August 19th
One of the most globally recognized Asian stars, Japanese actor Toshiro Mifune appeared in over 160 feature films. Mifune famously portrayed Musashi Miyamoto in Hiroshi Inagaki’s Samurai Trilogy, Samurai I: Musashi Miyamoto (1954), Samurai II: Duel at Ichijoji Temple (1955) and Samurai III: Duel at Ganryu Island (1956) – screening this month as part of TCM’s Summer Under the Stars. His name is often uttered in the same breath as master director Akira Kurosawa, with whom he collaborated on 16-films, including Scandal (1950), Rashomon (1950), Seven Samurai (1954), Throne of Blood (1957), Yojimbo (1961), High and Low (1963) and I Live in in Fear (1967)– all featured this month as well.
Mifune was born on April 1, 1920, in Seito, Japanese-occupied Shandong (present-day Qingdao, China). His father was a trade merchant and photographer, and his mother was the daughter of a high-ranking samurai official. Being Methodist missionaries, Mifune’s parents were encouraged to live in Shandong by the Japanese government during its occupation. Growing up, Mifune worked in his father’s photo studio and, at 19 years old, he was drafted into the Imperial Japanese Army Aviation division, where he served in the Aerial Photography unit during World War II.
Both his knowledge of photography and his wartime experience contributed to his talent and success as an actor. After the war, in 1947, Mifune applied to the photography department at the freshly formed company, Toho Productions. However, the department was full, so his friend who worked in the department sent his resume to a “New Faces” audition hosted by the production company’s talent division. Mifune was accepted and allowed to take a screen test for director and writer Kajiro Yamamoto who he impressed and cast in These Foolish Times (1947). Yamamoto also recommended Mifune to director Senkichi Taniguchi who casted him in Snow Trail (1947).
Kurosawa first encountered Mifune when Toho Studios conducted a massive open audition to sign postwar talent. Kurosawa was going to skip the event, but actress Hideko Takamine insisted that he attend to watch Mifune, whose acting had already created a buzz. Kurosawa later wrote that upon entering the audition room he saw, “a young man reeling around the room in a violent frenzy…it was as frightening as watching a wounded beast trying to break loose. I was transfixed.” Although Mifune lost the audition competition, Kurosawa was dazzled and went on to cast him as the young gangster, Matsunaga, in their first collaboration, Drunken Angel (1948), an existential postwar yakuza film. Kurosawa went on to work with Mifune in the medical tragedy The Quiet Duel (1949) and the detective film Stray Dog (1949). At the end of the decade Kurosawa directed Mifune in the political drama, Scandal which depicts kasutori culture, a phenomenon of early postwar Japan that refers to the proliferation of sleazy magazines. In Scandal, Mifune plays Ichiro Aoye, an artist who is slandered by vengeful media.
In the 1950s, alongside Kurosawa, Mifune honed the acting style for which he would be known. He created some of the most dynamic characters ever put on screen, all marked by intense physicality and surprising tenderness. Mifune’s characters were course or gruff, but nevertheless raw and emotional. Kurosawa once commented that in his films Mifune could convey in only three feet of film an emotion for which the average Japanese actor would require ten feet.
International critics seemed to agree. Although the thriller crime film Rashomon opened to lukewarm reviews in Japan, it nevertheless won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and put a global spotlight onto both Kurosawa and Mifune. Kurosawa so effectively wielded a complex plot – involving characters that provide subjective, alternative and contradictory versions of the same incident – that it is now known as the “Rashomon effect.” And Mifune was celebrated by film critics the world over for his performance as the film’s villain, the bandit and outlaw, Tajomaru. To prepare for the role, he reportedly studied footage of lions in the wild.
For Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai and Throne of Blood, Mifune nearly singlehandedly inverted the stereotype of the genteel, clean-cut samurai and has been credited for originating the “roving warrior” archetype. Seven Samurai is set in 1586 during the Sengoku period of Japanese history. It follows the story of a village of desperate farmers who hire seven ronin (masterless samurai) to combat bandits who will return after the harvest to steal their crops. According to Mifune, the film was originally going to be called Six Samurai and he was to play the character Kyuzo, a serious, stone-faced and supremely skilled swordsman. During the six-week scriptwriting process, Kurosawa and his screenwriters realized that “six sober samurai were a bore – they needed a character that was more off-the-wall”. Kurosawa recast Mifune as Kikuchiyo, a humorous, mercurial and temperamental rogue who lies about being a samurai, but eventually proves his worth and resourcefulness. Kurosawa gave Mifune creative license to improvise actions in his performance. Kurosawa, who grew up watching American Westerns, once said that Seven Samurai owes John Ford. For western audiences, Mifune’s performance recalled beloved gruff and rascally cowboys. It is no wonder that, in turn, Seven Samurai was remade in the United States by John Sturges as the Western, The Magnificent Seven (1960). Clint Eastwood was among the first of many actors to adopt Mifune’s wandering ronin persona, especially in Spaghetti Westerns directed by Sergio Leone where he played the Man with No Name, a character similar to Mifune’s seemingly nameless ronin in Yojimbo (1961), also directed by Kurosawa.
As an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Throne of Blood transports the play from Medieval Scotland to Feudal Japan, with stylistic elements from classical Japanese Noh drama. Mifune plays the Macbeth character, Taketoki Washizu, a samurai commander, whose rise to power with the help of supernatural spirits and a cunning wife is tragically cut short. Mifune won best actor at the Mainichi Film Awards that year. When Kurosawa attended a party at film critic Dilys Powell’s house, actor Laurence Olivier said that he enjoyed the film and was impressed by the scene in which Mifune’s Macbeth is shot with arrows. Mifune’s death scene was also the source of inspiration for Piper Laurie’s death scene in Brian De Palma’s Carrie (1976).
In the 1960s, Kurosawa and Mifune collaborated on the procedural drama High and Low in which Mifune plays a wealthy executive named Kingo Gondo whose son has been kidnapped and held for ransom. The Washington Post described that film as “the companion piece to Throne of Blood – it’s Macbeth if Macbeth had married better. The movie shares the rigors of Shakespeare’s construction, the symbolic and historical sweep, the pacing that makes the story expand organically in the mind.” The film foregrounds the modern infrastructure of the economic miracle system and the run up to the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, including rapid rail lines and the proliferation of personal automobiles. Martin Scorsese included it on a list of “39 Essential Foreign Films for a Young Filmmaker.”
Kurosawa and Mifune finally parted ways after Red Beard (1965), a period jidaigeki film, loosely based on the Fyodor Dostoevsky novel, Humiliated and Insulted. In it, Mifune plays Dr. Kyojo Nilde also known as “Red Beard,” a rough-tempered yet charitable town doctor and martial artist. Since the film required Mifune to keep a natural beard for the entirety of the film's two years of shooting, he was unable to act in any other films during the production. This put Mifune and his own financially strapped production company deeply into debt, creating friction between him and Kurosawa. Although Red Beard played to packed houses in Japan and Europe, which helped Mifune recoup some of his losses, the following years took Mifune and Kurosawa in very different artistic directions. Mifune continued to enjoy success with a range of samurai and war-themed films – and, according to his daughter, he was so popular that he had to turn down George Lucas’s offer to play Darth Vader or Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars. In contrast, Kurosawa’s output of films significantly decreased. Around this time, Kurosawa attempted suicide and, upon his survival, derided Mifune’s new direction in acting, calling his work, particularly on the American television miniseries Shogun, “inferior”. However, Mifune continued to speak respectfully of Kurosawa, saying “I have never as an actor done anything that I am proud of other than with him.”
The two men had no contact until they both attended the funeral of Godzilla director Ishiro Honda in 1993. There, they embraced tearfully, perhaps sensing this might be their last opportunity to reconcile. Both men passed away within a year of each other: first, Mifune on Christmas Eve, 1997, of multiple organ failure, then his mentor the following September.
