Scandal

Kurosawa’s last film before Rashomon and worldwide fame was, interestingly enough, a tale of sensationalistic celebrity journalism and scandal mongering. The director described it as “a protest film” against the press’s “habitual confusion of freedom and license”; some see it as expressive of Kurosawa’s ambivalence over the rampant Americanization and modernization of Japan. A mix of snappy Hollywood romantic comedy, shameless soap opera, and courtroom potboiler, Scandal stars Toshiro Mifune as a successful painter and Yoshiko Yamaguchi as a famous singer. When they meet by chance at a mountain resort, scandal rag Amour twists it into a torrid affair. The painter resolves to sue for libel, but his crackpot lawyer (Takashi Shimura), father of a small daughter with TB, has his own agenda. The surprising Scandal is still little known in the West, and screens here in a 35mm print provided by The Japan Foundation. “Much funnier than any plot summary might suggest . . . Rarely has the director been so witty or even as subversive . . . A parody of Hollywood that, simultaneously, satirizes the willingness of the postwar Japanese to accept without question a Western culture completely alien to them” (Vincent Canby, New York Times). B&W, 35mm, in Japanese with English subtitles. 105 mins.