I should not let 2020 come to an end without noting that it is the centenary of the birth of Toshiro Mifune, the man who immediately comes to mind for most people as the face of Japanese movies.
There is an automatic aura that surrounds anyone who manages to become a star, but there are some male stars in particular who seem to have something extra that can’t quite be explained by their roles or their general persona. Any star commands audience attention, or he or she wouldn’t be a star. Nevertheless, there are a handful that have something different, a very small group in which Mifune holds a high position. Sean Connery had it, with or without the James Bond aura; so did Clark Gable, Chow Yun Fat, Jean Gabin, Errol Flynn, Douglas Fairbanks, Steve McQueen, and arguably John Barrymore before the drinking and Jean Paul Belmondo in his physically active years. Bruce Lee and James Dean seem to belong to the same group, but they made so few movies before their deaths that they have their own special place in film history. The usual term is charisma, but it is a type of charisma that crosses cultural boundaries.
This has little to do with acting skill, though all of these men could give quality performances with the right script and director. Michael Caine is arguably the finest camera actor of our times, extremely knowledgeable about the process and always perfectly gauged to fit the shot, but in his scenes with Connery in The Man Who Would Be King, we still watch Connery. Caine is not wiped off the screen, like Kevin Costner in Robin Hood when Connery appears for his cameo, but still we think Connery first, Caine second. Similarly, Tatsuya Nakadai was a real star as well as a more consistently good and much more versatile actor than Mifune, but in their many scenes together over the years, it is always Mifune to whom the eye is first drawn.
The very presence of such stars can easily overbalance the movie unless there is someone with them who can at least hold his or her own and fight back for attention, so to speak, without turning the scene into a childish fight for center stage, or unless there are directors who can shape them carefully. This seems to be most true for Mifune. Gable, Flynn, and the other similar Hollywood stars rarely worked with great directors in great movies; to some degree, the real definition of a true star is that he or she doesn’t have to have good movies around them to be effective or popular. But they had a consistency that never overwhelmed their pictures, even if the characterizations were limited and repetitious. For Mifune, however, his best work is in movies made by powerful personalities like Kurosawa, Kobayashi, or Okamoto behind the camera. With others, even highly regarded giants like Inagaki, Mifune was much more uneven; in Samurai Saga he is superb, as he is in Machibuse playing a more mature variation of his Yojimbo character. In others he over-acts, sometimes quite horribly, his scenery-chewing coming close to overwhelming Rickshaw Man or Rise Against the Sword or, for me at least, even the Musashi Miyamoto trilogy. When he is working with a more average studio director, as in Samurai Pirate or Life of a Horsetrader., he is a real ham. At the same time, none of the other charismatic stars I have mentioned can point to as many genuinely great movies on their resume as could Mifune: Five of the top 25 on Kinema Junpo’s 2009 all-time list starred Mifune. None of the other great charismatic stars of other nations made movies like Rashomon, Seven Samurai, Samurai Rebellion, Throne of Blood, Yojimbo, Sanjuro, Samurai Assassin, and Life of Oharu, which are all acknowledged international classics, and we could point to half a dozen others that would be very close to such status if they were better known outside Japan.
Curiously, Mifune rarely made love stories, which were common with the other world-wide charismatic actors I have mentioned and relatively common with other Japanese male stars. Mifune is usually a man unhindered by love or sex, turning his back on women who offer it.* This is not unusual in wanderer films, of course, but all the major male stars made some kind of romance movie on occasion. Though Mifune spends many scenes drinking at inns, he never seems to ask for the woman for the night. In those rare cases he has a wife, such as Throne of Blood, The Bad Sleep Well, or Samurai Rebellion, the marriage turns out to be a mistake for him. We could hardly call such a macho figure asexual, but he often seems not even to notice the women who are attracted to him.
