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24 out of 26 people found the following review useful: Underrated Kurosawa, 19 April 2000 Author: Progbear-4 from Northern CA
This one tends to get slighted by a lot of critics and Kurosawa fans, but I thought it was wonderful. It's an episodic multi-character study of Tokyo's poorest, who live in a city literally made from garbage. Though it looks like an A-Bomb just hit, the film has a sort of serene beauty thanks to the glorious use of Technicolor. The title comes from the sound made by the insane young man who drives an imaginary trolley through the slum. All the characters were wonderful and all the stories engrossing, but perhaps the most tragic concerns the man and his young son who live in an abandoned car. When not searching for food, they spend their spare time using their imagination to build their dream house. An emotionally moving and beautiful film.
17 out of 17 people found the following review useful: Kurosawa's first film in color, 26 December 1998 Author: EzyRyder from Los Angeles
In 1970, after a five year absence, Kurosawa made what would be his first film in color. Dodes' Ka-Den is a film that centers around many intertwining stories that go on in a small Tokyo slum.The title comes from the sound a mentally retarded boy makes as he imagines he is operating a train. We slowly get to know more of the people in the small community, the two drunks who trade wives because they are not happy with the ones they have. The old man who is the center of the town who helps out a burglar that tries to rob him. The very poor father and son that cannot ever afford a house, so they imagine one up of their own. By the end of the film, the stories all come full circle, some turn out happy, others sad.Since this was Kurosawa's first color film you can see that he uses it to his advantage and it shows. Maybe too much. This movie goes in many different directions and it's hard to settle down and get into it. But don't get me wrong, Dodes' Ka-Den may not be Kurosawa's best, but coming from the greatest director of all time, it's much better than 99% of today's films.
18 out of 19 people found the following review useful: No samurai, just great characters, 23 December 1998 Author: Spearin from Durham, NC
This is a movie about the small scale. What could be more fitting for contemporary Japan?It's too easy to give Kurosawa his laurels on the strength of the Toshiro Mifune films, his great panoramas of mist and rain, and Fuji, always, shrouded, revealed. Dodesukaden (Dodeska-Den in the US release from Janus) brings you right up into the characters, right into their faces, their homes, their hovels, their dreams. It's billed as Kurosawa's first color film. The composition is phenomenal, really. Each shot, no matter how it moves or how it doesn't, is as wonderfully framed as a painting, as balanced as a beautiful face. The color saturation is complete, and yet they seem to float above the screen rather than clobber you or intrude.I am astounded by this film. I've never thought of Kurosawa as someone who would know how to handle squalor and the rude life of the bottom of the underclass. I was wrong. There isn't a false step in this picture, from the use of color to the editing to the choice of music and the times it's used. It's as moving a portrait of a community as I'll ever see. Dodesukaden belongs at the top of the canon of Kurosawaa's work, with Ran and The Hidden Fortress next to it.
16 out of 17 people found the following review useful: Magical, 5 June 2004 Author: notmicro from Seattle
Its definitely not for everyone; a great artist, when he is experimenting, often alienates a large percentage of the public. For my money, its one of the more amazing films of all time, and contains numerous scenes which I can recall vividly; the now-over-the-edge of sanity father exclaiming "the house is finished!"; the stuttering husband defending his rude wife to his guests; the monk offering all of his possessions to a thief; and most of all the incredible closing scene, as the camera pans across walls covered with amazing color drawings of trolley-cars. The compassion Kurosawa shows for humanity is deep and profound; there is nothing else in the annals of film quite like the Buddhist-influenced post-WW2 works of the Japanese directors. There are many many millions of people on the planet today who do not live as well as this little community in the middle of their garbage-dump.
13 out of 15 people found the following review useful: Genius at work, 23 February 2001 Author: (thehumanduvet@hotmail.com) from uk
Another demonstration of Kurosawa's genius, his first colour film is a darkly surreal look into the tragic lives of Tokyo slum dwellers, essentially a series of interweaving vignettes depicting several groups of people eking out a perilous existence in a harsh and uncaring post-war shanty town. Swinging from comedy to tragedy and back, this film shows how people deal with the worst kind of life each in their own way, mostly retreating into themselves and living in the fantasy worlds of their own heads, withdrawing emotionally from those around them or drowning themselves in alcohol. Mixing kitchen-sink realism with Kabuki-esque theatrics, Kurosawa toys expertly with the emotions of his audience, drawing tears and laughter with equal deftness. A wonderful, draining experience.
