A Kurosawa Mystery Solved

In February 1948, the great Akira Kurosawa was in the final stages of shooting what would be the most important film he had ever made up to that time, the quasi-neorealist drama Yoidore Tenshi (Drunken Angel), also his first collaboration with the actor Toshiro Mifune. He had earlier received news that his elderly father, Isamu, had fallen gravely ill and was fading rapidly. Because the old man was far away from Tokyo and because Kurosawa was facing an inflexible release date, he chose not to rush to his father’s bedside, perhaps hoping against hope that his father would hold out until the film was finished, edited and released. But he didn’t: while filming was still in progress, Akira received news that Isamu Kurosawa had died. Filled with sorrow and, we must presume, guilt that he had not been at the dying man’s bedside, Kurosawa (as his memoir reveals) wandered, a “drunken angel” himself, through the streets of the Shinjuku ward of Tokyo when he heard a familiar refrain.

As I walked, I suddenly heard the strains of "The Cuckoo Waltz" blaring over a loudspeaker system somewhere. The cheerful brightness of the song threw my black mood into high relief, intensifying my sorrow to an intolerable degree. I hurried my steps to escape from this awful music. (Akira Kurosawa, Something Like an Autobiography, pp. 162-163)

In Kurosawa’s life story, it frequently happens that a traumatic incident that might move the average person to open the nearest convenient artery serves instead to spur the artist’s creative imagination. For soon thereafter, he met with Drunken Angel’s composer, his best friend Fumio Hayasaka, and suggested an interesting experiment. For the bleakest scene in the picture – the one in which Matsunaga, a gangster dying of tuberculosis (played by Mifune), understands that not only his power and prestige, but his very life is ebbing away – Kurosawa proposed to Hayasaka that he score the scene with the cheerful, vapid "Cuckoo Waltz" to emphasize, through contrast, Matsunaga’s dark emotions. Instead of being baffled by his friend’s request, Hayasaka almost immediately understood.

“Ah, counterpoint,” he said. “Right,” I confirmed, “The Sharpshooter.” This expression, “The Sharpshooter,” was part of a private language Hayasaka and I developed. It referred to a Soviet film released in Japan under that title in which the counterpoint between sound and image was the most magnificent I have encountered. (Something Like an Autobiography, p. 163)

Not surprisingly, this scene in Drunken Angel, precisely because of the incongruous cheerfulness, in such a grim context, of the song that had so offended Kurosawa in the depths of his grief, proved to be perhaps the most powerful in the movie. The experiment in visual-aural “counterpoint” was a success. The master would go on to employ this effect again in later films: Nora Inu (Stray Dog, 1949); Yojimbo (1960) and, perhaps most memorably, in the climax of Tengoku to Jigoku (High and Low, 1963). (Hayasaka meanwhile had died – ironically, of tuberculosis – in 1955.)

But what of the film that (partly) inspired the experiment? What exactly was it about that very obscure Soviet film, The Sharpshooter, that so impressed Kurosawa? The chances of my ever finding out seemed remote indeed.

But what often saves cultural Sherlocks (both professional and amateur) – though we may be loathe to admit it – is luck… with the added help of the Internet, of course. And my luck came from purchasing the invaluable memoir Waiting on the Weather by Kurosawa’s loyal, longtime assistant, Teruyo Nogami. Ms. Nogami joined the Kurosawa-gumi (“Kurosawa group”) in 1950 for Rashomon and worked on every subsequent film (except The Idiot) made by the master until the very end of his career in 1993. Ms. Nogami’s book offers many valuable professional as well as personal insights into the great man. But she also offers an alternative viewpoint on experiences that Kurosawa describes so memorably in his autobiography.

One such experience is his discovery of the power of counterpoint in music. After recounting the same conversation between Kurosawa and Hayasaka, during the making of Drunken Angel, that I quoted above, Nogami goes on to describe the plot of the Soviet movie that inspired both men’s admiration, in the manner in which it was (apparently) relayed to her by either Kurosawa or Hayasaka or both:

Although I have never seen that Soviet picture, I have heard the scene described so many times that I can imagine it vividly.

The front in World War I, with German and Russian forces face to face. It’s night. Heavy rain is falling. In the shadow of a dead horse, a German sniper is shooting. Russian soldiers crawl out and stab the sniper, killing him. Suddenly, from a trench across the way come the strains of a record playing “Ça C’est Paris” [a song popularized early in the 20th Century by the French female singer Mistinguett]. The contrast of that gay music with the gruesome action, Kurosawa stressed, is powerful. (Waiting on the Weather, p. 189)

It’s easy to understand why such a scene would have impressed the young Kurosawa. But what caught my attention was that Ms. Nogami does not call the film The Sharpshooter, as Kurosawa (or rather the English translation of his memoir) calls it; she refers to the film as Sniper.

