What Happens When Noir Travels?

Noir is as American as jazz, right? But just like there are jazz clubs in Paris and Tokyo, noir is international. For Americans, Humphrey Bogart’s Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon is as familiar as Cheerios and the Super Bowl. (Maybe almost as familiar; noir buffs think we’re everywhere.) But France, Britain and Mexico had their own versions of noir cinema during the classic period in the 40s and 50s. In Japan, losing the war, suffering massive destruction and being occupied until 1952 fed a noir aesthetic that reflects aspects of US noir while providing a different take on it. Four crime films by world-famous director Akira Kurosawa give us a hint how noir can mutate to meet different cultural needs.

Kurosawa gained international fame for Rashomon in 1950. (If you haven’t seen it, stop reading right now and go watch it; no one should have to live life without that experience.) The film’s gripping multiple perspective crime story helped viewers consider questions that people argue about decades later in our ‘post truth’ era. He went on to do visually stunning historical dramas like Seven Samurai, Throne of Blood and The Hidden Fortress, which inspired George Lucas in his creation of Star Wars. Almost every major movie director, from Spielberg to Bergman to Fellini, claims to be influenced by him. Some criticize his later works for moving away from engaging with social concerns to retreat into long ago or mythical worlds, but that was after his noir crime flicks.

Kurosawa’s four crime films star Toshiro Mifune, the leading man in sixteen of his thirty movies, an actor whose stature has no equal in US cinema. If you haven’t yet had the pleasure of watching this guy enact dramatic roles ranging from indigent samurai to stressed corporate executive, imagine a combination of Marlon Brando, Clark Gable and Brad Pitt to get an idea of the kind of presence Mifune wields.

US noir films responded to the postwar malaise with worlds where everything is morally tainted. Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon may decide to turn in his murdering lover, but he had a clandestine affair with his partner’s wife and then expressed little emotion at news of the man’s death. Whether he makes the ethical or unethical choice, he gains nothing. As James Ellroy put it, noir films “exposited one great theme. And that theme is, you’re f—ed.”

Kurosawa’s four noir crime films explore moral questions that require costly choices, but the conclusion is not always ‘you’re f—ed.’ It’s as if classic American noir films say, ‘we won the war but things back home are still hopelessly screwed up’ while Kurosawa’s films say, ‘we lost the war leaving us in a gigantic mess but maybe we can rediscover an ethical path.’

Drunken Angel of 1948 sets a US-style gangster movie in a ruined area of a bombed-out city, literally a toxic cesspool surrounded by black markets and red light zones frequented by violent thugs. Mifune is a junior gangster who finds out he may die of tuberculosis, and must decide if he will change his ways to try to save himself. These criminals are former soldiers who were ready to die for the emperor in sacred kamikaze missions but now just commit crimes. This allows Kurosawa to trace Japanese male ethics from samurai codes of honor to the nationalistic militarism that led to disaster in WWII to the postwar despair that noir describes.

Stray Dog of 1949 casts Mifune in the role of a rookie cop whose gun disappears from his pocket. As the ‘piece’ is used to commit an escalating series of crimes, Mifune desperately tries to locate it. Help from an older wiser cop makes this film a precursor to buddy cop movies. Even while the world teems with black market weapons dealing that most people shrug at, the rookie cop suffers anguish that crimes are committed with the gun he lost through carelessness. Faced with a traumatized jaded world where hopelessness seems the only sane response, he tries to take responsibility. 

The Bad Sleep Well of 1960 is Kurosawa’s noir adaptation of Hamlet. Here the protagonist (Mifune again) rises in a corporation as he plots to avenge his father’s death. His father, a junior executive in the same corporation, was suicided to shut down an investigation of a kickback scheme that implicated corporate leadership. As the CEO’s secretary, marrying his handicapped daughter, Mifune is now positioned to bring these people down, but will he?

High and Low of 1963, literally ‘heaven and hell,’ adapts Ed McBain’s novel King’s Ransom. The setup presents another agonizing moral dilemma. Here Mifune is a shoe company officer who has taken out loans to get the money to buy a controlling share of company stock. Then he receives a call saying his son has been kidnapped. But it turns out kidnappers took his chauffeur’s son by mistake. He must decide if he will impoverish his family to pay a ransom for the child of his lowly employee. This film is famous for long tense scenes set in the family living room rendered stark and claustrophobic by shadow and tortured expressions.  

Kurosawa’s crime films place characters in corrupt landscapes facing daunting choices. Ditto for American noir. But with Kurosawa people sometimes choose to ‘do the right thing.’ That’s harder to find in American noir. I’d love to hear what you think of these films!

The next Minoa Diamond novel, Gavilan Mesa, is coming soon!