"Down here we've no lords or excellencies." Kurosawa's characters survive by playing the fool and stealing, selling flesh or other bits, even of space, and profiting off the lowest, each other, with perhaps a bit of industry (one seems to live by scraping), cleaning up and collecting the trash, begging... Even in JApan the hierarchy gets murky in the depths. We could as well say of the world that it's a bitty piece of turf but everything on it is a pain. At the forty minute mark (third) of Korosawa's adaptation a new pebble rolls in, like a turtle harrowing hell, picks up the dying woman whose been put out of the landlord's kitchen and pronounces "oh my."
The thirty minute mark (third) of Renoir's shorter version offers us the scene of an auction of all the goods of the gambling baron. The baron can thus laugh catching Pepel the thief in his house, offering him even his warm jacket when he goes. Pepel refuses as they would mock him in it at the flophouse. By the hour mark Renoir has the Baron installed in the flophouse where the cirrhosian quotes Hamlet but the landlord still surcharges the cobbler. "Nobility is like the pox always leaving traces." When the old lady lodger dies, Pepel throws off his fence/landlord's wife for her sister.
In Kurosawa's second forty minutes gramps counsels a temple stay to the drunk, chastises the landlord that to fail to do good is to do bad, and eases the old lady's death with visions of the Pure Land. "Lies always beat truth," says Mifune, the thief. This landlord's wife is more scheming than scorned, offering Mifune the girl Okayo if he will kill her husband. "It's not murder to squash ticks and lice." The old lady, marginal but central, dies after this version's break-up, instead of motivating it. "The breeze intoxicates,"slurs the actor, "That's the spirit." In Kurosawa's last forty minutes a tiger means bamboo, bamboo means a sparrow, a peony nods off, vanishing like whitecaps. Look up from the murder scene and see the roots. "Money buys your fate in hell."
Renoir's last half hour will make you forget your own mother's name. The count in rags has the impression that all he ever did was change uniforms - school boy's, groom's suit, functionary's, but not prison stripes. Pepel was born to the trade. In France when the landlord dies, can "I am Spartacus" style solidarity save him? The devil is in the details more than even the structure in differentiating these two filmmakerss versions. Compare Kurosawa's characters' horrible teeth with Gabin's irrepresiblw glamour in Renoir's staging, for with the Count rescuing Pepel from prison Les Mis style, Renoir intends us to see the depth romantically, whereas if there is any hope in Kurosawa's vision it is in the transformation of Gorky's play into a sort of jataka.
The thirty minute mark (third) of Renoir's shorter version offers us the scene of an auction of all the goods of the gambling baron. The baron can thus laugh catching Pepel the thief in his house, offering him even his warm jacket when he goes. Pepel refuses as they would mock him in it at the flophouse. By the hour mark Renoir has the Baron installed in the flophouse where the cirrhosian quotes Hamlet but the landlord still surcharges the cobbler. "Nobility is like the pox always leaving traces." When the old lady lodger dies, Pepel throws off his fence/landlord's wife for her sister.
In Kurosawa's second forty minutes gramps counsels a temple stay to the drunk, chastises the landlord that to fail to do good is to do bad, and eases the old lady's death with visions of the Pure Land. "Lies always beat truth," says Mifune, the thief. This landlord's wife is more scheming than scorned, offering Mifune the girl Okayo if he will kill her husband. "It's not murder to squash ticks and lice." The old lady, marginal but central, dies after this version's break-up, instead of motivating it. "The breeze intoxicates,"slurs the actor, "That's the spirit." In Kurosawa's last forty minutes a tiger means bamboo, bamboo means a sparrow, a peony nods off, vanishing like whitecaps. Look up from the murder scene and see the roots. "Money buys your fate in hell."
Renoir's last half hour will make you forget your own mother's name. The count in rags has the impression that all he ever did was change uniforms - school boy's, groom's suit, functionary's, but not prison stripes. Pepel was born to the trade. In France when the landlord dies, can "I am Spartacus" style solidarity save him? The devil is in the details more than even the structure in differentiating these two filmmakerss versions. Compare Kurosawa's characters' horrible teeth with Gabin's irrepresiblw glamour in Renoir's staging, for with the Count rescuing Pepel from prison Les Mis style, Renoir intends us to see the depth romantically, whereas if there is any hope in Kurosawa's vision it is in the transformation of Gorky's play into a sort of jataka.
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