The Kurosawa Project, Part 1: Sanshiro Sugata (1943)

This Christmas, there was a wonderful present waiting for me under the tree: Criterion’s massive DVD box set AK100: 25 Films by Akira Kurosawa. The set contains Kurosawa’s complete oeuvre, minus five films — 1949’s little-seen The Quiet Duel, and four other movies from Kurosawa’s later period, Dersu Uzala, Ran, Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams, and Rhapsody in August. It’s a beautifully packaged set, complete with a hardcover monograph about Kurosawa’s life and work by Stephen Prince, but it’s taken me a shamefully long time to actually start dipping into it.

My plan is to watch all the films in the set, and blog briefly about each of them. Many of these are films I already know and love — Seven Samurai, Sanjuro, High and Low, and Dodes’ka-Den are probably my favourites. Some are films I last saw many years ago and am anxious to revisit — Stray Dog, The Hidden Fortress, Ikiru. And a lot of them are titles that are completely unknown to me, and which I am sure contain countless unexpected treasures just waiting to be discovered — especially early efforts like No Regrets for Our Youth, The Men Who Tread on the Tiger’s Tail, and Scandal.

The first film in the set, and Kurosawa’s debut as a director, belongs in that company: 1943’s Sanshiro Sugata bills itself as “A Judo Tale,” which immediately distinguishes it from most martial arts films — instead of the flamboyant smacks, chops, and kicks of kung fu, the fight scenes are all about the rough ballet of judo and jujitsu, in which the combatants use their strength to grapple for subtle strategic advantages over their opponent rather than pummel them into submission.

The film is set during the 1880s, when judo was just emerging as a challenger to the art of jujitsu. Kurosawa never really makes it clear what the differences between the two fighting styles actually are, but that’s okay; his main focus is on the title character’s evolution from a headstrong young judo student to a man firmly on the path towards maturity, wisdom, and respect for his elders. The storytelling is brisk and a little choppy — understandable, given the fact that the only currently available version of the film is missing 17 minutes from Kurosawa’s original cut — but it’s a confident, solidly entertaining first feature which gives promising hints of the master director Kurosawa would soon evolve into, especially during an amusing passage-of-the-seasons montage built around the image of an abandoned sandal in the road, a fight with an overmatched Takashi Shimura that plays like the heavyweight title bout between Muhammad Ali and Larry Holmes, and a thrilling climactic jujitsu battle at dusk in a field of reeds during a howling windstorm.

Susumu Fujita, who plays Sugata, has a convincing, centred, but unpretentious physical presence that works for the role, although you do occasionally miss the live-wire volatility that Toshiro Mifune would inject into Kurosawa’s pictures. But perhaps I shouldn’t write Fujita off so blithely: just two years later, he would return to the role in Sanshiro Sugata Part II, also directed by Kurosawa. Did he find new depths in the character the second time around? I’ll have the answer for you shortly!