Indrek
10Nov11
The ice skating scene was in the book, only a little different
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Franz Walsch
17Feb12
anyone else see huge parallels between the idiot and mifune to franz and reinhold in berlin alexanderplatz? both the films and novels. anyway as a whole this film is a bit of a mess, the tampering with by shochiku (production company) is obvious, if the narration and explanatory text was frequent throughout it wouldn't have been a problem but confined to just the very beginning severely lessened the film.
Ace Craven
16Jan12
"Wisdom comes in two kinds: important and unimportant. But nobody realizes that." This film demonstrates the latter. Save a few scenes and a couple good camera movements, the pacing is too slow, the tension soap-operatic and the editing is flat out clumsy. Overall, a story that is not for the cinema. P.S. Three years later parts of the score (the good ones) were stolen by Disney for 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA.
Lucky Vita
27May11
Incredible sequences, but jarring transitions thanks to the studio chopping the fluidity out of the film. Still, we can imagine what a masterpiece this could have been. Use your imagination to fill in the blanks, it is fantastic even so.
Denis K.
16May11
Incredibly good adaptation of Dostoyevsky's novel. The changes Kurosawa made (the ice skating scene) fit the theme well and he brought the pages of the book to life on screen.
Francisco R.
4May11
What we see are only glimpses of what Kurosawa had intended in the first place, that's why the individual scenes are so good and the final product amounts to nothing but an absolute mess. For some reason I keep thinking that the many scenes involving knives are just Kurosawa telling us something else was butchered in the process...
NoOneJones
20Mar11
This broke my fucking heart. Something this flat, meandering, and utterly lifeless (soulless) is utterly undeserving of having had Kurosawa helm it. A testament to the evils of studio interference just like Pat Garret and Billy the Kid. Fuck producers, fuck studios, get out of the way.
Graveyard Poet
18Mar11
Kurosawa's forgotten film--an adaptation of Dostoevsky's novel of spiritual crisis set during a windswept city winter in postwar Japan involving a destructive love triangle that ends in the abyss of insanity. Haunting....
Gulazhar
14Sep10
Despite the brutal editing, I think the main thing here that Kurosawa made it to catch Dostoevsky's reality, he made it to catch his nerve. And I like that he included the episode of Dostoevsky's personal biography to Kameda/Myshkin biography (being pardoned right before the death penalty). It worked so good. Ah, and Setsuko Hara, she is beautiful, she is heartbreaking as Taeko/Nastassya Filippovna...
Kay
23Mar10
I saw this film recently on TCM. At first it had a nice start, slow, but nice. It's a shame to see a film like this butchered with heavy editing and what felt like a rushed explanation of what was happening. I tried looking for the original 4-5 hour cut. It turns out, it's been ravaged by time, a film never to be seen in its entirety.
Daniel S.
3Dec09
Of course, the first half of the film has been heavily edited, of course the actors had to distort their faces (most of all Mifune…) in order to render the subtleties of Dostoyevsky’s psychological descriptions, of course, of course. But entire scenes of this film will stay in my memory for a long time : Mifune’s house with its invading snow, Masayuki Mori’s performance as the Idiot or Setsuko Hara’s disenchanted beauty. Considering the low quality of today’s production, that’s more than enough for me. Highly recommended.
Amlethus
21Jun09
This movie breaks me heart. It starts off so amazingly, it seems like it's going to be one of the greatest movies I had never heard of, then somewhere about half way it stops making clear sense and the pacing goes crazy. Then I learned about the studio cutting out 100 minutes of the movie! Those bastards!