Almost everything in Japanese films gets remade, often several times, with varying quality, but not Mifune’s movies. Once his mark is on them, most become untouchable. To a certain degree, this is not unusual for charismatic actors. MGM tried to make Stewart Granger into a new Errol Flynn and failed and Kevin Costner’s Robin Hood is a blank space compared to Flynn’s; no matter how many people played James Bond, for true fans Connery was the one and only; and the only McQueen movie to have a successful remake was The Thomas Crown Affair, his least representative role (the less said about The Getaway the better). Yet somehow Mifune seems different. Aside from his trilogy about Musashi Myamoto, who has been one of the fundamental subjects of Japanese historical movies, I can find Japanese remakes of only Stray Dog and Hidden Fortress. Similarly, it is difficult to imagine Mifune playing any of the roles played by other Japanese stars of his era. When his movies are remade in other countries, his character is completely revised, often unrecognizeably so. Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name is the polar opposite of Yojimbo, ice in his veins compared to Mifune’s impish disruptiveness; Horst Bucholtz is so completely not Mifune that it takes a long time in Magnificent Seven to realize they are supposed to be the same characters, and even Paul Newman’s deeply committed Mexican bandit in The Outrage comes across today as little more than a racist stereotype. When Johnnie To in Hong Kong decided to riff on Stray Dog in PTU, the man who lost the pistol was To’s favorite schlub Suet Lam, not a charismatic young star such as Andy Lau.
Most of the other charismatic giants I have mentioned were relaxed in front of the camera, but Mifune seems constantly on the verge of an explosion. Even in his long series of Navy movies, his “calm” command role seems to be a calmness that he has to fight himself to maintain. This in effect hurts Red Beard, where he is reduced to Dr. Gillespie mentoring Young Dr. Kildare and, with only gruffness to fall back on, has trouble maintaining a convincing calm surface needed for the physician’s role. The essence of his personality is his cameo appearance as Miyamoto in the final moments of Kojiro Sasaki, calmly appearing out of nowhere, poised but tightly coiled, then releasing that coiled energy in a flash and disappearing calmly again, completely secure in himself and without regret. This is utterly unique among Japanese male stars. Restraint is the dominant mode of performance as it was (and presumably still is) the dominant mode of interaction in society as a whole, with comedy the only possible exception. Compare Ken Takakura, Koji Tsuruta, Chiezo Kataoka, Kazuo Hasegawa, Raizo Ichikawa, Rentaro Mikuni, So Yamamura, Masayuki Mori, Eiji Okada, Kinnosuke Nakamura, and even into today, men such as Takeshi Kitano, Koji Yakusho, or Riki Takeuchi. Even the wildest imagination cannot see any of them playing the characters Mifune played. Thus, the most famous Japanese star seems to be the least “Japanese” of all actors.
There are stars whom the camera simply loves but who are real blanks away from the camera, there are stage stars who simply can’t make the camera like them, and there are even some stars who are blank spaces in front of the camera yet somehow remain stars (don’t ask me to name names). Mifune seems to be bigger than the camera. It is significant, I think, that Mifune in effect failed his screen test. But while they were shooting it, Hideko Takamine dragged Kurosawa in to watch, and they both saw something even before the camera saw it. Whatever that was, it was not dependent on Kurosawa, even though Mifune’s most famous movies in the West are Kurosawa films. It was something sui generis. There really hasn’t been another star like him, from Japan or any other nation.
- (Update 6/26/23) After stumbling onto Tokyo Sweetheart, I did some serious cross-referencing among the more obscure titles and found that in fact Mifune made several love stories, including a double role in Last Embrace and as The Other Man in A Wife’s Heart. None of these are easily found in the present day, so we have very little evidence of his ability to play characters in love.
Japanonfilm 
One other remake of a Mifune/Kurosawa film is the color version of Tsubaki Sanjuro (2007) which, while interesting, lacks the vibrancy of the original. (Understatement). Rather than trying to recreate the remarkable blood gushing finale, the remake uses another totally different trick move by the lead character in his duel against the bodyguard he has offended.
The one actor who did recreate a role that Mifune had played was Shintaro Katsu as master spear fighter Tawaraboshi Genba in the 52 episode “Epic Chushingura” TV series which Mifune. The role had originally been played by Mifune in Hiroshi Inagaki’s “47 Loyal Retainers” (Chushingura – 1962). Of course Katsu and Mifune had co-starred in a couple of films previously, most notably “Zato Ichi Meets Yojimbo” and “Incident At Blood Pass” (Machibuse). In my opinion, Shintaro Katsu was the only one who could match Toshiro Mifune’s star quality, both on and off screen.
A little side note was that Mifune had originally been cast to play the Yojimbo character in Hideo Gosha’s “Goyokin.” Unfortunately there was difficulty on the set and according to varying reports Mifune either didn’t get along with Gosha or couldn’t handle the cold weather during the shooting and walked off the set. He was ably replaced in the movie by Kinnosuke Nakamura, but the character was clearly supposed to be Yojimbo, in this case a shogunate spy like in Machibuse.
