Welcome to Worth a Rewatch — new reviews and reevaluations of old films featured at Iowa’s nonprofit cinemas. Think of it as a small historical adventure, an investigation of an artifact and perhaps, the way meaning has changed over time. Today we look at Akira Kurosawa’s The Idiot (1951), which FilmScene will be screening this week with a post-screening discussion with Professor Anna Barker.
Akira Kurosawa seems keenly aware of the improbability of translating literature into film, especially in the case of Dostoevsky, who Kurosawa calls more psychological than visual. But Kurosawa wanted to make The Idiot. The success of films like Drunken Angel was supposed to make the way for an epic, ambitious work, great enough to capture those things seemingly untranslatable.
Maybe he did it, but we don’t know. His original cut of The Idiot, at 265 minutes, was shown once. It was cut to 180 minutes, and then cut again, against Kurosawa’s wishes, down to 166. The original was lost, or burned, or stashed forever in someone’s personal archive. When the movie was released in Japan, in 1951, no audience could square it with their expectation. The critics pounced, and Kurosawa was grounded. He prepared himself to be shut out of the business — but things were happening in the background.
Rashomon was entered into the 12th Venice Film Festival. Kurosawa heard about this only after he received the prize for Best International Film. Because of his reception in Venice, RKO bought the distribution rights in the United States; this was considered a gamble. As The Boone News Republican claimed, a Japanese film hadn’t been screened anywhere in New York for 15 years, since before WWII. But audiences in the States connected with Kurosawa. The critics saw him as an important filmmaker, and in the following years, every single one of his movies received an American release. Only The Idiot waited on the shelf, for over a decade.
In an interview with Film Quarterly in 1960, Kurosawa said, “People have said [The Idiot] was a failure. I don’t think so. At least, as entertainment, I don’t think it is a failure … I suppose that any director aught at least once to have been roundly attacked and embarrassed … Still, I would have been happy if at least one critic had admired something about it.”
In 1963, when The Idiot was released in the States, Howard Johnson of the New York Times called it, “a load of idiocy in anybody’s language.”
There are certain facts about the adaptation that are settled: the depth of Kurosawa’s narrative was scooped out by the studio; the movie is almost incomprehensible if you aren’t familiar with the original text. Kurosawa agrees. Still, it does not feel dead. Even though it was hacked to pieces, one can sense a good movie hidden in there, threatening to show through.
Rashomon was made by Daiei studio and The Idiot was made by Shochiku. Neither studio liked nor understood these movies. The difference is that Daiei did not make Kurosawa recut Rashomon. So, it feels like a twist of luck that one is considered a classic and the other has been swept under the rug. But that’s not everything.
Before he started filming The Idiot, Kurosawa read the novel seven times. He wrote the script with a writing brush on two-meter, rolled paper. It’s reported that he treated the source material with an almost religious solemnity. It is possible that Kurosawa did not allow himself to make interventions into the text, because he revered Dostoevsky. It is possible that Kurosawa loved The Idiot too much to make it his own.
The critics have softened over the years, but no one claims The Idiot is secretly Kurosawa’s best. It is more like an artifact, interesting not for the thing itself but for the opening it gives us to interpret the person who made it.
