A few days ago I watched the BFI DVD of
Mifune: The Last Samurai, the documentary on legendary Japanese actor Toshiro Mifune, who with Akira Kurosawa formed a magnificent collaboration.
To reference the title, the documentary begins not directly with Mifune, but with the depiction of Samurai in Japanese cinema, which started as early as the silent era. The swordplay dramas became known as
chanbara, a term generated by the sound of blades clashing in combat.
After this beginning the film turns to its subject, touching upon Mifune's childhood as the son of a Japanese family in China. It was actually sometime near the beginning of WW2 that he returned to Japan and worked as an aerial photographer. After the war, Mifune applied for work in the growing film industry. Popular rumor says that his application for a cameraman's position was misdirected to the actors' section and he took it up anyway. Better represented in Kurosawa's '
Something Like An Autobiography', Mifune captured the director's imagination with his wild audition performance, which eventually led to a nearly 20 year collaboration, starting with 1948's
Drunken Angel and ending with 1965's
Red Beard. This history is supplemented with input about Mifune's nature and work ethic from the children of Mifune and Kurosawa, and several of Mifune's co-stars including Seven Samurai actor Yoshio Tsuchiya and his leading ladies. The partnership with Kurosawa ended after Red Beard possibly because of tensions caused on account of the commitment required by the director from his leading star who was by then also a movie producer with a company to run.
Mifune also worked with several other Japanese directors (including Hiroshi Inagaki for whom he played legendary warrior Musashi Miyamoto in the famous
Samurai Trilogy). The need to keep his company running meant Mifune went into TV, something of a comedown for a star whose presence dwarfed the biggest screens. He also worked in some international productions including John Boorman's
Hell in the Pacific, the East-Western
Red Sun and Steven Spielberg's war spoof
1941. Spielberg himself is on hand in the documentary, relaxedly talking about Mifune as a star, the Kurosawa collaboration and his own experience of working with Mifune.
The tone is of course quite reverential, the docu glossing over the scandal of Mifune's infidelity, which led to a decades long separation from his wife. There are also few new facts for Mifune fans, of course that's not a knock against its makers, but a byproduct of this trivia-hungry information age. It would have been wonderful if they had got any archival footage of Kurosawa speaking about Mifune (the only contribution from Kurosawa is in the reading of a posthumous letter he wrote Mifune after the actor expired in 1997 (just a year before Kurosawa himself passed away).
The BFI DVD gives a strong anamorphic presentation of the documentary, doing justice to both the interview segments and the film clips (presented in their OAR), with only some concessions to archival material. There are 5.1 and stereo audio options (narration by Hollywood's Last Samurai Keanu Reeves) - the surrounds are unsurprisingly not very active. Extras include an extended 20-min version of the Spielberg interview and an audio interview with Mifune played as an additional audio track over the main docu (I just sampled a bit of this, but the audio quality was underwhelming and I feel it needs to be listened to with headphones). There is also a nice booklet with essays.
All countries
Argentina
Austria
Belgium
Brazil
Bulgaria
Chile
China
Colombia
Cyprus
Czech Republic
Estonia
Denmark
Finland
Greece
Hong Kong
Hungary
Iceland
Indonesia
Ireland
Israel
India
Latvia
Lithuania
Malaysia
New Zealand
Norway
Philippines
Poland
Portugal
Romania
Russia
Singapore
South Africa
South Korea
Sweden
Switzerland
Taiwan
Thailand
Turkey
Ukraine
United Arab Emirates
Faithless Press Release
Linear Mode
