Taking a break from Akira Kurosawa classics for popular commercial fare, Toshirô Mifune unleashes his inner Wallace Berry in this broadly played piece of Hollywood-worthy sentimentality.* A poor rickshaw driver with a rep as a wild & crazy guy, some passing advice given to a put-upon schoolboy backfires, and now Mifune’s carting the shy kid home for repairs. All’s well soon enough, but when the child’s military father dies suddenly from a stroke, the illiterate rickshaw man finds he’s been recruited by the new widow to play surrogate uncle. A doting mentor in manly arts if no tutor, the close bond is bound to bust as the boy grows up and starts to be embarrassed by this lower class champion. Shot ‘solid citizen’ style, largely on exterior soundstage sets by director Hiroshi Inagaki, the film perks up here and there for some head-scratching Japanese prioritizing (called to rush the stricken father to a doctor, the wife asks Mifune if he could stop to pick up an eight pound sack of rice), as well as a superb sequence of traditional Japanese drumming where, just briefly, Mifune drops the humble-pie routine to dazzle the crowd on screen & off with sheer athleticism. But more often than not, this is sticky stuff any way you slice it.
DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: *You can see Berry play this kind of masochistic quasi-parental slush in a late film like THE MIGHTY MCGURK/’46 . . . but I wouldn’t recommend it. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/05/the-mighty-mcgurk-1946.html
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