Kurosawa's Dodes Ka Den (1 Viewer)

[Jeff Swearingen]

My apologies for the spelling of the name...I get confused on this one...

Amazon is now recommending a purchase to me of Kurosawa's Dodes ka den on DVD. I was unaware it was available on DVD and the listing gave no info on the disc. Is this an Amazon goof or is the disc really out there?

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/AS...091772-9631840

 

[SteveGon]

That's probably an imported Mei Ah (Hong Kong company) DVD. I've heard the quality of their discs is dubious. If Dodes Ka Den was being released officially here, we'd have heard about it.

FWIW, Criterion was supposed to have released this some time ago, but it was delayed. Don't know what its status is now.

 

[Keith M.]

What is the latest release date of Kagemusha:Criterion ???

 

[Joe Fisher]

March 29, 2005

 

[Kain_C]

I'll be getting Kagemusha. Just saw Ran a week ago, loved it, and am waiting on Rashomon to come from dvdplanet. Add that to Seven Samurai and the Sanjuro series, and I will only have started to get a decent Kurosawa collection going.

 

[andrew markworthy]

Yes, but Kurosawa in a badly-presented form is still better than 99% of what's out there. I think we've got to face facts that a lot of Kurosawa's work is only going to be in pretty inferior R3 versions for some time to come, and it's them or nothing. [For Kurosawa newbies, it's often a surprise to learn that in addition to the samurai epics there is an equally good collection of his work dealing with domestic themes which is well worth exploring. Unfortunately in the west it's the samurai titles only that are generally available].

Unless your prime criterion for buying a DVD is how good it makes your system look, I'd say get this and then trade up if a better version ever comes along.

 

[Gereon_B]

IMDB says that no 244-minute-version of Dodes'kaden ever existed. This is the first time I hear about that; I always read that the studio cut down the movie. Maybe anybody of you can confirm this information on IMDB?

The Mei Ah Version of Dodes'kaden is hardly fun to watch; faded colour and terrible english subtitles...

 

[Brian PB]

I believe the confusion about the running time of Dodesukaden comes from Donald Richie's seminal book, The Films of Akira Kurosawa, in which he lists the running time at 244 minutes (3rd ed, 1996, pg. 257). Richie is careful to list the timing of alternate versions of Kurosawa's films (e.g., the export versions of The Hidden Fortress and The Bad Sleep Well), but does not list an alternate cut of Dodesukaden (unfortunately, this is the only one of the director's films for which he doesn't also provide the length of the film in meters, which could've helped to corroborate the correct running time). In the 10 pages of text he devotes to the film, he says nothing about it being a four-hour film edited down to two by an unhappy studio. In Richie's later work, A Hundred Years of Japanese Film (2001), the running time is listed as 140 minutes.

Many web resources write of an edited version performed against the director's will: This version of events has been repeated frequently on other Internet sites. Though the story is both detailed and believable, it appears to be false.

 

[SteveGon]

True, but I've seen Dodes Ka Den and it's one of Kurosawa's weaker films. I'd probably rent it to see it again, but it's a no-buy for me.

 

[andrew markworthy]

I've just checked in Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto's 'Kurosawa' (Duke Press; recommended).He only gives a listing of 140 minutes and 12,566 feet. There is no mention of a suppressed longer version of the movie, no arguments with the producers (since this was a work for a collective, it's difficult to see how that would happen anyway). In addition, Yoshimoto provides a cogent analysis of the movie demonstrating that it isn't 'incomplete' and there is an underlying unity.

I agree with you Steve that it's not Kurosawa at his best (in part I suspect because he was struggling with dealing with colour film for the first time) but I still think it's worth seeing.

Incidentally, the film won several awards in Japan, so reaction to it can't have been all that bad.