Mifune: The Last Samurai [dir. Steven Okazaki]

 A short while ago I watched Mifune: The Last Samurai, the documentary on legendary Japanese actor Toshiro Mifune, who with Akira Kurosawa formed a legendary collaboration, as acclaimed as John Wayne and John Ford, Max Von Sydow and Ingmar Bergman or Amitabh Bachchan and Manmohan Desai.

To reference the Samurai of the title, the documentary (narrated, at least in the English version, by Hollywood's own Last Samurai Keanu Reeves) begins not directly with Mifune, but with the depiction of Samurai in Japanese cinema, which started as early as the silent era. The swordplay dramas became known as chanbara, a term generated by the sound of blades clashing in combat.

After this beginning the film turns to its subject, touching upon Mifune's childhood as the son of a Japanese family in China. It was actually sometime near the beginning of WW2 that he returned to Japan and worked as an aerial photographer. After the war, Mifune applied for work in the growing film industry. Popular rumor says that his application for a cameraman's position was misdirected to the actors' section and he took it up anyway. Better represented in Kurosawa's Something Like An Autobiography, Mifune captured the director's imagination with his wild audition performance, which eventually led to a nearly 20 year collaboration, starting with 1948's Drunken Angel and ending with 1965's Red Beard. This history is supplemented with input about Mifune's nature and work ethic from the sons of Mifune and Kurosawa, and several of Mifune's co-stars including Seven Samurai actor Yoshio Tsuchiya and his leading ladies. The partnership with Kurosawa ended after Red Beard possibly because of tensions caused on account of the commitment required by the director from his leading star who was by then also a movie producer with a company to run.

Mifune also worked with several other Japanese directors (including notably Hiroshi Inagaki for whom he played legendary warrior Musashi Miyamoto in the famous Samurai Trilogy). The need to keep his company running meant Mifune went into TV, something of a comedown for a star whose presence dwarfed the biggest screens. He also worked in some international productions including John Boorman's WW2 castaway drama Hell in the Pacific, the East-Western Red Sun and Steven Spielberg's war spoof 1941. Spielberg himself is on hand in the documentary, relaxedly talking about Mifune as a star, the Kurosawa collaboration and his own experience of working with Mifune. The narrative highlights Mifune's standing as the first global Asian superstar.

The tone is of course quite reverential, the documentary glossing over the scandal of Mifune's infidelity, which led to a decades long separation from his wife Sachiko. Also, there are few new facts for Mifune fans. Of course that's not a knock against its makers, but a byproduct of this trivia-hungry information age. It would have been wonderful if they had any archival footage of Kurosawa speaking about Mifune (the only contribution from Kurosawa is in the reading of a posthumous letter he wrote Mifune after the actor expired in 1997 (less than a year before Kurosawa himself passed away).