their home country. Kurosawa’s adaptation would be titled The Men Who Tread on the Tiger’s Tail. BANNED for 8 years in Japan!.
( Log Out / Change ). Damned if you do, damned if you don’t: Kurosawa’s fourth feature film was shelved, having been too American for the Japanese censors and too Japanese for the American censors. Perhaps I've given the final product a bit more in the way of a star count than it actually deserves, but I don't really regret my decision. After such a high profile success, a one-hour kabuki adaptation performed on a single set was hardly going to interest anyone. By the end it is clear that Togashi has clued onto the ruse, but his respect for Benkei’s performance is such that he goes along with it. This is also an interesting film to consider because of when it was made. Even when the film thrives, enjoying a Hitchcock-like sense of tension conveyed exclusively through the cinematography and editing, we’re still just watching a group of self-serious characters who are trouble to empathize with. The film was made to be short, cheap and suitable to Japanese censors, but when the Allied forces took over they brought with them American censors who considered the subject of feudal Japan to be taboo. As noted film scholar Donald Richie once remarked, it’s ‘a bit like adding Jerry Lewis to the cast of Hamlet’. World War II ended before Akira Kurosawa finished shooting The Men Who Tread on the Tiger’s Tail.
“Didn’t you receive it?” he asked. Change ), You are commenting using your Twitter account. Benkei has two men to convince. Kurosawa’s proposed fourth feature film, however, the feudal epic The Lifted Spear, was cancelled because it was going to be impossible to shoot. The porter character doesn’t seem like he should be involved in the story at all, but because of how light the story is, we kind of need him to have any investment in the story. The first introduces Yoshitsune, a famed military general on the run from his mistrusting brother. The film would seem to celebrate the temporary peace felt by Yoshitsune and his men, emphasizing its meaning in the face of coming adversity and making everything feel just a little doomed. The rest was filmed at Toho Studios and filming was briefly interrupted to listen to Hirohito's surrender speech ending hostilities. The porter acts as something like a Greek chorus or just a helping hand for the audience.
It is not difficult to see why the Japanese censors were so incensed by Kurosawa’s treatment of Kanjincho. (3). Still, there's some impressive flowing shots and a lot of quiet tension. By all accounts Fujita is a much younger version of Togashi than the kabuki tradition would dictate, and as a result he is more prone to deferring to Benkei’s age and wisdom when they converse. It is an intriguing contradiction: the runaway samurai only survive because Benkei breaks a code of honour and strikes his master, and the only reason the magistrate believes their story to be accurate is because it is unimaginable that Benkei would ever break a code of honour and strike Yoshitsune. Let’s jump back: in 1936 a then-26 year-old Kurosawa entered the Japanese film industry for the first time. He does not change that formula here, notably in his realisation that the disguised samurai he is describing to his companions actually are the monks with whom he is travelling.
The servant Benkei poses as the lead monk, and when he is pressed to reveal a deed for the Temple he claims they are raising funds to build, he produces a blank scrawl and recites from memory or flat out makes up a believable description of the deed, ensuring their safety.
Yoshitsune, along with six men loyal to his cause, fled across the border to safety under the guise of traveling monks.
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