Documentary on Kurosawa's Film
Also on the DVD is a 33-minute excerpt from the made-for-TV Toho Masterworks series titled Akira Kurosawa: It Is Wonderful to Create. This includes interviews with a few of the actors who appeared in The Lower Depths, including Kyoko Kagawa, who played the landlady's sister. The actors reminisce about things that happened during production.
An interesting part of this documentary consists of art director Yoshiro Muraki talking about designing and constructing the flophouse set. Archival documents and photos were consulted, and old tenement neighborhoods in Tokyo were visited. But it is unclear as to how often artistic and practical filmmaking considerations trumped historical accuracy.
There is also some interview footage of Kurosawa, who comes across as charming, but enigmatic. Here's the description he gives of his version of The Lower Depths: "This film portrays people living at the bottom of society, and yet they are vigorous, never losing hope for the future, as they try to climb out of the pit they are in. The film depicts their lives in a cheerful and humorous way."
Scholarly Audio Commentary by Donald Richie
The DVD set provides no audio commentary for Renoir's film, but for Kurosawa's there's a feature-length English-language commentary by Japanese movie expert Donald Richie. Richie isn't entertaining, but his strengths are his ability to help English-speakers appreciate Japanese culture and to put this film in the context of Kurosawa's body of work.
Richie declares The Lower Depths to be "one of [Kurosawa's] finest films," but he admits it's not a crowd-pleaser. He discusses Japanese styles of acting and how Kurosawa's visual esthetics in the movie are Japanese, even though he kept Gorky's dramatic structure. Richie states that the places in the film where there is a fade out followed by a fade in correspond to going from one act to the next in the stage play.
There's an intriguing discussion by Richie of the professional relationship between Kurosawa and actor Toshiro Mifune. Kurosawa directed Mifune in about 16 films, some of which achieved greatness, but after about 1965, they never worked together again. Richie says that Kurosawa felt possessive of Mifune and was miffed when the actor began taking other jobs. As far as Kurosawa was concerned, the break became irreparable when Mifune did the American TV miniseries Shogun.
Booklet Containing Two Scholarly Essays
Packaged with the DVD set is a 20-page booklet containing a pair of scholarly essays. One of these is by Renoir expert Alexander Sesonske. He quotes the great French filmmaker as saying about Junie Astor, the actress who plays the landlady's sister in his version of The Lower Depths, "She's terrible, isn't she?" Sesonske claims Renoir managed to shoot and edit the movie in ways that make the actress's poor performance less noticeable.
In the other essay, a pair of professors at the University of Pittsburgh discuss Kurosawa's The Lower Depths. For the most part, the authors give a condensed version of the information in Richie's audio commentary. They write, "It is those occasional threads of comic sensibility that underscore the poignancy of the entire film. We are awakened to somber reality, to the pathos of the downtrodden."
DVD Details
Listed below are the details for the Criterion Collection DVD set containing Renoir's and Kurosawa's film versions of The Lower Depths.
DVD Release Date: June 22, 2004
Number of Discs: 2
20-Page Booklet Containing 2 Essays
Disc One:
Feature Film: Jean Renoir's The Lower Depths (1936)
Feature Film Run Time: 1 hr. 32 min.
Full-Screen (1.33:1), Black and White
MPAA Rating: Not Rated
French Monaural
English Subtitles
Video Intro by Jean Renoir (6 min.)
Disc Two:
Feature Film: Akira Kurosawa's The Lower Depths (1957)
Feature Film Run Time: 2 hr. 5 min.
Full-Screen (1.33:1), Black and White
MPAA Rating: Not Rated
Japanese Monaural
English Subtitles
English-Language Commentary by Japanese Film Expert Donald Richie
Making-Of Documentary (33 min.)
Cast Biographies (text)
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