Although released in 1950, Scandal has significant relevance to our celebrity-obsessed, media-hyped world today. An artist vacationing in the mountains comes across a famous singer who has missed her bus and gives her a ride back to town where they are both, by coincidence, staying in the same inn. A sensationalist tabloid, very similar to the scandal magazine Confidential, then in its heyday in Hollywood, manages to snap a picture of the two on the painter's motorcycle and blows it up into a huge, fabricated story designed to humiliate the singer, a very private person who has been uncooperative with the press. At a certain point in Scandal, the story shifts the focus to a lawyer hired by the artist, a man so desperate for money for the medical care of his sick daughter that he takes a bribe to throw the case.
Unlike the historical films for which he became famous in the West, Kurosawa's movies of the postwar period were mostly set in contemporary times, reflecting the upheaval in Japanese society as it moved uncertainly away from old traditions and ways of life. One of those changes saw the opening up of the press after years of constraint by an authoritarian government. Kurosawa, who throughout his career kept the media at a cool distance, called Scandal a protest film, "directly connected with the rise of the press in Japan and its habitual confusion of freedom with license." The story may have even been partly motivated by personal experience. After the war, more than one magazine linked Kurosawa in an allegedly "doomed" romance to Hideko Takamine, an actress he worked with on Uma (1941), a production for which he directed several scenes uncredited. And, like his male lead, Kurosawa started out as a painter.
The role of the artist is played by Toshiro Mifune, the actor most closely linked to Kurosawa's cinema, even though they ended up estranged in later years, and the Japanese star with the largest global following. Scandal was the fourth of 16 pictures the two made together.
Although less well known to international audiences, Takashi Shimura, who plays the attorney, was also one of the key figures in Kurosawa's work and a star of Japanese cinema. This was the ninth film the two made together out of 22 pictures stretching from Sugata Sanshiro (1943, aka Judo Story) to Kagemusha (1980). Shimura's work here calls to mind the roles he played in Kurosawa's Drunken Angel (1948) and Ikiru (1952). Kuruosawa said that the attorney character in this film is more interesting than the doctor Shimura played in Drunken Angel "because the doctor was someone I'd thought up but the lawyer had been living in the back of my head waiting to come out."
No stranger to the media herself, Yoshiko Yamaguchi, later famous as Shirley Yamaguchi, was born in Manchuria, China to Japanese parents in 1920. During the war, she made pro-Japanese films in occupied territories of China and escaped treason charges and execution there when she revealed her Japanese ancestry. In her home country, she became a popular singer, known as the Judy Garland of Japan, and many of her hit songs are still well known today. She was married to acclaimed Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi from 1952 to 1957 and served as a member of the Japanese parliament from the mid 1970s to the early 1990s. Her life story became the basis for Ian Buruma's novel The China Lover. In the 1950s she appeared occasionally on American television and in a few movies, including Samuel Fuller's House of Bamboo (1955).
Scandal is the second of nine scripts on which Kurosawa collaborated with Ryûzô Kikushima and the only one of his films to feature a courtroom scene.
Director: Akira Kurosawa
Producer: Takashi Koide
Screenplay: Akira Kurosawa, Ryûzô Kikushima
Cinematography: Toshio Ubukata
Art Direction: Tatsuo Hamada
Original Music: Fumio Hayasaka
Cast: Toshiro Mifune (Ichirô), Yoshiko Yamaguchi (Miyako), Yôko Katsuragi (Masako), Noriko Sengoku (Sumie), Takashi Shimura (Hiruta).
BW-105m.
by Rob Nixon
