Where the Force awoke
QUESTION Was the plot to Star Wars based on a black and white Japanese film?
Japan has had a flourishing film industry since the 1890s when movies of geisha dances and kabuki plays were made. In the Twenties and Thirties, the Japanese were making films in many of the same genres as americans and Europeans: domestic dramas, screwball comedies, gangster pictures, horror, love stories, even musicals.
But the West was hardly aware that Japan made films at all until akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1951.
The originality of its plot, exotic costumes and locales, imaginative camerawork and dynamic editing, the driving rhythms of the bolero soundtrack and the sheer wildness of Toshiro Mifune’s lead performance made the film a sensation and meant Kurosawa was, for many years, the only Japanese director whose name was widely known in the West. (Mizoguchi and Ozu were appreciated more by the arthouse crowd).
Rashomon was remade as Hollywood western The Outrage in 1964, but despite an excellent director (Martin Ritt) and a starry cast (paul newman, Edward G. Robinson, Claire Bloom, Laurence Harvey, William Shatner) it was not a success.
Two other Kurosawa pictures had been remade by foreign directors with huge success. Seven Samurai (1954) became John Sturges’s The Magnificent Seven (1960) and Yojimbo (1960) became Sergio Leone’s a Fistful Of Dollars (1964), which turned Clint Eastwood into a movie star.
Many big Hollywood names — Spielberg, Scorsese, Coppola, Lucas — have said they were inspired to become filmmakers partly through seeing Rashomon and Seven Samurai on TV. Some even helped finance Kurosawa’s projects when he found it hard to get Japanese backing.
George Lucas readily acknowledges that the plot and characters of the original 1977 Star Wars owe much to Kurosawa’s 1958 film The Hidden Fortress. The events of the Japanese film are seen through the eyes of two hapless peasants, Tahei and Matashichi, who become R2-D2 and C-3pO in Star Wars. Tahei and Matashichi are caught up in fighting between two clans, the Yamana (the Galactic Empire) and the akizuki (a league of clans corresponding to the Rebel alliance).
They are taken prisoner by the Yamana, who have destroyed the castle of the akizuki, but escape and fall in with the akizuki general Rokurota Makabe (Obiwan Kenobi/Han Solo/Luke Skywalker) and princess Yuki (princess Leia). The four set off to smuggle the akizukis’ store of gold (the Death Star plans) through territory controlled by the Yamana to territory controlled by the league. Star Wars fans may take it from there.
Lightsaber duels in the Star Wars series are clearly a homage to the choreographed swordfights in Japanese samurai movies. In turn, several of Kurosawa’s films are based on western originals.
although Kurosawa doesn’t admit the debt in his autobiography, the plot of Yojimbo is essentially that of Dashiell Hammett’s 1929 novel Red Harvest. The Idiot (1951) is a version of Dostoevsky’s novel; The Lower Depths (1957) is based on the Maxim Gorky play; Throne Of Blood (1957) is Macbeth; The Bad Sleep Well (1960) is a modern retelling of Hamlet; the police procedural High and Low (1963) is from Ed McBain’s 87th precinct story King’s Ransom; and Ran (1985) is King Lear.
Graham Healey, School of East Asian Studies,
University of Sheffield.
QUESTION Is there a psychological term to describe the innate urge to jump off a cliff or balcony?
ACROPHOBIA, the fear of heights, is one of the most common phobias and might affect up to 7 per cent of the population. Vertigo is the dizziness associated with it. It is sometimes thought this ‘urge’ is a symptom of acrophobia, but it is so common others believe it is not.
a 2011 survey by Jennifer Hames and her team at the University of Florida asked 431 college students about urges to jump from high places and thoughts of suicide. They also assessed the students’ levels of depression, and tested their physical sensitivity to anxiety i.e. faster heartbeat and shortness of breath etc.
about a third said they’d felt the urge to jump at least once. people who had thought of suicide were more likely to say yes, but more than 50 per cent of those who said they’d never considered suicide experienced the phenomenon, too.
They concluded that in most cases the urge to jump had nothing to do with a death wish, but was in fact the opposite — a misinterpreted survival signal. They dubbed this high place phenomenon (Hpp).
In their paper the team explained it this way: imagine a person with raised anxiety sensitivity. She leans over a ledge of the Grand Canyon. In a quick reaction to her physical sensation of anxiety, her survival instinct forces her away from the edge.
Yet when she looks at the ledge, she sees it’s sturdy. There was never any danger. Her brain tries to process an answer to the question: ‘Why did I back up if it was safe?’ a logical answer is that she must have been tempted to jump.
Hames said people misinterpret the instinctual safety signal, and conclude they must have felt an urge to leap. Hence the study’s title: an Urge To Jump affirms The Urge To Live.
Ian Crawford, Glasgow.
QUESTION Who supplied the thousands of demob suits that were issued to servicemen and women leaving the armed forces at the end of World War II?
FURTHER to the earlier answer, one of the main businesses contracted to suit and boot returning servicemen at the end of the war was Burton Tailoring.
They issued you with a blue or brown pin-striped, double-breasted suit, a square, box-shaped coat and large flannel trousers with turn-ups which, for a while, made the male population look like they were taking part in a Warner Brothers’ gangster film, like Bogart and Cagney in 1939’s The Roaring Twenties.
The ex-servicemen were also given a hat which further enhanced the gangster look. although there were no two-tone shoes to complete the look, there were black or brown brogues.
This contract made Burton’s name and fortune. It’s said to be where the saying Going for a Burton comes from. It also gave rise to many risque jokes featuring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor!
I have an original blue pin-striped suit that I still use when working on film set in the Forties and Fifties. I recently wore it on the netflix TV drama series The Crown,which is about the young princess Elizabeth and prince philip.
Danny Darcy, Reading.
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