Page 9 - Pastiche Vol 1 Edition 1 January 2019

Kurosawa worked under numerous directors as an
assistant director for five years, but the most
important figure in his development was
Yamamoto. Out of his 24 films as A.D., 17 were
under Yamamoto, many of which are comedies
featuring the popular actor Ken'ichi Enomoto,
known as "Enoken". Yamamoto promoted him
directly from third assistant director to chief
assistant director after a year, which nurtured
Kurosawa's talent with added of tasks ranging from
stage construction and film development to
location scouting, script polishing, rehearsals, Kurosawa working as an Assistant Director
editing, lighting, dubbing, and second-unit directing. Kurosawa took over most of the
production in the last film as an assistant director for Yamamoto, Horse (Uma, 1941).

Yamamoto’s advice that a good director needed to master screenwriting, made Kurosawa
realize the potential earnings from scripts were much higher than that of an assistant
director. Kurosawa wrote or co-wrote all of his own films, besides screenplays for other
directors such as for the antiwar film director Satsuo Yamamoto's film, A Triumph of
Wings (Tsubasa no gaika, 1942).

Towards the end of 1942, novelist Tsuneo Tomita published his Musashi Miyamoto-inspired
judo novel, Sanshiro Sugata, which intrigued Kurosawa to immediately ask Toho to secure
the film rights. The shooting began in Yokohama in December 1942 and release on March 25,
1943. The movie turned out to be a critical and commercial success. In The Most Beautiful - a
propaganda film, he portrayed the wartime female factory workers in a semi-documentary
style in early 1944. During this time he became close with actress Yōko Yaguchi and got
married on May 21, 1945. Shortly before his marriage, Kurosawa was pressured by the
studio against his will to direct a sequel Sanshiro Sugata Part II, which premiered in May
1945, which is generally considered one of his weakest pictures. The Men Who Tread on the
Tiger's Tail, based on the Kabuki play Kanjinchō, starring the comedian Enoken was
completed in September 1945.

Post World War II, No Regrets for Our Youth (1946),
inspired by both the 1933 Takigawa incident and
the Hotsumi Ozaki wartime spy case, criticized Japan's
prewar regime for its political oppression. Though for its
controversial theme, the completed work divided critics,
but it nevertheless managed to win the approval of
audiences. One Wonderful Sunday, bearing the influence
Mifune and Kurosawa on the set of Yojimbo of Frank Capra, D. W. Griffith and F. W. Murnau was
premiered in July 1947 - a relatively uncomplicated and
sentimental love story of an impoverished postwar couple trying to enjoy their one weekly
.
day off amidst the devastation of postwar Tokyo. Action-adventure thriller Snow Trail, from
Kurosawa's screenplay and directed by Senkichi Taniguchi debuting Toshiro Mifune was
released in 1947. His first major work, Drunken Angel was premiered in Tokyo in April
1948 and was chosen by the prestigious Kinema Junpo critics poll as the best film of its year
- the first of three Kurosawa movies to be so honoured.
contd...

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