MUBI

Just before “Rashomon” made him an international star, Akira Kurosawa had already completed a four and a half hour adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s “The Idiot” for Shochiku, but following a disastrous audience preview, the company drastically cut the film to 160 minutes, knowing not of the star its director was about to become. The missing footage has never been rediscovered, and what a travesty it remains, because even in a trumped up cut, Kurosawa’s work is a stunningly photographed character study of love, betrayal, paranoia, and self hatred, pooled together with first rate performances by Masayuki Mori, Toshiro Mifune, Yoshiko Kuga, and a decidedly dark Setsuko Hara. Mori is the simpleton of the title, a war-scarred vet who somehow catches the devoted eye of Hara and Kuga, while reclusive millionaire Mifune pines for Hara in a love-hate relationship, playing out a love quadrangle that, given the irony of Dostoyevsky, renders the three sane participants crazier than The Idiot. Today this is considered minor, simply because of its history as a compromised work, but I still feel it represents Kurosawa’s visionary abilities of the early ‘50’s, when it can be argued he was the world’s greatest director.