Scandal

One of the few flat-out misfires in Kurosawa's career and made just before on of his biggest hits, Rashomon (1950), this awkward film about the mercenary nature of the tabloid press comes across as a Hollywood melodrama that somehow got made badly made in Japan.

Toshiro Mifune is a Gary Cooper-like artist, Ichiro Aoye, who hires a spineless lawyer (Takashi Shimura, perhaps Hollywood would have cast Peter Lorre), with a daughter dying of TB to press a suit after he and a young singer (Yoshiko Yamaguchi) are set up as a romantic item to satisfy the appetites of a prurient public.

Laboriously executed, overly wordy and with none of the compelling visuals that usually characterize Kurosawa's work, the film is also dated, the extended Christmas sequence appearing today to be less of a comment on Japan's post-war Westernization than an incongruous stab at Capra-esque sentimentality.

Kurosawa was never afraid to illustrate a moral precept but the ending of this film hardly delivers it in a convincing way, leaving it as a fine-sounding utterance by Mifune's vindicated artist but robbing what has become the main character, the lawyer Hiruta, of any real prospect of redemption.

 

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