Donzoko
The Lower Depths
1957
directed by
Akira Kurosawa
Kurosawa's last Academy screen picture. In 1957, Japan started producing CinemaScope films and Kurosawa jumped on the bandwagon right away. Please mark that all these earlier movies have been made on 1:1.33 Academy screen aspect ratio; don't mask them off for the "video wide-screen" 1:1.8 ratio or you'll lose top and bottom of the screen.
Having said that, on to the film. I have one problem with it, which is that it was based on a book by Maxim Gorky, an obnoxious USSR communist party follower. If you've read what Alexander Solzhenitsyn has to say about him in The Gulag Archipelago you'll understand. I was also rather surprised Kurosawa selected this as a subject; after all, Stalin had been dead with Khrushchev in power for several years already and I just feel Kurosawa should have known better.
Well, maybe he did, because he turned what has been called "one of the greatest theater sob-stories" into what I feel is a very funny and entertaining film; as Wodehouse/Kaufman say in Barmy in Wonderland
kid the pants of this one. You have to enjoy this as a comedy. It can more or less be summed up in one of the last lines
It was all the actor's fault. Right. Isn't it (almost) always like that in a movie production? A number of social drop-outs is collected like flotsam in one of those forgotten corners between three highways or railroads which you can find in many cities (the choice of location is a masterstroke in itself), where they are effectively cut off from the rest of the world. They have their little setbacks; a bit like Dodesukaden.
Produced by Toho
Japan 1957
137 minutes, B/W, Academy screen
| Credits: |
Cast: |
||
| producer screenplay based on a play by photographed art director music by |
Shojiro Motoki Akira Kurosawa Hideo Oguni Akira Kurosawa Maxim Gorky Kazuo Yamasaki Yoshiro Muraki Masaru Sato |
Sutekichi, the thief Osugi, the landlady Rokubei, her husband Okayo, her sister Kahei, the priest the ex-samurai the actor Tomekichi, the tinker Asa, his wife Osen, the prostitute Yoshisaburo, the gambler Otaki Tatsu police agent |
Toshiro Mifune Isuzu Yamada Garyiro Nakamura Kyoko Kagawa Bokuzen Hidari Minoru Chiaki Kamatari Fujiwara Eijiro Tono Eiko Miyoshi Akemi Negishi Koji Mitsui Nijiko Kiyokawa Haruo Tanaka Kichijiro Ueda |
| The Lower Depths |
| Adapted from a play by Maxim Gorky, Akira Kurosawa's dark seriocomedy follows the adventures of a boarding home's odd residents, especially the love triangle that develops between the landlady, her sister, and a thieving boarder. Toshiro Mifune, Isuzu Yamada star. |
| In Japanese with English subtitles. VHS |
| The Lower Depths (Donzoko) (1957) The Lower Depths (Les Bas-fonds) (1936) |
| Maxim Gorky's play served as the basis for two films from master directors on opposite ends of the globe. First, Akira Kurosawa's dark seriocomedy "Donzoko" follows the adventures of a boarding home's odd residents, especially the love triangle that develops between the married landlady, her sister, and a thieving boarder. Toshiro Mifune, Isuzu Yamada star. Next, a setting move from Moscow to Paris was one of several changes made in Jean Renoir's earlier version, "Les Bas-fonds." Louis Jouvet plays a financially ruined nobleman who learns about life from a street thief in the city slums. Jean Gabin, Jany Holt, Suzy Prim also star. AKA: "Underground." |
|
Standard; Soundtracks: Japanese mono/French mono; Subtitles: English. Two movies. DVD 125 min./85 min. |
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