It’s funny to me, but in the last three years, I’ve seen FAR more movies released prior to 1970 than I had in my entire life combined leading up to that trio of years. Hell, you could almost certainly make that about movies made prior to 1980!

It’s not that I had a particularly strong bias against “old” movies; it’s just that I never felt like getting around to them when there were so many made just in my lifetime. But in the last few years, I’ve reviewed movies like Modern Times, The Gold Rush, Godzilla, Nosferatu, The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari, and a bunch more I don’t immediately recall. Some have been requested by followers; others were just because I felt like watching them. Many were the latter, inspired by the former!

Whatever the reason, it’s been a blast getting to power though older flicks I previously would have brushed off as not relevant to my modern sensibilities.

Somewhat recently, one of these older works I reviewed was Yojimbo, making it the third Akira Kurosawa movie that I ever watched (in the footsteps of Seven Samurai and Ran). Seeing as how I was enamored of two out of the three of them (sorry, Ran), I decided to venture a little deeper into the Kurosawa woods, and so I settled upon taking in Rashomon.

Rashomon is the tale of three strangers coming together for shelter on a stormy night. As they settle in, two of them–a wood-cutter and a priest–can’t let go of the details of a trial they were a part of earlier that day. As the third man, a simple bandit, starts pulling the story out of them, he begins to see why a trial over a simple murder weighed so heavily on them.

The trial had several witnesses, and each of them remembered the murder and the events leading up to it quite differently. Are some of them lying? And if so, what are their motives? That’s the heart of what Rashomon is about.

TWO UPS AND TWO DOWNS

+ I like how the story is both covertly and overtly about the human condition. Lies and deceit and hate are all part of the narrative, and they play into whether we can ever truly trust our fellow man. Parts of this are outright and in your face; other aspects are just in the narrative of the tale and are more subtle. But either way it gets to you, you are coming away from this pondering the trustworthiness of those around you.

There’s a common saying about there being three sides to every story: Person A’s side, Person B’s side, and The Truth. Rashomon takes full advantage of that adage (though we get more than just two people involved, but que sera sera). We never do find out “the truth”, but it’s likely to be a blending of everything we saw.

And where does that leave us? Who is “wrong” here? No one? Everyone? Rashomon doesn’t pass judgment on that, and we never see the results of the trial to even know what the court came up with. The movie is far more interested in letting us stew in our confusion and unease than it is about providing us with answers. And it’s a better movie for it.

+ This is a tropes originator, with the multiple stories from multiple POVs. Credit for being a forefather of something that’s been done a ton since it came out. To be fair, Kurosawa did not invent the would-be trope, as Rashomon is an adaptation of a story called “In A Grove”, but still… Rashomon admits it is an adaptation in its opening credits, and it popularized the idea worldwide.

Television shows of several genres have loved doing Rashomon-based episodes. Everything from Batman: The Animated Series to My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic to Supernatural to The X-Files to How I Met Your Mother have pulled from this classic movie for a rare episode where characters enter a conflict by misremembering the events of some situation, large or small.

You have to give credit to an idea that lives on seventy-plus years after its advent. Rashomon is downright Shakespearean in that regard.

– The score is a bit heavy handed for my tastes, especially early on. Kurosawa is essentially trying to make it part of the scenery, but it gets a bit intensively so. The score bounces and flows and hits with every step some characters take or wind that blows a tree. On one hand, I will confess to liking the emphasis–it’s like every movement in the film has its own punctuation mark!–but on the other, Rashomon and Kurosawa are really beating you over the head with it all.

– Even at its brief and easily digestible runtime, Rashomon starts off slowly and takes a little time to truly get going. I certainly appreciate that Kurosawa–not usually known for his brevity–kept this to under ninety minutes, but even then, the first act does drag just a bit.

As we gather the priest, the woodcutter, and the bandit under a dilapidated building in a rain storm, it just feels like Rashomon is dragging its feet getting to the fun narrative structure that is the real meat of the story. I think it ends up being half an hour in before we get the first point of view of the murder. I do wish it had moved a little faster to that point and gave us more details within the interpreted stories instead.

OVERALL

What can I say? Rashomon is famous, and deservedly so. I’ve seen conflicting reviews of the famous Toshiro Mifune’s performance here; some think it’s another feather in his cap, and others think he is far too over-the-top. I actually really enjoyed him as a proud bandit with nothing to lose, so why wouldn’t he laugh in everyone’s face? He definitely added to the experience for me. Most everything worked for me here, honestly, and the legacy of this film and its convention will live on as long as fiction is being created.