|
Après-guerre Japan, humiliatingly disarmed and "ready to collapse from anxiety," as sweltering procedural. The MacGuffin is a snub-nosed pistol stolen in a crowded bus, the greenhorn detective (Toshiro Mifune) desperately combs the underworld for it in the middle of a blasting heat wave. The journey into the black market is a clammy panorama of vagabonds, molls, yakuza dandies and chorines, each vignette leading closer to the trigger-happy war vet (Isao Kimura), the investigator's despairing doppelgänger. "Maybe there are no bad people, only bad situations," muses the hero, the alternate Self encountered. "Leave that psychoanalysis to detective novels," advises the veteran partner (Takashi Shimura). Akira Kurosawa at a stylistic junction with Hollywood, what he takes from Hathaway (Call Northside 777) and Dassin (The Naked City) he gives to Kazan (Panic in the Streets) and Fuller (Pickup on South Street). Pushing forward even as the characters wander in circles, the camera is all swift pans and hard curves, one sinewy composition after another. A long take of Mifune sharing a beer with an affable pickpocket unfolds as a slow dolly-in punctuated by a glimpse of a starry summer sky. The detective and his foe leave the humid city for a grueling showdown in the woods, where a hint of traditional aestheticism (a single drop of blood on a pale blossom) is promptly deflated (a girl watches the macho duel from a distance, shrugs, and goes back to her piano lesson). It builds to the image of a pair of exhausted torsos manacled together in the flower field, with a singing children's excursion crossing the background. Edwards has the baseball stadium stakeout in Experiment in Terror, Spielberg the culprit's revelation (a row of white shoes, one pair mud-stained) in Duel. With Keiko Awaji, Gen Shimizu, Teruko Kishi, Eiko Miyoshi, Reikichi Kawamura, Noriko Sengoku, and Reisaburo Yamamoto. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |