Gate of Hell (1953)
Directed by Teinosuke Kinugasa

Film Review

The almost accidental appearance of Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon at the 1951 Venice Film Festival created in the West an instant appreciation for Japanese cinema.  Japan's Golden Age of filmmaking was well under way by the time westerners first succumbed to the exotic beauty of Rashomon and Kenji Mizoguchi's Ugetsu monogatari (1953), and it is a curious thing that many great films made in Japan around this time achieved little or no impact at home but became enormous critical successes in the West.  This is true of Teinosuke Kinugasa's Gate of Hell (a.k.a. Jigokumon) a sumptuously filmed jidai-geki (period drama) which has the distinction of being the first colour Japanese film to be seen in the West.

Teinosuke Kinugasa may not have acquired the lasting fame of other important Japanese film directors - the names Kurosawa, Mizoguchi and Ozu trip far more readily off the tongue - but he had a prolific filmmaking career and in his lifetime was one of the most revered directors in his country.  Gate of Hell is his best-known film but it is far from being his best film, and compared with the two silent films which brought him early acclaim - A Page of Madness (1926) and Crossroads (1928) - it appears directorially bland, the mise-en-scène lacking in both flair and imagination.  Kinugasa was himself unhappy with the film as the script (adapted from a play by Kan Kikuchi) was written in too great a hurry and he was forced to pad the story out so that it achieved the ninety minute runtime which the studio (Daiei) had imposed on him.  The film's sluggish pace and lack of narrative content are painfully noticeable in its second half, although it makes up for this in other ways, not least of which its stunning production design.

Gate of Hell is one of the most visually spectacular of all Japanese films, indeed its bold use of colour (the palette is dominated by iridescent primary colours) makes it one of the most vibrant and eye-catching pieces of cinema you will ever see.  You are not eased into the film, you are thrown in, with heart-stopping brutality.  The film begins in a frenzy of activity, cutting manically from one action-filled shot to another in a way that vividly conveys the confusion and terror of a country falling apart in the turmoil of a bloody revolution.  The pace is so fast that you can hardly keep up - it is just a blaze of activity, as fast and exciting as any of Kurosawa's later samurai films.  Then, twenty minutes into the film, the tempo suddenly changes as the main part of the film gets underway - a classic love triangle situation in which a samurai hero is gradually torn to pieces by his insane craving for a woman he can never possess.

The abrupt change of pace is so jarring that many cite this as a weakness of the film.  In fact, it was probably intentional, marking a clear dividing line between two very different worlds - one a war-ravaged vision of hell where violence is external and fiercely blatant, the other a kind of earthly paradise where violence is contained, locked away inside the individual.  In the first world, the samurai Morito is in his element, events allowing him to channel his aggression into extraordinary acts of courage and heroism.  In the second, he is very much a fish out of water and he is ill-equipped for the fight that ultimately destroys him, the battle against those inner forces - lust, vanity, jealousy - that are guiding his destiny.  Gate of Hell is a classical diptych in which the first and second parts of the story mirror one another with a clever but cruel irony.

Playing the male lead is Kazuo Hasegawa, a highly charismatic actor who appeared in many of Kinugasa's films and had an incredibly busy career in Japan for several decades.  Unlike the samurai in Kurosawa's films, Hasegawa's Morito is a deeply flawed, almost clownish character, reminiscent of so many of Sheakespeare's tragic characters.  Stubborn, violent and wickedly calculating, he is hard to engage with and our sympathies are almost entirely monopolised by the unfortunate object of his compulsive desire, the Lady Kesa, handsomely played by Machiko Kyo, the lead actress in Rashomon and Japan's most famous actress at the time.

The most proactive and heroic of the film's protagonists, Kesa is something of a proto-feminist, a woman whose outward vulnerability belies her inner strength.  It is her moral superiority and resolution that allow her to resist the tyranny of male domination, so she is free to choose her own destiny, albeit a tragic one, to save her honour and protect the one she truly loves.  Gate of Hell may be set in a far distant period of Japanese history but it has a very modern resonance, and in common with many of Mizoguchi's films, it portrays women as the nobler, wiser sex whilst lending some pretty overt support to the emancipation of women.  The other male protagonist, Wataru Watanabe (played by Isao Yamagata) is another atypical kind of hero, one who resists the lure of an easy vengeance and shows  an almost unreasonable degree of compassion to the one who robs him of his most precious thing.  Watanabe's insistence that a wrong-doer should be permitted to live out his penitence instead of being given the easy option of a swift exit makes another valuable social lesson for a 1950s audience.

Gate of Hell was extraordinarily well-received when it was first seen in Europe and America, not long after its comparatively muted release in Japan in 1953.  The film was not only honoured with the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1954 (the precursor to the Palme d'Or), it also received two Oscars, in the categories of Best Foreign Language Film and Best Costume Design, Color.  Today, the lethargic pace of the film's second half and its theatrical style of acting (closer to kabuki theatre than modern cinema) date it somewhat.  It doesn't quite match up to the sophistication, depth and sustained artistic brilliance of contemporary films by Mizoguchi, Ozu and Kurosawa, and yet it is hard not to be seduced by its chief asset, the lush colour photography which seems to somersault from the screen as a mesmerising succession of exquisitely painted tableaux.  Seldom has the innate visual power of cinema been exploited as fully and as elegantly as Gate of Hell.  The film may fall short in several respects, but it has a savage beauty that grabs you every time you watch it, filling your head with images so stark and tangible that it seems they will persist for an eternity.  Art does not have to be subtle to make itself felt.

Film Synopsis

Japan, 1159, during the Heian Period.   In the midst of a bloody uprising, the imperial palace of Sanjo falls to the rebel faction.  To save the lives of the sister and father of Lord Kiyomori, leader of one of the warring clans, a resourceful samurai named Morito persuades Kesa, a lady of the imperial court, to act as a decoy.  Once the rebellion has been crushed, Kiyomori assumes control and rewards his most loyal samurai warriors with whatever they most desire.  Morito asks only that he be allowed to marry the Lady Kesa, but she is already married, to a member of the imperial guard, Wataru Watanabe.  This humiliation only makes Morito all the more determined to marry Kesa.  As he is driven mad with desire he embroils his intended bride in a plot to kill her husband...