The Emperor and the Wolf: The Lives and Films of Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune

Rating:
Summary: Terrible as Biography
Review: Galbraith doesn't speak Japanese. His judgment is simplistic and naive. Worst of all, he packs this film with trivia on every insipid movie Mifune starred in. The book has no sense of priority or proportion. The author knew he didn't have enough compelling material for a book so he packed it with fillers, mostly about cast and crew info for dozens of Mifune's forgettable flicks. I dare say at least 30% of the book is useless trivia.
I also think this is a dual biography because Galbraith didn't have enough material for either artist. Bad book, utterly shameful.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent and Comprehensive
Review: I found this bio-history of Japanese cinematography in general and Mifune and Kurosawa in particular to be highly illuminating, and an evocation of the lived memories of the these films appearances over the last generation, including finally seeing the full version of Seven Samurai. The fill-in background for the production of Rashomon, Ikuru, and Seven Samurai was especially interesting, in relation to Kurosawa's early years in the Japanese film industry, from the thirties through the war.I was intrigued to read of the influence of Hidden Fortress on Star Wars. Leave the sophisto literary analysis to Godzilla. These three films are inexplicable in context, simply mysteriously appearing as three of the greatest films ever made.

Rating:
Summary: Warning: Not a Biography
Review: I read the warnings about this book, but I am such a film buff, Kurosawa fan, Mifune fan and all-around nerd, that I did not heed them. First thing, this book is not a biography of Mifune or Kurosawa. It should be retitled and repackaged as the "Films of Kurosawa and Mifune". This is really a filmography with extensive plot summations and notes on production. The author includes his opinion of each movie, as if I care what his opinion is. There is very little information about either of these greats. The excuse is that the war destroyed most of the documents pertaining to their early years. That does not explain the lack later on of any information about either of them. For instance, the author writes that scandal plagued Mifune in his later years, but does not go into any more detail than to mention that he had a mistress. I was very disappointed in this book and do not feel as if I learned one thing about Kurosawa or the great Toshiro Mifune.

Rating:
Summary: Its all about films....
Review: I think many reviewers didn't read the subtitle of the book, "Lives and Films of....." I don't think this book was meant to be a complete kiss and tell biography of Kurosawa and Mifune, this is a book which chronicled their cooperative efforts together in making films that became great classics and their relationship with and against each other. This is a book on relationship between two giants of the Japanese film industry. It was not meant to be a total biography as so many reviewers seem to have wanted.

The book gives very good background material to both men but its always about the relationship between the two. After both men split up after Red Beard, the author took pains to how see each one of them dealt with their careers afterward. Kurosawa continued to have success while Mifune drifted into period films, TV shows and his achievements suffered greatly. The book also gives a great understanding on how Japanese film industry worked, how it declined and basically how it fell apart in the face of Hollywood. Even the author expressed mixed surprised how waves of American films in a foreign nation like Japan, completely converted the Japanese audience into their own as they abandoned their own film industries into Third World status.

I thought the book was well written, well researched and explained the relationship and the films made by both Kurosawa and Mifune. But for anyone looking for a true biography, look some place else, for film historians like myself, this book is a must read.

Rating:
Summary: Warning: Not a Biography
Review: I think many reviewers didn't read the subtitle of the book, "Lives and Films of....." I don't think this book was meant to be a complete kiss and tell biography of Kurosawa and Mifune, this is a book which chronicled their cooperative efforts together in making films that became great classics and their relationship with and against each other. This is a book on relationship between two giants of the Japanese film industry. It was not meant to be a total biography as so many reviewers seem to have wanted.

The book gives very good background material to both men but its always about the relationship between the two. After both men split up after Red Beard, the author took pains to how see each one of them dealt with their careers afterward. Kurosawa continued to have success while Mifune drifted into period films, TV shows and his achievements suffered greatly. The book also gives a great understanding on how Japanese film industry worked, how it declined and basically how it fell apart in the face of Hollywood. Even the author expressed mixed surprised how waves of American films in a foreign nation like Japan, completely converted the Japanese audience into their own as they abandoned their own film industries into Third World status.

