Alone among the Japanese film-makers known to us, he goes beyond the seductive but minor stage of exoticism to a deeper level where one need no longer worry about false prestige" (Cahiers du Cinéma 40).
"[6] A criticism frequently directed at Kurosawa's films is that the director's preoccupation with ethical and moral themes led him at times to create what some commentators regard as sentimental or naïve work.
Speaking of the postwar "slice of life" drama One Wonderful Sunday, for example, film scholar (and future politician) Audie Bock claimed that not even Kurosawa's celebrated prowess as an editor could save one particular scene from bathos: "The last sequence… is an excruciating twelve minutes of the boy conducting an imaginary orchestra in an empty amphitheater while his girlfriend appeals directly to the camera for the viewer to join in.
"[8] On Dersu Uzala—a Soviet-Japanese production about an early 20th-century Nanai hunter in the Siberian wilderness—scholar Joan Mellen expresses the minority view when she writes: "Kurosawa finds an ideology… in a pantheistic belief in the magnificence of nature and in an embarrassingly archaic, Rousseauesque adulation of the 'natural man'… But the contrast between the person [Dersu] at one with his surroundings and the world of industrialization, which Kurosawa depicts only in the abstract, is largely theoretical, rendering the work a sentimental journey.
As a result Red Beard contains a didactic quality absent from Kurosawa's finest works, films like Ikiru, which also treat social themes.
')"[11] On the other hand, Yoshimoto also claims that Kurosawa may have created the cynical character of the master swordsman Sanjurō in Yojimbo as a reaction to this very perception of naïve moralism in the director's earlier work.
[12] During the Second World War, workers on all levels of the Japanese film industry were under immense pressure to create works that not only omitted the slightest criticism of the ruling military dictatorship, but that actively promoted kokusaku ("national policy"), that is, militarism and other aspects of fascist ideology.
In her negative essay about the (mostly) Soviet-financed Dersu Uzala, Joan Mellen strongly criticizes Kurosawa's apparent acquiescence in what she perceives as "evident Soviet anti-Chinese propaganda."
[16] The narrative of one of Kurosawa's last films, Rhapsody in August, centers on an elderly survivor of the atomic attack on Nagasaki who is visited by her half-Japanese, half-American nephew, Clark (Richard Gere), who appears to apologize, as an American, for the city's wartime destruction.
")[19] Joan Mellen, in her examination of this subject, praises only the director's characterization of Yukie (Setsuko Hara), the heroine of No Regrets for Our Youth, remarking that "her face expresses the very potential of the Japanese woman that has been so often, during all these long centuries, left wasted and latent.
[21] Mellen also claims that, after Rashomon, Kurosawa stopped portraying women's potential in his works "as if repelled by Masago, that half-demon of his own creation.
"[23] Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto has noted that Kurosawa's films often offer a paradoxical bond between good and evil male protagonists, in which the distinction between them becomes blurred.
"Without being able to produce any value by herself," Yoshimoto writes, "the woman in Kurosawa's films is often the embodiment of passivity threatening the solipsism of the split male subject.
"[25] In Japan, critics and other filmmakers, conscious of Kurosawa's samurai background, have sometimes accused his work of elitism, because of his focus on exceptional, heroic individuals and groups of men.
In one scene in Yojimbo, the samurai anti-hero Sanjurō, having reneged on his agreement to fight for one of two factions in a feuding town, retreats to a high watchtower to watch, with considerable amusement, the two sides battle it out.
This scene greatly offended the filmmaker Masahiro Shinoda, who interpreted the samurai's climb into the watchtower as symbolic of the director's detached, above-it-all attitude towards the chaotic social conditions he was depicting in the film.
"[31] However, he did concede in an interview that part of the reason he employed dynamic "Western" stylistic elements in his films was to attract the young Japanese audience of that time.
Japanese youth (in the director's view) often preferred the exciting styles of American and European films and were ignorant of or indifferent to their native history and culture.
Writes Stephen Prince: "The tide of popular activism [in 1960s Japan] is relevant to Red Beard and to the films that followed because of its glaring absence from their narratives and concerns, because of the adamant refusal by these films to believe that society could be made better… By contrast [with the Japanese New Wave filmmakers], with evidence readily at hand of democratic protest in modern Japan… Kurosawa chose in his work to retreat to the past and to mythical spaces.
"[26] Audie Bock, writing in 1978, claims that the humanist ideology that sustained the director during previous decades was no longer relevant: "By the time Red Beard was released, in 1965, the postwar era of values like 'humanism,' 'culture' and 'democracy' was over.
"Like tennō," Yoshimoto claimed, "Kurosawa is said to cloister himself in his own small world, which is completely cut off from the everyday reality of the majority of Japanese.