Volume 22, Number 10 · June 12, 1975
Goriot in Tokyo
By Michael Wood
Voices From the Japanese Cinema
by Joan Mellen
Liveright, 295 pp., $12.95
Ozu: His Life and Films
by Donald Richie
University of California Press, 275 pp., $14.50
The Japanese film, Donald Richie wrote a few years ago, offers 'the most perfect reflection of a people in the history of world cinema.' That sounds right, and probably is right. Yet when we try to visualize that reflection, I think we are likely to conjure up an anthology of grunts and scowls and bloodshed: Toshiro Mifune's impersonations of assorted samurai; the destroyed face of the old woman in Kaneto Shindo's Onibaba; the spectacular cruelty of Kinugasa's Gate of Hell; hara-kirl everywhere. There is no reason to assume these manifestations are not representative, not 'Japanese'—indeed Joan Mellen's attractive book of interviews with various Japanese cinéastes, including Kurosawa, Shindo, Ichikawa, and Kobayashi, reminds us how very Japanese such things are.
Review, 2427 words
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