The Emperor and the Wolf
Stuart Galbraith IV
Faber £20, pp823
There have been some notable collaborations between directors and stars over the past 70 years - Josef von Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich, John Ford and John Wayne, Anthony Mann and James Stewart, Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro, to name four obvious Hollywood examples.
But perhaps the most extraordinary partnership is that between Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune, the emperor and the wolf of Stuart Galbraith's joint biography. Mifune was in 16 of Kurosawa's 30 films and appeared in a further 130-odd movies, several scripted by Kurosawa. Only two Mifune pictures directed by other filmmakers (Mizoguchi's 1952 The Life of Oharu and Kobayashi's 1967 Rebellion) are masterworks; the only Kurosawa picture without Mifune universally recognised as great is the 1952 Ikiru.
The pair were similar and complementary. Both were heavy-drinking, physically imposing workaholics from middle-class, Westernised families buffeted by the economic and political crises of Japan between the two world wars. Temperamentally the director was a natural aristocrat, the actor a face in the crowd, voted 'the most Japanese man' in a 1960s poll. Kurosawa was nicknamed 'the Emperor' for the imperious, peremptory style in which he dominated the set. Mifune was often compared to a wolf for his fearsome gaze, his menacing walk and the ferocious way he could prance and pounce.
Kurosawa was born in Tokyo in 1910. His father, the head of athletics at a leading high school, was credited with building Japan's first swimming-pool. His initial ambition was to be a painter, but in his mid-twenties he was drawn to the cinema and in 1937 he became an assistant director at the Toho company. He remained there for many years, initially gaining a reputation as a prolific screenwriter before directing his first picture in 1943. Galbraith is fascinating on the exasperating censorship Kurosawa experienced, first in wartime Japan, then under the postwar occupation.
Mifune was born in Japanese-occupied Manchuria in 1920, grandson of a herbal doctor and son of a portrait photographer. At school, he won prizes for karate, archery and swordsmanship. Conscripted in 1940, he used the experience of working with his father to become an air force cameraman. Fortunately, his insolent, menacing manner kept him in the ranks and thus ineligible for dangerous combat photography. Demobbed in 1946, he dressed in a suit cut from the two blankets given him to re-enter civvy street and went for a job as a stills photographer at the Toho studio. Instead, he was accepted in Toho's New Face programme for promising young actors.
Kurosawa, established as a versatile director with narrative flair and an eye for detail, scripted Mifune's first film, Snow Trail (a thriller inspired by Raoul Walsh's High Sierra). He then directed him in four movies - as a gangster, a cop, a doctor, and a victim of tabloid journalism - before the sensation of Rashomon, which took the world by storm after winning the Golden Lion in Venice in 1951. It changed attitudes to Japan, brought a hitherto unknown national cinema to global attention, brought the phrase 'Rashomon-situation' into the language and made its director and star famous.
For the following 15 years, the pair knew little but critical and financial success and began to live on a grand scale, Mifune driving one of Tokyo's only two black Rolls-Royces (the other belonged to the Emperor - the real Emperor, that is). A succession of masterpieces flowed from Toho studios with period and modern settings and derived from Japanese sources as well as from Shakespeare, Gorki, Dostoevsky, Ed McBain and Dashiell Hammett.
The Idiot, The Seven Samurai, Throne of Blood, The Hidden Fortress, Yojimbo, High and Low provided Mifune with roles that exhibited an acting range far beyond that of his American contemporaries. They reworked genres creating a humanistic cinema that was at once dynamic and contemplative, steeped in Japanese culture yet universal in appeal. They were often about learning from masters, or sensei, but never didactic. A new generation of foreign directors was influenced by these seminal works, among them Arthur Penn, Sam Peckinpah and Sergio Leone.
Then, in the mid-1960s, their careers began to unravel as the Japanese film industry fell apart. Kurosawa embarked on two abortive, debilitating Hollywood projects, The Runaway Train and Tora! Tora! Tora!, the Pearl Harbor epic on which he went clinically insane while directing the Japanese sequences. In 1972, he attempted suicide, recovering to make a series of largely foreign-financed pictures, the best being the Soviet picture Dersu Uzala and Ran, his reworking of King Lear. His chief supporters were the movie brats who had taken over Hollywood - Coppola, Lucas, Spielberg, Scorsese.
Meanwhile, Mifune created his own company and sought to establish an independent identity. But he went from one undistinguished picture to another, working around the world in mostly dismal epics. His production company was in financial trouble, he left his wife for a young actress and he gave the tabloids a field day when he spray-painted obscenities on the house of his estranged in-laws.
He often spoke of working with Kurosawa again, but the emperor never seriously considered him after the mid-60s. He always felt under the shadow of Kurosawa and of his major 1984 New York retrospective, Mifune remarked ruefully: 'Why not call it a Kurosawa series instead? I haven't done much else worth showing.'
The two died within nine months of each other - Mifune in December 1997 of Alzheimer's at the age of 77; Kurosawa in September 1998 at 88, crippled after suffering a damaged spine in a fall, but still writing and even directing his first television commercial from a wheelchair.
Their careers and relationship are fascinating. But in Galbraith's book they have to be pursued through a dense narrative covering 60 years of Japanese cinema and culture, punctuated by accounts of the rise and fall of studios, industrial strikes, thumbnail sketches of every artist, producer and artisan who ever worked with Kurosawa and Mifune. There are also details of overseas distribution, endless extracts from American reviews (mostly pretty imperceptive) and an exhaustive filmography which is a book in itself.
Astonishingly, this hefty brick of a paperback was written in five years by a 35-year-old American who doesn't appear to have had more than a passing acquaintance with the Japanese language when he began.
