About Akira

Kurosawa -- plus Hollywoodism

A few months ago I wrote an article about "the Magnificent Seven," the elite group of the world's greatest living filmmakers. The list is trimmed to six with the death of Japan's Akira Kurosawa at age 88.

Thirteen years ago, when Kurosawa made Ran, his 16th-century-Japan retelling of King Lear, I attended a strange press conference during the First Tokyo Film Festival. Kurosawa hated Japanese film critics, so he banned them from meeting with him. A busload of foreign journalists were diverted from the fest for a two-and-a-half-hour pilgrimage to the countryside near Mt. Fuji, and specifically to the Hakone Prince, a palatial hotel close by where Kurosawa summered. There he agreed to talk with us.

The bus ride became uncomfortable when the filmmaker's long-time interpreter, a French woman, asked journalists to write down their questions. She read them aloud into a mike, altering what might offend the great director, and then said cheerily, "You can ask as many questions as you like about horses. He likes to talk about horses."

It was true: Kurosawa at 75 seemed happy only with soft, reverential queries. He spoke on, and enthusiastically, about the pint-sized horses recruited for Ran's battle scenes.

Was Ran's evil Lady Kaede based on Lady Macbeth? "Not especially," he said. "But behind every man of power, there's a lady in back manipulating him." Much of the Western press groaned. Kurosawa grinned. "I don't have a Lady Macbeth," he added, leaning into the microphone. His jolly mood ebbed when asked about Ran's obvious debt to Eisenstein. "I've never been influenced," he said, testily. Neither would he acknowledge Ran's flagrant anti-war theme. "If I wanted to deliver a message," he said, "I'd write a letter."

After an hour, Kurosawa rose, signed autographs. He's as imperious as old Lear, I remember thinking, and as much a prey to flatterers. Hmmmm. He marched out of the hotel, his fawning interpreter at his side, and climbed into his chauffeured Mercedes. Smiling and waving to his fans (me among them), the great Japanese filmmaker was driven away to his summer home.

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Credit Writer/Director Simcha Jacobovici with ambition: to convert Neal Gabler's 420-page volume An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood into a coherent documentary. Hollywoodism: Jews, Movies, and the American Dream (at the Coolidge Corner) is quite a film story, of how a group of impoverished Jews immigrants from Eastern European shtetls eventually became tsars of the studio system: Carl Laemmle at Universal, Adolph Zukor at Paramount, Louis B. Mayer at MGM, Harry Cohn at Columbia, and the three Warner Brothers. The movies they green-lighted were thematic affirmations of their own rags-to-unbelievable-riches sagas, asserting that anyone with chutzpah can make it in the USA, including little guys and outsiders, that there's an inevitable happy ending at the end of the rainbow. Since everybody went to Hollywood movies and breathed the utopian cant of studio product, these Jewish moguls could be said to have invented the "American Dream."

Hollywoodism provides sagacious observations from Jewish film critics and studio historians, including Gabler, J. Hoberman, and Jonathan Rosenbaum, and prime footage of the Jewish bosses -- i.e., Mayer pontificating before the American Legion, Laemmle lecturing his employees, "I will not have quitters or lazy men working for Universal," and with the thickest of Yiddish accents. But Jacobovici's film is weirdly schizophrenic. The first half is Jewish boosterism, proud crowing about how these lowly Jews rose in Hollywood. Only one historian mentions that these studio heads "were ruthless [and] badly mistreated women." The second half (more credible) often wags it finger at these same bosses for hiding their Jewishness, for forcing Jewish actors to change their names to gentile ones, for doing movies that always pushed assimilation, for being totally cowardly before World War II about making anti-Nazi movies, for being gutless a second time in cooperating with HUAC in purging Hollywood of supposed Communists.

There are a couple of problems. The film bunches Twentieth Century Fox with the Jewish-run studios, but William Fox was a gentile. In actuality, Fox was known as "the goyisher studio." Including the final scene from Fox's The Grapes of Wrath to illustrate a "root for the underdog" Jewish point of view is simply an untruth: the filmmaker, John Ford, and the producer, Darryl F. Zanuck, are likewise Christian.

Then too, it's certainly stretching film history to describe the era of the Jewish bosses as being an enlightened time for blacks on screen, as opposed to earlier, when WASPs were in control and the pro-Klan The Birth of a Nation was the par. Yes, there were several all-black musicals made in '30s Hollywood, but otherwise blacks were stereotyped as maids, eye-rolling porters, and shuffling, muddle-headed servants in countless films made by Zucker, Mayer, the Warners, and Harry Cohn. Curiously, Jacobovici shows a flagrant example of Jewish racism without criticizing it in his voiceover: Al Jolson switching from singing in the synagogue to doing "Mammy" in blackface in the Warner Brothers' The Jazz Singer.