Keepin' it real

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More Kurosawa

layla_lilah and I grabbed lunch at Speisekammer in Alameda. I had a crab melt sandwich, which was not particularly German, and a side salad of beets, carrots, cucumber and cabbage that was. She had the Schweinebraten (recession menu half portion) which looked pretty good. Then off to Stanford for the double feature.

Rashomon was as breathtakingly good as I remember it. Mifune, Masayuki Mori and Machiko Kyo (what's she doing wearing my hat!) in multiple retellings of the same incident run the gamut of motives and emotions. Which version is the truth? Now a cliche sixty years later, Rashomon's multi-version plot was revolutionary in 1950, winning a number of film festival prizes and bringing Kurosawa and his cast notice before Western audiences. (And those woods! Maybe that was in the back of my head when I lost my mind in Muir Woods and shot 300 pictures in two hours last fall.)

Scandal, made the same year, was one I hadn't previously seen. A painter and a singer meet innocently, a photo is exploited by a trashy tabloid and Mifune (the painter) vows he will sue. Mifune gets to look cool and handsome here, but it's Takashi Shimura as his deeply flawed and unsuccessful lawyer that'll break your heart.
 

Upcoming later this week: a double feature of Ikiru (1952), starring Takashi Shimura as a bureaucrat who decides to live differently when he discovers he is going to die, and One Wonderful Sunday (1947) in which a poor couple try to have a nice time on 35 yen.