Sansho the Bailiff (1954)

Sanshô dayû, Japan, 124 minutes
Director: Kenji Mizoguchi
Writers: Ogai Mori, Fuji Yahiro, Yoshikata Yoda
Photography: Kazuo Miyagawa
Music: Fumio Hayasaka, Kinshichi Kodera, Tamekichi Mochizuki
Editor: Mitsuzo Miyata
Cast: Eitaro Shindo, Yoshiaki Hanayagi, Kyoko Kagawa, Kinuyo Tanaka, Masao Shimizu, Akitaka Kono, Keiko Enami, Masahiko Kato

Based on a children's book published in 1915, which was in turn based on a folk tale dating back a millennium, Sansho the Bailiff is a calculating and cruel tour de force of casual human depravity. As if offering balm for its horrors, the film is silvery beautiful, with languorous elaborately framed shots like formal works of art, using a full spectrum of glowing grayscale tones. The beauty blunts only somewhat the harsh black and white realities of this story, which is less about Sansho and more about two children, Zushio and his younger sister Anju, and their parents. Even the folk tale puts Sansho in the title, however. He may be a sideline character but he represents a way of life—the strong man way, with vast wealth, slaves, concubines, and a brutal style.

That's part of Japanese history, from the country's feudal Heian period that provides the movie's setting. What's less part of Japanese history (or at least until halfway through the 20th century) also has a good deal to do with what makes Sansho the Bailiff so cunningly effective. Zushio's and Anju's father, Masauji Taira, is a kind of post-Jesus pre-Enlightenment savant. "Men are created equal," he gently impresses on Zushio. "Everyone is entitled to their happiness." Or at least the pursuit of it, I'm sure. Only two years before the release of this movie, Japan was still occupied by a culturally heavy-handed US which favored such sentiments. It's our good fortune (or maybe my American bias) that it works so well for this movie and story.

Ugetsu (1953)

Ugetsu monogatari, Japan, 94 minutes
Director: Kenji Mizoguchi
Writers: Matsutaro Kawaguchi, Kyuchi Tsuji, Akinari Ueda, Yoshikata Yoda
Photography: Kazuo Miyagawa
Music: Fumio Hayasaka, Tamekichi Mochizuki, Ichiro Saito
Editor: Mitsuzo Miyata
Cast: Masayuki Mori, Machiko Kyō, Kinuyo Tanaka, Sakae Ozawa, Ikio Sawamura, Mitsuko Mito, Kikue Mōri

Ugetsu appeared in the West a couple of years after Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon, helping position Japan as a world powerhouse of art cinema even as the country's postwar recovery continued. Kurosawa was junior by some 10 years to Kenji Mizoguchi (and more infatuated with Western culture, likely the reason he was first to break through in the West). Mizoguchi's work goes well back into the silent era of the 1920s. In typical Japanese fashion, Mizoguchi alternated between stories set in modern times and "Jidaigeki," set in Japan's Edo period, from about the 17th century into the 19th, and concerned with the lives of samurai and others of the time, often the unremarkable and mean lives of the lower classes. Jidaigeki sounds roughly analogous to Westerns and cowboys and farmers.

Rashomon and Ugetsu both count as Jidaigeki. "Ugetsu" seems like something of an ugly word, but its definition is actually very lovely, "moon obscured by rainclouds." The direct source is a 1776 collection of ghost stories by Ueda Akinari, which are themselves adapted from legends. Perhaps because it reaches so far into the past, Mizoguchi's picture looks and feels ancient, and incidentally theatrical in spite of all the exteriors and creative use of the camera to establish and underline scope and perspective. It's a morality play that confoundingly appears to accept class divisions at face value. It starts on war but spends most of its time in the strange lighting and shadows of ghosts. All its extremes tend to sneak up on one. Once begun, it is utterly engrossing, strange and beautiful. In the end it is an exquisitely balanced story that ends so satisfactorily one hesitates to question its vaguely noxious class implications. (It also has unique twists and turns along the way, which I will be discussing past the jump, so spoiler alert.)