Intrigued, I looked up “sniper” in the search engine of The Internet Movie Database. Of the titles that this search produced, only one was remotely relevant: Sniper, a 1932 (other sources say 1931) Soviet movie written and directed by one Semyon Alekseyevich Timoshenko. (The Russian-language title, in Cyrillic, is "Снайпер," which would most commonly be transliterated as Snayper, which might be pronounced something like “sni-pair.”)

Further Internet research on this work has revealed that this film is undoubtedly the one to which both Kurosawa and Ms. Nogami allude. And, amazingly, the film had its New York premiere in August 1932 and actually received a review in the New York Times:

Movie Review

Snayper (1931)

Through Bolshevik Eyes.

H.T.S.

Published August 26, 1932

The Soviet production "Sniper," which came to the Cameo yesterday, begins like a pacifist picture, but ends with a patriotic appeal to defend the Bolshevist republic. Without any love theme or romance, the director and scenario writer, S. Timoshenko, has turned out a worthy war film.

In the first scenes British soldiers are marching off cheered by fair women and fat business men. Then comes a "quiet day" on the western front, in which a dozen men are picked off by a German sniper, who finally is located by two Russian snipers, a Captain and a private. In the night the private crawls out, stabs the German and drags in his body. The sniper's papers show that he was a metal worker. This moves his slayer to remark that he, too, had been a metal worker. This incident is followed by a drive resulting in the capture of a German position at dreadful cost. Now the Russian private stands on the field and asks the dead who they are. One by one they reply. All are workers — from Russia, Germany, France, England and the United States.

Later the Russian division in France learned of the Bolshevist revolution and Lenin's order giving the land to the peasants and the factories to the workers and his plea for immediate peace. Many of the Russians refuse to fight any longer. Some are shot by firing squads, but the revolt continues. The Russian Captain tries to halt the movement by using his rifle, but is overpowered by the private just as news of the end of the war arrives.

Fifteen years pass — it is 1933. A band of "shock" workers is repairing a locomotive near the Soviet border. Their chief is the private sniper. After hours he gives instruction in sharpshooting to men and women comrades. Then comes an invasion of the Soviet soil, in the repelling of which the former private brings down his former Captain, a leader of White Guard Russians in foreign service. So "Sniper" finishes on a note of exaltation at the successful defense of the "workers' Fatherland."

The acting of all concerned is of high calibre, the direction is excellent and the photography and sound reproduction are clear. The action is explained by English captions.

SNIPER, a Russian language picture; directed by S. Timoshenko; a soyuzkino production. At the Cameo Theatre.

The Captain... c [sic] [Boris] Shlikhting
The Soldier... Peter [Pyotr] Sobolevsky

The U.S. release date, in the summer of 1932, is, for me, a fascinating fact. If the film was released in Tokyo at about this time, then Kurosawa must have seen it when he was in his impressionable (and politically radical) early twenties, long before he entered the film industry in 1936.

Not everyone, apparently, was so impressed by this picture as the New York Times critic. At allmovie.com, one Hal Erickson (without indicating how in the world he encountered this very obscure film) provides the following capsule review:

This WWI drama tells its story in symbiotic fashion, first concentrating on a Russian sniper in the French army, and then focusing on a Russian sniper in the German army. In both instances, the snipers come to realize that they're fighting on the wrong side, for the wrong cause. Both throw their weapons aside and desert, marching off to Petrograd and the greater glories of impending Bolshevism. Following their example, all the expatriate Russians fighting with the French and Germans forsake their adoptive countries and return to Soviet soil. Poorly acted and photographed, The Sniper will never be mistaken for a classic of the Russian cinema [except, possibly, by the greatest Asian director of all time and the best Japanese film composer of all time].

So is this picture available on home video for us to view and perhaps understand what Kurosawa saw in it? As far as I know, it is not. Yet the movie, believe it or not, was publicly exhibited as recently in June 2010! At the 32nd Moscow International Film Festival, Snayper was shown in a category called “Socialist Avant-Gardizm [sic], Part 3.” Its brief English synopsis in the festival’s program (which I have a vague hunch was written by someone whose first language was not English) is as follows:

Front of imperialistic war. French army suffer losses. All of the efforts to annihilate German sniper fail. And only one person is capable to locate the enemy – a Russina [sic] GI, who came to France as part of the Russian task group. Former ironworker finds out from the sniper’s documents that the later was also a metal worker. This fact, on the one hand gets the hero to believe in necessity of solidarity among workers who are now soldiers, and on the other hand he starts feeling even deeper distinction between himself and his commander – the captain of Imperial Army.

If I ever see this film, I would not much care if Mr. Erickson is right and it turned out not to be a masterpiece. I would care only that the crucial scene of the Russian sniper stabbing the enemy soldier, accompanied incongruously by merry music, might move me as much as it moved my favorite filmmaker of all time.