• 或る剣豪の生涯 (Life of an Expert Swordsman)

12/13/20 (Sun)

Inagaki Hiroshi’s 1959 adaptation of Cyrano as a Japanese period flick, also known less literally as Samurai Saga (though neither is a particularly good title). I learned about this after seeing the previous day’s Cyrano, My Love, and while I wasn’t wild about Inagaki’s Rickshaw Man, the idea of Mifune Toshiro as Cyrano – not too far in spirit from his roles in Yojimbo and Sanjuro – was too perfect to pass up.

The setting is Kyoto, the year 1599, one year before the decisive battle at Sekigahara that changed the face of Japan. Tokugawa forces are increasingly visible and bullying, seen at the start trying to use their status to get into a theater without paying. A letter is sent to the star Okuni (historically inaccurate – she didn’t become known until four years later) warning her not to perform. Encouraged by the crowd, she dances anyway, but is interrupted in mid-performance by an angry samurai named Komaki (Mifune) known for his temper, unrivaled sword prowess and massive nose (here, flat and wide rather than long, in keeping with Asian proportions).

From there, the story hews surprisingly closely to the original grafted onto a Japanese setting, whether it belonged there or not. Komaki is asked by Princess Chiyo (Tsukasa Yoko), whom he secretly loves, to protect the young handsome samurai Jurota (Takarada Akira), whom she secretly loves. Jurota being hopelessly inept with words and the ways of women, the honey-tongued Komaki steps in to help with that as well, writing to the princess from his own heart but in Jurota’s name. And so forth.

The film makes the fatal mistake of following the source material too strictly. Inagaki, who wrote the script as well, needed more imagination to realize this in Japanese terms. The idea itself is fine given the universality of the story and the swordplay in both cultures, and setting this on the eve of Sekigahara is a great choice. But it felt derivative. Poetic exchanges between the samurai and princess, for example, are historically common and could easily have worked in the proper context, but it was rendered clumsily. They didn’t even need a big nose; it could have been a birthmark or slashed face, as in a number of Kabuki dramas. And the entire Jurota character felt phony, inserted only to satisfy the plot rather than an organic creation of its own. I wonder if audiences unfamiliar with Cyrano could enjoy the film. I recalled the horrific Kabuki version of Aida, which was transplanted into pre-Edo Japan; while this film didn’t reach those depths, it was equally guilty of laziness in recycling rather than re-imagining. Inagaki didn’t have the creative vision seen in, say, Kurosawa’s Shakespeare adaptations.

The director also doesn’t give the audience much credit. The opening when the samurai try to enter the theater, for instance, is too exaggerated to take seriously, even as comedy. Most of the cast throughout was Acting (or over-Acting) rather than portraying a character, which gets wearing. I found it hard to believe a word. Moreover, the deaths in the Sekigahara sequence, especially Jurota, were comically bad, a contrast with the strong chambara swordfighting scenes. It looked cheap.

The one saving grace is Mifune, whose bravado fits the Cyrano character to a tee. He was utterly convincing in conveying the character’s lack of self-confidence with the princess. The ending was marred by a strange vision of his ghost leaving his body and fighting the invisible angel of death before returning to the dying body. I don’t know what that was all about. The director was trying too hard. Mifune was moving in the last moments, and his rendering of the final “panache” line was beautiful. It made me wish that he had actually performed Cyrano itself rather than this pale imitation.

Other than Mifune’s performance, this film is a missed opportunity, a shame given the potential.