elvircorhodzic SANSHO THE BAILIFF is a magical, historical period drama that at any moment can break the human heart. The Film is set in Heian period in Japan. Slavery was permitted. The story describes the family of one of the court officials who, because of his honesty and integrity, was sentenced by superiors. His wife has cheated, kidnapped and forced into prostitution. His son and daughter have become slaves at the notorious and cruel Bailiff. The young man, after growing up in the camp, becomes the chief aide to his master, but his sister and cruel circumstances force him to face his own conscience...The scenery is extremely rich. The costumes symbolizes the social status and human personality. It is amazing how the change in the character of the main protagonists depends on the social status. However, the family is most important in this film. Perhaps even more than social sacrifice, which mainly affects women, regardless of age. The mother, who is in the greatest pain for lost children, creates a song, a daughter, who takes her own life in order to provide her own brother an opportunity for new life, are parts of identity of Mr. Mizoguchi.The protagonists are emotional, they suffer and live out of necessity, regardless of the realization of the ideals that they carry within. This film can be seen as a tragic history of one family. The film is rightly named after the main villain, because he is in the middle between two worlds.A film about morality, love, family, duty and compassion that at times is breathtaking.

WILLIAM FLANIGAN Viewed on DVD. A photo play version of an ancient folk tale from when commercial slavery was an important contributor to regional Japanese economies (the so-called "Dark Ages" of some 1,200 years ago). The tale is tied to an estate manager/overseer (or "bailiff") by the name of "Sansho." The estate is based on slave labor and Sansho is the slave master with life and death power (but torture rather than death is preferred by Sansho as a cost inhibitor). The traditional tale title is used by the director, but the film is not focused on the bailiff character (who plays an in effect supporting role). Direction and cinematography (black and white) are outstanding and seem "joined at the hip" (although the old narrow-screen format is present on the DVD version). Acting is a bit uneven with the adult lead actor (Yoshiaki Hanayagi) tending to overact for the camera (as if in a silent movie or on the stage). Period costumes and mannerism (such as the staging of court protocols and processions) look authentic (judging from other source materials) and the sets are most impressive. The film score is a major contributor to the style and enjoyment of this movie. It is one of the best (it not the best) composed for any Japanese movie from the 20th Century. Solos of traditional instruments are seamless interwoven into modern orchestral arrangements. Leif motifs and themes are used for characters and scenes/locations. The score provides the acoustical glue that helps to hold this movie together and is one of the two contributors to the film's most impressive dynamics (the other contributor being camera movements). WILLIAM FLANIGAN, PhD.

johndavies007 Drawing on a traditional tale and a 1915 novella by Mori Ogai, Mizoguchi's Sansho the Bailiff is a historical drama concerning the cruel misfortune befalling the wife and children of a humane provincial governor exiled in ancient Japan. Few films can match the feeling for the beauty of nature, the painterly eye and captivating silvery luminosity. The great cinematographer Miyagawa Kazuo does a magnificent job. With his preference for long takes, Mizoguchi is renowned for serene fluid camera moves (masterly yet unobtrusive tracking and crane shots are a trademark), but he also knew when stillness was required, as in the central, heart-rending scene i'll call Anju's ripples. There's more impact in her few ripples than a Hollywood tidal wave.Water features strongly in the film. Mizoguchi was not one to blatantly point up symbolism, but here water is involved with separation, beauty, purity, self-sacrifice, danger, aching longing, suffering, continuity, and at the end the eternal. Water is counterpointed by fire, male balanced with female. Sansho the Bailiff was the third consecutive Mizoguchi film to win a major prize at Venice (the Silver Lion), in a vintage year. Mizoguchi was an extremely driven, competitive director. It was the success of Kurosawa's Rashomon at Venice in 1951 that spurred him on to the heights of his string of late masterpieces. International recognition came late for him- he died of leukaemia in 1956, at the age of 58- but his epitaph rightly bears the words "the world's greatest film director." I doubt any film matches Sansho the Bailiff's sense of the aching pain of family separation, of longing to be reunited. Mizo was strong on issues of identity. Here we have Zushio's name changed more than once, and other repetitions of scenes and motifs: wood being chopped by the children then- a crucial moment- as adults. Providing an ironic sense of justice, Sansho is exiled, just as the governor had been exiled. The film makes striking use of sounds and song, carried and echoing across time and space. With its message that "without mercy man is like a beast", it's a film full of compassion and humanity. The film has clear links with Mizo's own life: the main female characters, sister Anju (Kagawa Kyoko) and mother Tamaki (Tanaka Kinuyo) are paragons like Mizo's own mother and sister. Female suffering in an oppressive patriarchal world is often central in his films. Here the main character may be Zushio and the title character also male, but my feelings go out more for sister Anju. Mizo's mother died in his teens and there may be something of his own yearning in Zushio's search. On the other hand, Mizo thought none too highly of his dad, whereas in the film the father is also a paragon of virtue and wisdom to be guarded and passed on. But then, the tyrant Sansho himself- memorably played by Shindo Eitaro- may stand for the father Mizo despised as ripe (or rotten) for overthrow. Sansho's own son rejects his ways and turns to Buddhism.Mizoguchi aimed high and often behaved tyrannically on set but although something of an aesthete his films are not mannered or pretentious. He aimed for balance between realism and heightened emotion, giving discreet dignity and distance to emotions without blunt manipulation. Melodrama in his hands reaches a sublime level of refinement. He avoids self-serving diversions that will harm the narrative: there is an underlying integrity. He has his own distinct style without fitting so neatly the auteur model as, say, Ozu and Bresson. In Sansho the Bailiff the average shot length is shorter than the earlier extremes of Story of the Late Chrysanthemums (1939) and Loyal 47 Ronin (1941), and gone is Mizoguchi's abhorrence of close-up evident in Straits of Love and Hate (1937): though still used quite sparingly, emotional connection between viewer and characters is strengthened.The film stresses family unity and an idealised patriarchal wisdom- in competition with a brutal version of male power. Mizo supports the overthrow of tyranny and the revolt by the enslaved. His sympathies are with the underdogs and dispossessed. He was consistently opposed to injustice, as recognised by the leftist Yoda (whose torture by the establishment in the 30s may add relevance to Sansho's brutal tortures), and in the film gives Sansho a tougher fate than does Mori Ogai, though without resorting to vengeful sadism. Mizo was often authoritarian, petulant and even abusive, and for all his concentration on the suffering of women he was very far from saint-like in his own dealings with them. Yet the humane qualities that shine through films like Sansho the Bailiff are clearly genuine.The power of the wonderful ending, often described as transcendental, may also be partly indebted to the Buddhism which Mizo developed late in life. Sansho the Bailiff has been picked by one organisation among the top 100 spiritual films, but the Vatican missed it and Mizo out of their 45 recommendations.Mizoguchi and Yoda made several changes to the original sources, for the purposes of greater realism and social message. The siblings' age seniority is reversed, their young adulthood rather than simply childhood is portrayed and miraculous occurrences of a fairy-tale like story are ditched. The film also provides a reason for the governor's exile, to reinforce solidarity with the people in the face of unjust authority. Mizoguchi no doubt rightly jettisoned the miraculous cure of Tamaki's blindness in Mori Ogai's novella. Some consider the film too harrowing and pessimistic. For me it finds a poignant balance between suffering and beauty, cruelty and love, imprisonment and freedom, pain and redemption, loss and comfort, aesthetic value effectively joined with political anger. A film to love and cherish, the exquisite peak of cinema.

Robert J. Maxwell After the first twenty minutes or so I wasn't expecting too much from this production, despite the cachet of the director's name. A humanistic governor of a rural Japanese village in the feudal era is sent into exile and his wife and two children must wander the roads. They run into bandits. The mother is sold into slavery on one island and her little boy and girl are slaves on another. Innumerable tribulations follow and I worried this might turn into a 1954 Japanese version of torture porn.By this time, though, I noticed a couple of interesting things about the film. One was that every shot -- and I mean every single shot -- was done with the eye of a painter. The compositions were nearly perfect.Another thing I noticed was -- well, have you ever seen one of Sergio Leone's spaghetti Westerns? Or any of their imitations? You know, the movies that are full of greasy faces in choker close ups, the bone-white teeth glistening out at you? If you have, then imagine the opposite. I only saw one close up in the entire movie, and that comes near the end when the identity of a blind, lame old woman on the beach is revealed. In the absence of close ups, even a medium shot, or a shot of someone from the waist up, is a bit of a shock.Anyone who's kept his eyes open will be familiar with the mistreatment of slaves. The forms they take seem universal. You get separated from your family, the women serve as whores, they're beaten for infractions, and if they try to run away they're branded or they have their Achilles' tendon cut.After eight years of suffering, the young boy, Zushio manages to escape from the manor of the slave owner Sansho, a Bailiff. He comes across one of those benefactors found in some stories -- "Ben Hur" or a tale by Dickens. As a result, he becomes governor of the province, frees all the slaves, arrests Sancho the Bailiff, and resigns his post in order to go in search of two slaves who had become his friends, as well as his sister and his mother. The results are mixed.When Zushio escapes, the pace of the film picks up and by the end I was thoroughly involved in the fate of the young man and his family. And that's despite the fact that this is not a Samurai movie. There is no swordplay or any genuine combat, although it could easily have fitted into the narrative.The story is rudimentary, not very complicated, and the movie is in black and white with subtitles. But this is a tragedy of the sort that is universal in its appeal. Well worth catching, as long as you have some patience during the establishing scenes.