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Your post on Toshiro Mifune is excellent, with many well-taken points. I would like to add my own comments as well as challenge some of those you made about the great actor’s work.
Mifune often claimed that he was proud *only* of the films he made with Kurosawa. Your broad overview of his career, in which you mention wonderful movies he made with Inagaki, Kobayashi, Okamoto and others, proves that the man sold his own talent short. (Okamoto’s Samurai Assassin is, in my opinion, one of Mifune’s most underrated masterpieces.) Even his performance in The Life of Oharu, in which he was (in my opinion) grossly miscast as the heroine’s passionate first lover, is fascinating simply because he *is* Mifune, because of his powerful presence even in an inappropriate role.
I’d like to take issue with your comments on Red Beard, however. You compare the plot of this masterpiece to the old, creaky Dr. Kildare films, which I think is a bit grotesque (and which author Stuart Galbraith IV rightly refuted in his joint biography of Kurosawa and Mifune). Mifune as Dr. Niide is not a gruff, lovable old cuss like Lionel Barrymore, but a genuinely angry man (more about this later). And Dr. Yasumoto, the Yuzo Kayama character, is not the pleasantly mediocre Lew Ayres but, at the beginning anyway, a spoiled, stuck-up little twerp (though also, this being a Kurosawa film, a very smart and talented one).
I think Dr. Niide is probably Kurosawa’s most tragic character, except for Kikuchiyo in Seven Samurai. His government charity is called a “clinic,” but in fact it’s more like a hospice for the dying, and this fact drives Niide crazy with frustration. There’s an excellent scene in the middle of the movie in which Red Beard grossly overcharges a hypochondriac rich man for his services, and the man’s steward, played by Takashi Shimura, gently shoves the knife in by reminding Dr. Niide that he doesn’t know the first thing about disease… which the good doctor is forced to admit is true. (Though you can’t see it in the Criterion edition, in the version of the film that I saw decades ago, somebody, apparently not Kurosawa, inserted at this point a weird, anachronistic shot of bacteria under a microscope, in case anybody missed Shimura’s point.) So Niide’s tragedy is that he’s fighting an enemy, disease, he doesn’t really understand at all, and which nobody would fully understand until the age of Pasteur.
Rather than a soap opera, the movie asks the most grave of all philosophical questions: wherefore suffering? However, the question for Niide himself would be something like: “Why is there so much suffering that I, a doctor, have no idea how to deal with?” And so the best scenes of the movie are not those in which he sternly scolds the young doctor, but those in which he reveals his vulnerability and sense of futility and failure. I think it’s a great performance in a great film.
Another great underrated film is The Lower Depths, one of the very rare adaptations of a classic that is artistically superior (as cinema) to the literary work upon which it’s based. Except for Seven Samurai, this movie contains the most amazing ensemble cast Kurosawa would ever work with: Kyoko Kagawa, Isuzu Yamada, Koji Mitsui, Eijiro Tono, Minoru Chiaki, Kamatari Fujiwara, Genjiro Nakamura, Bokuzen Hidari… the list goes on and on. Yet it’s Mifune, among all these great stars and character performers, that we can’t take our eyes off of. He’s a great team player here: you never catch him trying to steal anybody else’s thunder. But he can’t help but stand out: it’s in his nature.
I’d like to ask if you believe, as I suspect is true, that the fact that he was raised in China and didn’t live in Japan until he was an adult was the key factor in what you rightly call his very un-Japanese lack of restraint.
I have more to say, but I guess I’ll stop here.
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I did of course simplify Red Beard, perhaps to the point of caricature. The movie is of course more complex than the Dr. Kildare series, either on film or on TV, But I felt, even when I saw it on large screen several years ago, that the movie is severely out of balance, that Mifune is just too big to hide behind the beard and be a frustrated doctor. See, for example, Raizo Ichikawa in Seishu Hanaoka as a comparison, a star, a good. even eventually great, actor but not so big he overwhelms the story. Lower Depths is a good example of the charismatic performer working in an ensemble; he never resorts to scene stealing, but still, we always look at him first.
I wouldn’t want to venture into the “raised in China” issue, for after all his parents were Japanese and he would have been raised as a Japanese child. However, it is interesting to note that the one Japanese actress to regularly release pent-up emotion on Japanese screens before the late fifties was Shirley Yamaguchi, who was also born and raised in China. (Machiko Kyo, however, was born and raised in Japan.)
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