THE LIVING MAGOROKU (Japan, 1943) Keisuke Kinoshita

Russia has been invaded from the west over and over for at least the last thousand years. As they geared up for war with the Nazis, Eisenstein made Alexander Nevsky about the 13th century invasion of Russia by the Teutonic Knights. I saw a World War Two British film that showed the destruction of the Spanish Armada. 

The Living Magoroku, perhaps ironically, starts with a 16th century battle between two Japanese armies. Is that how you want to present your country during war time, Japanese slaughtering Japanese?

Made in 1943. I would have assumed they had a shortage of able-bodied men to act as extras, but it looked okay. More late Kurosawa than early Kurosawa, with large armies shooting at each other with rifles and arrows and a few shots of guys killing each other with swords. A weirdly unenergetic samurai walks along casually killing people here and there.

Then it switches to then-present day Japan. We see teenagers training in the same field.

An officer berates the boys for not showing enough spirit.

"Don't cling to your life," he says. "When you die, die honorably. That's what's in the Japanese blood we inherited from our ancestors."

I wondered what I would do in their shoes. Yukio Mishima just coughed a few times and told his draft board he had TB and they left him alone. I'd want a back up plan. I'd learn typing and shorthand so I'd get a soft office job in the Army if worse came to worse.

The director himself was drafted in 1940 but lucked out and was wounded seriously enough that they let him go. He became a director the same year as Kurosawa and beat him out for the New Director Award.

While the lieutenant addresses the teens, an aging blacksmith wanders into the scene.

"How many of them will earn the Order of the Golden Kite?" he said. "How many of them will die in battle? If you think about it, you have to love them."

Later, he makes new sword for the officer.

"Cut down 20 or 30 American weaklings---it won't even have a nick on the edge."

The movie is about a superstitious family that lets a large field lie fallow because their ancestors fought the battle there 300 years earlier. Their son thinks they should grow something on it to contribute to the war effort. There's the sword-making subplot. The officer finds out his rare samurai sword is a fake and needs a new one. A young couple wants to get married but the boy is from a family of servants who worked for his girlfriend's family.

There's a guy with lung disease. It keeps him out of the army but it's murdering him.

It was a nice-looking movie with enough bizarre, pro-death Japanese fascist stuff to keep it interesting.

Available on the Criterion Channel.