Bright News From A Dark Valley Although classified as a "samurai movie", Kenji Mizoguchi's brooding take on the tale of the forty-seven warriors who choose to commit hara-kiri rather than succumb to the disgrace of losing their clan title is anything but all-action. Although instructed by the military to make an aggressive warlike film, the master director opts for an awe-inspiring display of pure cinema, replete with classy, ultra-long takes and an air of slow-burning doom probably unmatched in cinema history.
It is indeed the way the story is filmed that is most breathtaking. Never has a film so perfectly paired up its thematic concerns with the style in which these themes are presented. The scenes in the film are rarely under five minutes each, with the camera relentlessly prowling around via tracking and boom shots. Furthermore, it says so much about its director that the long spaces between cuts are not obvious because of their unobtrusive nature. Instead, we are drawn into the story of the honourable ronin, who inhabit a world totally different from out own. Japanese audiences in 1941 found the film a little too different from their own world, as reflected in the poor performance at the box office.
The film forms part of a trilogy of totalitarian films about sacrifice, along with Eisenstein's "Alenander Nevsky (1938) and the Nazi film "Kolberg" (1945): but in reality the "47 Ronin" is head and shoulders above both of these. Indeed, "47 Ronin" is one of the great masterpieces of world cinema, and awaits rediscovery.
DVD notes: Not a great transfer on this Korean DVD, but the film is in its intact (three hours forty-one minutes) form, and has full English subtitles.
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