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Redbeard (Akahige) 1965, the picture which along with Seven Samurai is Kurosawa's other great epic, has also remained relatively obscure here. To ask "which is Kurosawa's best film?" Is like asking what is the greatest work of Beethoven's, nevertheless, after you've seen them all Redbeard must surely rate high on the list. Here is the master at the top of his game with twenty films already behind him, working in a sheer virtuoso space. As usual in a Kurosawa film a tight plot makes the three hours fly by like three minutes. But what the film is really about, rather than plot, is character development. Ultimately, in the sense that all turns out well for the heroes, and in the sense that there are lots of laughs along the way, Redbeard may be classified as a dramatic comedy, which explores the entire range of human emotions experienced day to day by the staff and patients of a poor people's clinic in late Tokugawa Japan, just before the dawn of the modern era. "Redbeard", the central figure played by Toshiro Mifune , is the tyrannical head doctor (with, of course, a heart of gold), a doctor of the old school who runs the clinic with an iron hand but also with lots of ill-concealed empathy for the patients and plain old common sense. Matinee idol Kayama Yuzo is an uppity young doctor assigned to the clinic who gives Mifune a hard time until he sees the light of Redbeard's old school wisdom and is brought under respectful control. Among many memorable scenes; The hilarious judo (or karatte ) sequence where Redbeard is forced to resort to bone cracking violence in order to teach some marauding criminals a lesson, or the hat pin scene, where Kagawa Kyoko, a beautiful but insane patient, uses her wiles to seduce Kayama then attempts to murder him with a hat pin! It is to be noted that this was the last time actor Mifune worked with Kurosawa after a lengthy and famous collaboration. Mifune resented Kurosawa's imperious ways, especially when the director demanded that he keep his full beard for many months, which forced Mifune to turn down many other lucrative offers. This film remains, nevertheless, one of the outstanding landmarks of Mifune's own long career. Not to mention still snother Kuriswaw peak!

"THE BAD SLEEP WELL", "(1960), original title Waui yatsu hodo yoku nemuru, is basically a study of corruption in big Business with intimations, particularly in the telephone conversation at the end, that orders come from higher up, shades of Watergate in 1960 Japan. Toshiro Mifune, trading samuai robes for a business suit, appears in a very uncharacteristic role, emphasizing once again what a really fine all-around actor he can be under the right direction. The usual Kurosawa repertory actors are there: Mori Masayuki, the gentlemanly samurai who was victimized by Mifune in Rashomon (1950), pays him back as Iwabuchi the super-evil company president who orders Mifune's erasure; Shimura Takashi (chieftain of the Seven Samurai) plays the vice-president in what is perhaps his only role as a 'warui yatsu' (bad guy), and many other familiar faces in unfamiliar roles. This film, one of the most contemporary in the Kurosawa repertoire, is rarely seen in this country, largely because American film distributors operate under the delusion that the only good films coming out of Japan are samurai sword sagas.

I have never been a great Quentin Tarantino fan (I hated "Pulp Fiction" and walked out of "Reservoir Dogs") but right off the bat I will have to say that even if he doesn't get an Oscar this year, Mr. Q. should at least get a medal - the Congressional Medal of Honour (of Poland and Israel?) - for telling it like it should have been, even if it wasn't actually quite that way. Any person of Jewish persuasion who does not stand up and cheer at various points in this tremendous historical revision comedy isn't worth his (or her) weight in schmaltz. And any Gentile person of liberal democratic red blood who doesn't let out a few whelps of "Amen", or "right on", during the proceedings, needs to be taken out into the alley and shot in the head. The basic plot: A merciless vengeance unit composed mainly of Jewish commandos under the leadership of a delightfully southern drawling Lt. Brad Pitt (best thing he's ever done!) is parachuted into Nazi occupied France in 1941, their mission, to strike total terror into the hearts of all Germans by not only brutally slaughtering every German soldier they can get their hands on, but scalping them American Indian style, bashing their brains out with baseball bats (another all-American touch) and carving swastikas into the foreheads of their victims. One such swasticated German soldier is purposely let go so that he can take his tterrorization back to the Fuhrer hisself. Der Fuhrer (Adolph Hitler) is tellingly portrayed as a frenzied madman who does everything but literally chew up a rug (Supporting actor contender in my book) when he sees what these stop-at-nothing "Basterd" vigilantes are doing to his pure Aryan troopers. Propaganda minister Goebbels also comes in for significant treatment in a film almost as good in its portrayal of Nazi pageantry and evil as Istvan Szabo's "Mephisto" in heavy reverse gear. The plot, told in five well defined chapters, is far too complicated to unravel in a mini-review such as this, but it's all about getting good and even with the Germans for their well-known collective brutality and genocide policies. Suffice it to say that all the krauts get what they deserve in the end and just about every one of the many twisted and complex roles in the film are tossed off to perfection. Very fetching is one of the heroines, Madeleine Laurent, as "Shoshana Dreyfus", a French blonde Jewish girl whose whole family was murdered by the Germans and who is hell bent on revenge no matter what the cost. (and does she ever get it!). Equally fetching and outstanding is blonde German actress Diane Kruger aconspiring anti-Hitler German actress who will get herself unceremoniously strangled by Herr Oberst Waltz for her glourios underground efforts. Kruger, interestingly, was Helen to BradPitt's Hercules in "Troy" some seasons back, where she was little more than Teutonic window dressing, but here she has come a long way as an actress and is most cleverly employed by Quentin. Of exceptional note in this delicious international cast is German Actor Christof Waltz who very nearly steals the show as a smooth-talking tri-lingual Gestapo officer, almost as charming and suave as he is evil and cruel. Nearly half of the film is actually spoken in German and French, (with and without sub-titles) which adds a touch of class and authenticity, giving a realistic semi-serious edge to this basically surreal black comedy. Buñuel would have loved it and, even though it does get a wee bit talky here and there between scalpings and other instances of arch mayhem, I found the film extremely satisfying -- in short, I loved it. My only complaint was that there were not enough juicily explicit scalpings (since at the beginning unit commander Brad, half-Apache, tells his men that each one is expected to bring a minimum of 100 German scalps home, (or die trying) -- and in the final inferno, where a full house of high ranking Nazis (including Hitler, Goering and Martin Borman - just follow the white arrows) and their women folk are locked into a French cinema which is then set on fire - (remember that a favourite way of getting rid of Jews in WW II without wasting bullets was to lock them in a synagogue and then burn it down) -- Unfortunately we don't actually get to see these Krauts roasting alive in dynamic close-ups. What was needed here was a walk on by Robert Duvall doing a variation on his Apocalyose Now theme: "When I smell German flesh burning it smells like .. sniff-sniff ... VICTORY!" - and some lingering closeups of roasting live red German meat dripping juicily in the flames. All I can say to anybody who stumbles onto this review is, forget about the BS the critics have been writing to show how deftly they can dissect a truly joyous and educational film to death. Just get out there and see this bloody movie - or we'll break your laigs - and take the whole family too, because this is definitely family fare of the highest order. Not to be missed if you like movies that tell it like it should have been .... and you can take that to the bank! Grokked at ODEON Muswell Hill, London, Tues. August 25, 2009 PS: If you loved "Swindlers List" forget this.... Alex Deleon, London PSS: Christopher Walz did in fact get the Best Supporting role Oscar in 2010.