I thought the book was well written, well researched and explained the relationship and the films made by both Kurosawa and Mifune. But for anyone looking for a true biography, look some place else, for film historians like myself, this book is a must read.

Rating:
Summary: a worthy companion
Review: It's difficult to imagine how anyone could compete with Donald Richie's magisterial work on Kurosawa, but Stuart Galbraith has somehow found a way. His dual filmography of Kurosawa and Mifune is the ideal introduction to Japanese movies for the film buff. This is by no means a replacement for Richi, but it is a worthy companion, and illuminates much of interest about the early Japanese film business. I only wish Galbraith had devoted more space to the split between the two creators, but I suspect any reticence the author may show is merely a repeat of that exercised by his Japanese sources and interviewees, so the book still gets the full five-star thumbs-up.

Rating:
Summary: Well researched, well considered, and very welcome
Review: The careers of Japanese film director and Japanese actor Toshiro Mifune were so intertwined -- each did much of his very best work with the other -- that it is hardly possible to think of one without the other. It was entirely fitting that a dual bio be attempted, and Galbraith is to be applauded for taking on the job and making good work of it.

Though _The Emperor and the Wolf_ looks intimidatingly thick, only 650 of its 825 pages are actual narrative (the rest is taken up by an impressively detailed filmography of the two principals which scholars will love, and extensive notes and index), and that narrative reads easily and fairly swiftly.

The emphasis is clearly on the FILMS rather than the lives of these extraordinary artists. Galbraith moves calmly over such developments as Kurosawa's 1971 suicide attempt and Mifune's mistress Mika Kitagawa. He doesn't avoid, but he doesn't dwell, either.

On the other hand, assuming the Western reader's basic ignorance of such matters (and rightly so), he takes care to summarize the work of other directors, writers, and actors whenever they crossed paths with our two heroes. Descriptions of even really bad and forgettable films that have never made it to the U.S. sometimes make one yearn to see them, never mind the many decent ones.

There are plenty of quotes from American film reviewers -- good, bad, and ugly. (I was surprised that among my favorites, Stanley Kauffmann missed the boat a few times, and John Simon utterly dismissed "Ran.") Kevin Thomas of the LA Times seems to have done the best, most consistent job of grasping what these two geniuses were doing, each time a new film came out.

Galbraith gets overly defensive about Kurosawa's final two projects, "Rhapsody in August" and "Madadayo," but is harsh with "Dreams" and doesn't hesitate to disagree with famed Japan and Japanese film expert Donald Richie on some judgments, or to point out where other commentators have missed the boat (such as in the role William Holden played in championing Japanese films -- in particular, Inagaki's "Samurai" -- in the United States).

He's not a great prose stylist -- he regularly treats "none" and "each" as plural nouns, as in "none ... have been," "each ... have been" -- and I scratched my head over the conclusion "as lightweight films go, it is something of a masterpiece" (of "Sanjuro," p. 331), as well as the meaningless "infinitely more transcendent" (p. 558).

The book includes 44 b&w photos. Most are merely okay (perhaps Richie got most of the great ones for his books), although the one of Mifune in full costume driving off the set of "Yojimbo" in his MG is priceless.

One comes away from this largely reverent book with increased respect for both its subjects (yes, that is possible!), particularly the actor, about whose modesty and professionalism there are endless testimonials.

Even as a world famous star and head of his own production studio in his 40s, Mifune would clean bathrooms and ashtrays, spray the sidewalk, fetch chairs for others. He always knew his lines, and was unfailingly kind to new, young actors. Because he acted as his own agent, he rarely received top dollar for his work, which usually meant greater gate receipts for even truly bad films after the mid 1950s.

I snapped this book up as soon as I ran across it, just over a week ago, and I'm glad I did.

Rating:
Summary: Now go away and write the book
Review: This book suffers from two major failings: 1) it is completely lacking in focus 2) the author is too timid to set his own stamp on the material.

