Why Don't Kurosawa's Films with Contemporary Settings Get More Attention?

Recently Hunter Derensis published a piece with Responsible Statecraft looking back at Akira Kurosawa's I Live in Fear--his drama about a family head suffering from anxiety about the very real prospect of nuclear war. As Derensis notes, the movie "is considered one of Kurosawa's minor works, lost in the shadow of his masterpieces." While some of those masterpieces have contemporary settings (Ikiru was sufficiently well-regarded to get a remake just a couple of years ago by Oliver Hermanus as Living), any listing of these, at least in the English-speaking world (and certainly in the United States), is apt to be dominated by Kurosawa's samurai-era films, the many films Kurosawa made about modern life, some of which are, again, acknowledged masterpieces, much, much less discussed. Just why is that?.

I can think of three reasons.

1. Here interest in Kurosawa, even among the relatively sophisticated and none too large group of people who would recognize the name, is substantially an extension of their interest in some very popular American/Western movies, which Kurosawa's films have been credited with inspiring. I suspect that more people know Kurosawa as the maker of a movie supposed to have inspired Star Wars than for any other reason (The Hidden Fortress). They also know him as the maker of a movie that inspired The Magnificent Seven, and thus in a way "grandfather" to innumerable direct and indirect derivatives of that move in its turn, all the way down to Rebel Moon (Seven Samurai). And they know him for having made still another movie that inspired For a Few Dollars, and the "Man with no Name" trilogy (Yojimbo). And their interest pretty much comes to an end there (the more in as an occasional Living is the kind of movie that gets Oscar nominations rather than breaks box office records).

2. Not only Americans but even American film buffs see comparatively little foreign film, and when they do mainly take an interest when a foreign movie very obviously offers something Hollywood isn't giving them at home. Admittedly serious drama about contemporary life has probably never been Hollywood's forte, but samurai sword-fighting is more obviously "exotic." Possibly reinforcing this is (to go by that whole Goethe-Schiller-Brecht theory about the division between the experience of the "epic" and the "dramatic") their finding it hard to get into a contemporary drama when it is obviously set in a foreign culture, and uses another language and requires them to read subtitles (especially as Americans, and Anglosphere film consumers generally, probably do less of that than their foreign counterparts), whereas this interferes less with their kicking back and enjoying an adventure set in a time long past in a distant place.

3. American critics may well be put off by what Kurosawa does with his contemporary dramas--certainly in a film like the nuclear war-themed I Live in Fear. Consider the matter this way: how many American movies of the 1950s addressed the theme of nuclear war, and especially the psychological effect of an ever-present danger of nuclear war on "ordinary" people, in so direct a fashion? Without any science fiction-al trappings or disaster movie spectacle, but rather contemporary drama, like this? (Especially if, as Derensis suggests we do, we rule out the very recent Oppenheimer, which not incidentally had such an unconventional method of presentation, and which the idiots in the media so often insisted, in spite of director Christopher Nolan's own explicit statements in substantive interviews, was not about nuclear war, but instead "AI.") Had there been such a film the critics would not have been friendly, trotting out the great "art lie" that still stands a century after Upton Sinclair Mammonart about "politics" being incompatible with the "true art" that necessarily confines itself to "timeless truths" (i.e. the prejudices of the idiot of a critic in question), and sneer at the results. Giving it a second look today they might well do the same--as usual when they behave in the conventional ways, doing Kurosawa's film an injustice, and leaving us culturally the poorer as they fail in their duty once more.