Hi Aki,
Tonight we watched Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress.
You know the movie very well, of course. I’ve only seen it three or four times. Every time I remember that the beginning is slow and there’s a lot of the two Fools who are the heroes, before the real story gets going. And every time when I watch, the beginning with the two Fools before the real story gets going seems to take longer.
I guess you have to find the Fools’ antics funny to enjoy them. The odd thing is that I do find them funny, once they are contrasted with the heroic General and brave, fiery Princess. But on their own, the Fools don’t amuse me at all. Could it be I’m missing a lot by not knowing Japanese? Maybe their accents, the words they use, are funnier than the bare-bones subtitles.
Anyway, it’s 45 minutes before we meet the Princess for real. And it’s an hour before the General, Princess, and Fools set out on their mission. I count that as the end of Act I. A whole hour for Act I! Too long for me!
The story: War has broken out between the Akizuki and Yamana clans. The Hayakawa clan stays out of the war but has agreed to shelter the survivors of the losing Akizukis – if they can cross the border.
But we really begin with the two Fools. They are peasants who sold all their goods to buy a couple weapons and join the war, in the hope of gaining riches. Didn’t work out that way: arriving late to battle, they were pressed into service stripping corpses. Now in rags, they are trudging back to Hayakawa where they’re from, and quarreling every step of the way, blaming each other for the mess they’re in.
They find the Yamana-Hayakawa border closed and patrolled by Yamana soldiers watching lest any last Akizukis escape. Then the Fools get picked up by Yamana troops and are thrown in with other captives digging out the foundations of Akizuki castle, searching for the rumored 200 gold pieces that formed the basis of Akizuki wealth.
The fools manage to get away in the confusion following a slave revolt, and wander the wild hinterlands, hungry, stealing what they can, at the end of their rope. Then they find some sticks with gold pieces hidden in them.
Searching for more, the Fools run into a fierce bandit (Toshiro Mifune) who says he knows where the rest of the gold is. And he has a wild spitfire of a girl wandering around too, in the Hidden Fortress abandoned by the Akizukis, which was used at one time as a spy post on Yamana lands.
But in fact the bandit is the Akizuki general Rokurota, and the girl is the Akizuki Princess Yuki, with a high price on her head. They are holed up here unsure what to do. And the General would have killed the Fools, only when he asks them their plans, they babble out some nonsense about the only way to get to Hayakawa is by going into Yamana first. This appeals to the General, and so he spares them and even adopts their plan.
So (at last, after a whole hour!) they set forth: the General, the Princess, two Fools and three horses weighted down with billets of wood concealing the Akizuki gold. They enter Yamana territory, but news of their movements are always just behind them. Along the way they sell the horses, buy a enslaved Akizuki captive and a cart, do battle with Yamana generals, burn all the wood in a fire festival, dig up the gold from the ashes come dawn, and flee for their lives over wild mountains on the Hayakawa marches. But it’s all in vain. The two Fools make up their minds to betray the Princess, but they fail even in this – Princess and General are already captured. Totally defeated but still with their lives, the Fools trudge on into Hayakawa to make their way home.
Behind them the general Rokurota defeated in a duel comes to identify the General and the Princess. But he has been beaten savagely and scarred for having lost the duel, and his old honorable friendship with Rokurota has soured in the rival general’s heart. Rokurota apologizes to the Princess, but Yuki thanks the General for the best time of her life, and sings the song from the Fire Festival on rising above attachment to life.
Come the morning, they set out from the frontier for Yamana castle. But at the last moment the Yamana general, remembering the song, battles his own men, sets the General and Princess free, and sends them into Hayakawa, with the horses laden with gold ahead of them. Then he leaps on a horse and follows.
Far ahead, the two Fools trudge along. Once again they are swearing friendship – until the horses with the gold come along. Then they start bickering over who gets what, until some Hayakawa troops ride up an arrest them.
In the final scenes, the Fools meet again their traveling companions, now transformed in courtly dress and battle armor. General Rokurota offers the Fools two gold pieces in thanks for their services, and the Fools leave Hayakawa castle, finally (it would seem) having learned their lesson, and no longer squabbling over gold.
This was a hard project to make work. It seems as though Kurosawa is really telling the Fools’ story, but the heroic General and brave Princess are too interesting, and as soon as they appear, the story shifts to them. I could say Kurosawa was making more of a kids’ story, and the Fools give the kids somebody to look down on and laugh at. But it goes deeper.
The opening scenes tell us what war is like for most of the people who fight it. Dirty, destructive, and inglorious. When the General and Princess hijack the story, we get glimpses into what war is like for the elite: glorious, adventurous, honorable. The point then is clear: the samurai elite can wage glorious war, on an individual basis, but as soon as it gets into clans and states, then inevitably the peasants are drawn in, and war is no longer so nice. The idea that a peasant can gain from war is the ultimate folly.
The opening reminds me a little of Yoshikawa’s Musashi which also opens with the hero, a peasant gone off to fight in war, waking up in the piles of dead, learning that his side has lost the war. He also went to war with a buddy from his home village, and the two end up following very different paths from the corpse-field. There is also Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu monogatari about two peasants who go to war for gain, which came out five years before The Hidden Fortress.
Does anyone remember the folly of war at movie’s end after seeing the General strike down his foes, and the heroic escape at the end? Or do we instead see the dirt and ugliness of the beginning as the Fools’ own fault, and nothing inherent in war at all? Intellectually I can say that war is wrong here, but I can’t help but get excited when I see the horses galloping and hear the grandiose martial music that is General Rokurota’s theme.
(10 April 2009)
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