The title suggests it's about the films that director Akira Kurosawa and actor Toshiro Mifune made together, including a well-known string of masterpieces (Rashomon, Seven Samurai, Throne of Blood, etc.); in fact it details, chronologically and in parallel, the life and films of Kurosawa and those of Mifune. As the work they did together was only part of each man's career, the result is a lot of jumping around from one to the other, with lots of description but almost no analysis. In particular the author gives only the most minimal interpretation of the relationship between the two, either on screen or off, its obvious importance in making their masterpieces possible, or why it abruptly ended, apparently devastating the careers of both. Instead we get this happened then that happened, quotes of variable interest from people who knew one or the other, and plot summaries of every film that either Kurosawa or Mifune had anything to do with in any capacity.

Kurosawa manages to come through all this with his dignity and status as one of the greatest-ever directors more or less intact. After the break with Mifune he remained true to his talent and overcame severe financial and personal difficulties to make films such as the grand-but-dry Ran and the subtly profound Madadayo. Mifune's standing is however sadly undermined by the author's approach. His extraordinary work with Kurosawa disappears in a wealth of detail about all the other hundred or so films he appeared in and/or produced - almost all of which it would be kinder to forget - punctuated by accounts of his messy and rather pathetic private life and many business failures. The man who played Kikuchiyo in Seven Samurai - for example - deserves better than this.

The saddest thing is that Galbraith obviously wanted to write a really good book, but has mistaken quantity for quantity. For example, with all this material he could have written an interesting biography of Mifune, exploring the question of how it was that a man so apparently lacking in good sense and confidence managed to turn out performances oozing both that rank among the finest in world cinema. Or he might have written a book that really did concentrate on the films Mifune and Kurosawa made together, shedding greater light on their relationship, its creative force and its rise and fall. As for the thousands of plot summaries of lost films that Galbraith feels are so important, they could have gone to an archive to moulder harmlessly.

However to write these or other books of his choosing Galbraith would have had to put aside his disabling respect for his subjects, which makes him avoid passing any kind of judgment or opting for any particular interpretation, prefering instead just to dump undigested on the page as many versions of `what happened' as he has been able to find. (Ironically this fault resembles Kurosawa's hands-off approach to Dostoyevsky in his film of The Idiot, whose disastrous results Galbraith notes.)

Ultimately I blame the editor at Faber. On receiving the manuscript this person should first have read it and then sent it back with a covering letter saying, `great research, now write me two or three great books.' In failing to do either they did a great disservice to Galbraith and his readers - not to mention Kurosawa and Mifune.

Rating:
Summary: the masters
Review: This is a book about the best in Japanese cinema and filmaking a great read about such a great director.

Rating:
Summary: Does not tell us anything about Kurosawa and Mifune the men
Review: This is a filmography, not a biography. This book focuses almost entirely on Kurosawa's and Mifune's films, giving almost no insight into what their lives were like, or what they were like as people. The first half of this 800-page book is an interminable series of synopses of their early works -- films of significance today only as harbingers of much greater things to come. (Particularly annoying is the author's endless quoting of contemporary reviews from "Variety.") The second half still focuses primarily on the films and the minutiae of their production, but provides more substance about K&W's personal lives. However, it is not nearly enough to get a clear picture of Mifune and Kurosawa as real-life people. We, the readers, always feel like fans still observing the two legends from a distance, learning almost nothing of their personal lives. For instance, barely half a page is spent on Mifune's wedding, and essentially nothing is written about his wife, Sachiko.

In addition, although this is a dual biography-the justification being that Mifune and Kurosawa did their best work together-Mr. Galbraith fails to convey what kind of relationship, whether personal or professional, the two had. Rather, the book's focus alternates from one to the other between chapters. A glaring omission in this regard is a failure to examine their famous falling out. The overly cautious author only hints that it was due to Mifune's reluctance to be tied down by the perfectionist director's lengthy shoots ("Red Beard," their last film together, took 2 years to film), that Mifune, once he gained fame, preferred quick, easy-money projects to support his luxurious lifestyle. However, almost no anecdotes are given to illustrate this or any other aspect of their relationship.

In summary, the definitive English-language biographies of Mifune and Kurosawa have yet to be written.