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PAULINE KAEL
amidst total devastation. His clean-up has been so thorough and so out–
rageously bloody that it has achieved a hilarious kind of style.
We would expect violence carried to extremity to be sickening;
Kurosawa, in a triumph of bravura technique, makes it explosively
comic and exhilarating. By taking the soft romantic focus off the
Westerner as played by Gary Cooper or Alan Ladd or John Wayne,
Kurosawa has made him a comic hero-just because of what he does,
which was always incredible. Without his nimbus, he is unbelievably,
absurdly larger-than-life. In
Shane,
the rather ponderously "classic"
version of the Western, good and evil were white and black. Shane
was Galahad. The Western dog, who howled at his master's grave in
Shane,
who crossed the road to frame the action at the beginning and
end of
The Ox-Bow Incident,
has a new dimension in
Yojimbo-he
appears with a human hand for a bone. This dog signals us that in
this movie the conventions of the form are going to be turned inside
out, we'll have to shift expectations, abandon sentiments: in this terrain
dog eats man. And if we think that man, having lost his best friend,
can still count on his mother, Kurosawa has another shock for us. A
boy from one gang, held prisoner by the other, is released; he rushes
to his mother, crying "Oka" (rna or mother). She responds by slapping
him. Mother isn't sentimental: first things first, and what she cares
about is that gambling concession. This Eastern Western isn't merely a
confusion in the points of the compass ; Kurosawa's control and his sense
of film rhythm are so sure that each new dislocation of value produces
both surprise and delight, so that when the hero tries to free an old
man who has been trussed-up and suspended in air, and the old man
protests that he's safer where he is, we giggle in agreement.
Other directors attempt to recreate the pastness of a story, to
provide distance, perspective. For Kurosawa, the setting may be feudal
or, as in this case, mid-nineteenth-century, but we react (as we are
supposed to react) as modern men. His time is now, his action so
immediate, sensuous, raging, that we are forced to disbelieve, to react
with incredulity, to admire. (This is partly the result of using telephoto
lenses that put us right into the fighting, into the confusion of bared
teeth and gasps and howls.) He shakes spears in our faces. This is more
alive than any living we know; this, all our senses tell us, is art, not life.
Ironic detachment is our saving grace.
Of all art forms, movies are most in need of having their concepts
of heroism undermined. The greatest action pictures have often been
satirical: even before Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., mocked the American
