GATE OF HELL

New Zealand Listener, Volume 32, Issue 824, 13 May 1955, Page 30

GATE OF HELL

(Daiei) | IKE many another film-goer, I have read too widely among the theatre advertisements not to have become allergic to superlatives. I shall not say. therefore, that Gate of Hell (or Jigokumon, to give it its original Japanese title) is the most beautiful colour film

I have seen. But the temptation is difficult to resist. Certainly I can’t recall any other production in which the spectrum has been used with subtler art (6r more unobtrusive artifice), where colour and movement have more gracefully combined to delight the eye, or where I have been more conscious of an elusive symbolism-the hint of a significant formal pattern below the surface. In a sense, the film reminded me of Japanese landscape gardening, in which beauty of design is the product of an immemorial tradition, where the spatial relationships between shrubs and cascades, between blossoms and boulders, are precisely calculated to produce a disciplined naturalism almost too beautiful to be true. The sequences of Gate of Hell seemed, in the same way. to have been meticulously planned as foils to one anothernot only in their rhythm and dramatic tempo, but in their colour. All this beauty, however, frames a story as violent as any in the bloody catalogue of grand opera. There are three protagonists, a captain of the Imperial Guard (played by Isao Yamagata), his wife (Machiko Kyo), and a Samurai (Kazuo Hasegawa). The period is late in the 12th Century, following an abortive revolt against the Shogunate. As a reward for lovalty. the Samurai claims the Lady Kesa-only to discover that she is already married. Pride-a (continued on next page)

Samurai had no "second word ’-and desire force the warrior to persist in his demands to the point where disaster engulfs all three, My one omplaint about Gate of Hell would be that the sub-titling, on which the Western filmgoer must lean heavily at times, is gauchely American in idiom. The essence of that remote period, however, comes through strongly in visual terms. and evento Western eves the standard of: acting is high. But those who deserve most credit (they have

already. been recognised | by a Cannes. Grand Prix) are Masaichi Nagati (producer). Tenosuke Kinugasa (director) and Kohei Sugiyama (photography). _ I was lucky enough to see Gate of Hell at a private screening, and no commercial prints, I understand, have yet arrived here. But when it does, lose no time in seeing it. Good films, as we have learned from experience. don’t always have long runs.