Editor’s Note: Freeline Media’s movie critic, Mike Fried, reflects back on the cinema of the 1950s, in particular two movies considered masterpieces of modern cinema. In fact, Mike goes a step futher – they are both Must See movies, he insists!
By MIKE FRIED
IKIRU
*****
This stomach belongs to the protagonist of our story.
At this point, our protagonist has no idea he has this cancer …
Here is our protagonist now. But it would only be tiresome to meet him right now. After all, he’s simply passing time without actually living his life. In other words, he’s not really even alive. This isn’t even worth watching. He might as well be a corpse. In fact, he’s been dead for 20 years already.
And so begins, Ikiru, the greatest director’s greatest achievement — a meditation on living a life without meaning and whether that meaning can be found even at the end of one’s life.
Takashi Shimura is Kenji Watanabe, an older man who has worked in a bureaucracy for decades and who is subservient to it, and that bureaucracy has been grinding him down. He is so stuck in his ways that he has an inability to even act besides pushing paper from one side of his desk to the other. When he gets his diagnose, he is determined to ensure his life has meaning.
Shimura is often held in second regard to Toshiro Mifune, his co-star in many films; but to me, they were absolute equals. While Mifune had a firebrand personality that resulted in exuberant roles, Shimura’s performances were often very subdued and soulful. When Seven Samurai was released in the West in a heavily edited format, Shimura’s scenes were cut. In fact, Shimura appeared in more Kurosawa films than Mifune.
This is probably the greatest character study ever made and it would not fly with any actor besides Shimura. And the movie shows Kurosawa’s absolute disdain for the public bureaucracy. Kurosawa always considered this his greatest work and I have to heartily agree. It is a sentimental film, but it eschews sentimentality.
“Ikiru” means “to live” and that is what Watanabe realizes he needs to do. With the aid of his young colleague, Miss Odagiri and a novelist he meets in a bar, he tries to find meaning in his life by approving and supervising a public works effort to help the neighborhood as demanded by its residents. He uses the bureaucracy to make his legacy even if the bureaucracy will soon forget that the work was accomplished through his efforts.
And yet the vultures circle, his son and daughter-in-law want a piece of his retirement now. He does not tell them about his diagnosis because he is treated badly by them. And his diagnosis is one of “a mild ulcer” because Japanese medical practice in the 1950s was to avoid telling patients the full truth for fear of aggravating the disease.
Shimura’s final scene in the film is absolutely haunting and it sticks with me every time I watch it. Every time I rewatch this film, I seem to hit upon some new idea or insight. That’s how deep the story is.
And when Shimura sings “Gondola no Uta” (“Life is brief”) in such a soulfully sad manner, you realize in your bones that it is something that Mifune could never do.
WATCH IT!
P.S. — as much as I am a fan of Bill Nighy, stay away from the 2022 movie, Living. It is a remake in the worst way because it just missed the point of Kurosawa’s original.
SOME LIKE IT HOT
*****
So, dere’s dese two mugs and dey is musicians and dey witness da St. Valentine’s Day Massacree and dey have to go into hiding, see, so they dress up like women and get a gig working in an all women’s band heading to an engagement in Florida. Things get complicated when dey befriend Sugar Kane, da band’s singer and ukulele player, who one of the guys pursues while the other one gets chased by an aging much-divorced millionaire.
This is definitely one of the ten best comedies ever made and the one that can be considered to be absolutely perfect. A throwback to 1930s and 1940s screwball comedies, it’s one of the first — if not the very first — gender bending and gay-friendly movies to come out of Hollywood, and thank goodness for that.
Billy Wilder and his partner I.A.L. Diamond struck gold with the wittiest screenplay that they ever created, and it’s executed with such wondrous glee by Jack Lemmon, Tony Curtis and Marilyn Monroe. Monroe.
Monroe, despite all of her insecurities and flubs on the set, gives her best screen performance. She is the real star of the film. But Lemmon earned a well-deserved Oscar nomination for Best Actor and there’s a reason why. Unlike Curtis, who played the role of Josephine as a woman, Lemmon played Daphne as a man playing a woman. They both had lessons in how to walk in heels but Lemmon said “No” because he wanted to walk like a man in heels, not like a woman. Tony Curtis was no slouch either. Curtis does a very funny Cary Grant voice which prompted Grant to say “I don’t talk like that.” (He does! And Grant loved the impersonation!)
Wilder has so many wonderful visual touches. When the band shows up at the hotel in Florida (actually the Hotel Del Coronado in California) all the old geezers are sitting in their rocking chairs, reading the Wall Street Journal, wearing boaters and rocking in unison.
There’s a terrific sight gag with Edward G. Robinson’s son playing a young hood who is flipping a coin à la George Raft in Scarface when the big hoodlum, Spats Colombo, walks by and calls it a “cheap trick.” Spats is, of course, played by George Raft. When one of the gangsters is being frisked before the big gangster meeting, a gun is discovered in the leg of his pants. The gangster says “It’s not loaded” at which point his other leg is frisked and a bunch of bullets fall out. And Wilder even throws in a nod to the grapefruit scene from Public Enemy.
Joe E. Brown is absolutely outstanding as Osgood Fielding III. His scenes with Lemmon are comedy gold and, for his part, Lemmon leans straight into the deception and actually enjoys his night out with Osgood — so much that they’re engaged and planning a June Wedding. The look on Joe E. Brown’s face at the end of the film is pure magic.
And Pat O’Brien has a small role as an FBI agent and he makes the most of it.
Monroe had it in her contract that all of her films had to be in color but Wilder was able to get this movie shot in black and white by showing her the screen tests of Lemmon and Curtis’ makeup in color and how it made them look like they had a green tinge.
Speaking of Robinson, Wilder wanted Edward G. Robinson to play the gangster named Little Bonaparte (Little Caesar, get it?!?) but Robinson refused to be in the same picture as Raft after the two had a fistfight on a film some 20 years earlier.
The third act of this film is absolute perfection. Spats and his hoods wind up at the same hotel as Daphne and Josephine. And as much as they need to flee, they don’t want to leave Sugar and Osgood behind. But Spats realizes the dames ain’t dames and the omelette is really going to hit the fan.
It’s incredible to me that the movie was nominated by the Academy for best screenplay and best director but not for best picture.
Well, nobody’s perfect.
WATCH IT!
Michael Fried has no formal training in movies, except having watched over 26,000+ movies — if not more — in his 60-plus years on this planet, starting with Goldfinger as his first cinema experience. He knows what he likes and he knows what he doesn’t like, and it’s quite often different from the conventional wisdom. He knows that the best franchise is Godzilla and he loves action movies and comedies. He has not been nominated for any awards except some boring insurance awards which has no applicability to movies (with the possible exceptions of Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity and John Cassavettes’ Big Trouble). He is part of a team that won the 1980 SUNY Albany Trivia content by correctly guessing the question, “Who played the president of Klopstockia in Million Dollar Legs?” So he has that going for him, which is nice.
Contact Mike at moviemike3@yahoo.com and mike.fried@yahoo.com.
