Unrated, 2 hr. 23 min. Directed By:
Akira Kurosawa. Release Date:
Nov 26, 1963. DVD Release Date:
Oct 13, 1998.
I haven’t thought about One Week by the Barenaked Ladies (or
whatever they were called) in a billion years.
Well, not a billion, but certainly a significant portion of my life
time, say a third of it, and no I’m not going to discuss how many years that
is. Nor am I estimating in dog years so
it sounds better. This week, I’ve
thought about it twice: once after
seeing Abraham Lincoln: The Vampire
Slayer… oh wait, that was Buffy, and now that I’ve watched this truly awesome
movie directed by Kurosawa (okay I don’t make films, but if I did they’d have a
samurai).
Something nagged at me throughout
this movie. It’s certainly Japanese
enough, but the whole time it felt… inspired by Western cop dramas of the
period. I later realized that this is
the adaptation of a crime novel by Ed McBain, so the light dawned. At the time, I couldn’t figure it out, but in
many ways these guys would have fit right in to any movie scene of the same
period with few exceptions, mostly Mrs. Gondo, but wouldn’t The Apartment have been awesome if
Shirley Maclaine was all geishaed up?
I can’t tell if the unsettling thing
about this movie was that these people seemed so similar to American actors
(and people) of the day, or if the Japanese actors were merely attempt to “simulate”
Americanness. The latter is certainly
possible, and there are a few moments where the characters behave in ways that
would probably not be one of the seven habits of highly effective folks in
Japan. After the sock hop scene, I was
more inclined to think the latter, and if that’s the case, the Japanese did a
remarkable job of emulating Western way of life. Usually when you see that, it’s not done too
well, and this was done so well it was distracting to the story. There's even a scene that makes me understand the line from Archer where Woodhouse talks about it being "an itchy weekend" after Mallory and Archer steal his stash to use on Cyril.
So, I dug this as a culture study OF a culture study. As a cop drama, this was amazing, and I don't even LIKE cop dramas. The cast was great, and the story was lock solid. I can't find anything to gripe about except that they haven't made a remake yet... although I may have just jinxed that. If you haven't seen High and Low, you need to. Now.