9 out of 9 people found the following review useful: obscure and underrated; it's another of Kurosawa's dramas on the lower class, this time bleaker, a little more abstract, still a masterpiece, 24 January 2008 Author: MisterWhiplash from United States
If there was anything Akira Kurosawa did wrong in making Dodes'ka-den, it was making it with the partnership he formed with the "four knights" (the other three being Kobayaski, Ichikawa, and Konishita). They wanted a big blockbuster hit to kick off their partnership, and instead Kurosawa, arguably the head cheese of the group, delivered an abstract, humanist art film with characters living in a decimated slum that had many of its characters face dark tragedies. Had he made it on a more independent basis or went to another studio who knows, but it was because of this, among some other financial and creative woes, that also contributed to his suicide attempt in 1971. And yet, at the end of the day, as an artist Kurosawa didn't stop delivering what he's infamous for with his dramas: the strengths of the human spirit in the face of adversity. That its backdrop is a little more unusual than most shouldn't be ignored, but it's not at all a fault of Kurosawa's.The material in Dodes'ka-den is absorbing, but not in ways that one usually finds from the director, and mostly because it is driven by character instead of plot. There's things that happen to these people, and Kurosawa's challenge here is to interweave them into a cohesive whole. The character who starts off in the picture, oddly enough (though thankfully as there's not much room for him to grow), is Rokkuchan, a brain damaged man-child who goes around all day making train sounds (the 'clickety-clack' of the title), only sometimes stopping to pray for his mother. But then we branch off: there's the father and son, the latter who scrounges restaurants for food and the former who goes on and on with site-specific descriptions of his dream house; an older man has the look of death to him, and we learn later on he's lost a lot more than he'll tell most people, including a woman who has a past with him; a shy, quiet woman who works in servitude to her adoptive father (or uncle, I'm not sure), who rapes her; and a meek guy in a suit who has a constant facial tick and a big mean wife- to those who are social around.There are also little markers of people around these characters, like two drunks who keep stumbling around every night, like clockwork, putting big demands on their spouses, sometimes (unintentionally) swapping them! And there's the kind sake salesman on the bike who has a sweet but strange connection with the shy quiet woman. And of course there's a group of gossiping ladies who squat around a watering hole in the middle of the slum, not having anything too nice to say about anyone unless it's about something erotic with a guy. First to note with all of this is how Kurosawa sets the picture; it's a little post-apocalyptic, looking not of any particular time or place (that is until in a couple of shots we see modern cars and streets). It's a marginalized society, but the concerns of these people are, however in tragic scope, meant to be deconstructed through dramatic force. Like Bergman, Kurosawa is out to dissect the shattered emotions of people, with one scene in particular when the deathly-looking man who has hollow, sorrowful eyes, sits ripping cloth in silence as a woman goes along with it.Sometimes there's charm, and even some laughs, to be had with these people. I even enjoyed, maybe ironically, the little moments with Rokkuchan (specifically with Kurosawa's cameo as a painter in the street), or the awkward silences with the man with the facial tics. But while Kurosawa allows his actors some room to improvise, his camera movements still remain as they've always been- patient but alert, with wide compositions and claustrophobic shots, painterly visions and faces sometimes with the stylization of a silent drama meant as a weeper. Amid these sometimes bizarre and touching stories, with some of them (i.e. the father and son in the car) especially sad, Kurosawa lights his film and designs the color scheme as his first one in Eastmancolor like it's one of his paintings. Lush, sprawling, spilling at times over the seams but always with some control, this place is not necessarily "lighter"; it's like the abstract has come full-throttle into the scene, where things look vibrant but are much darker underneath. It's a brilliant, tricky double-edged sword that allows for the dream-like intonations with such heavy duty drama.With a sweet 'movie' score Toru Takemitsu (also responsible for Ran), and some excellent performances from the actors, and a few indelible scenes in a whole fantastic career, Dodes'ka-den is in its own way a minor work from the director, but nonetheless near perfect on its own terms, which as with many Kurosawa dramas like Ikiru and Red Beard holds hard truths on the human condition without too much sentimentality.
11 out of 15 people found the following review useful: Sad Stories in the Slums of Tokyo, 2 October 2005 Author: Claudio Carvalho from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
"Dô desu ka den" is the first colored movie of Master Akira Kurosawa, and surprisingly is not about samurais, ronins, warlords or battlefields. It is inside a very poor community in a slum in Tokyo, where the dwellers are homeless drunkards, beggars, tramps, abused women, losers. I do not know the reason why Kurosawa selected this tragic theme and environment to put colors, but indeed they are very sad stories, some of them heart-breaking. I personally like the touching story of the boy and his father that dream with a house of their own and built by them; the story of the retarded boy that believes he pilots a train; the story of the man that raises five children as if they were their own sons and daughters; and the story of the young woman abused by her stepfather. My vote is nine.Title (Brazil): "Dodeskaden – O Caminho da Vida" ("Dodeskaden – The Way of the Life")
5 out of 5 people found the following review useful: Cinematic Expressionism, 1 April 2006 Author: Jason Forestein (jay4stein79@yahoo.com) from somerville, ma
*** This review may contain spoilers ***
Most people, when they think of expressionist cinema, look to the b&w German films of the silent and early sound eras--films that emphasized canted angles, extreme contrasts of light and dark, exaggerated performance, and occasional uses of surrealism to create a dreamlike atmosphere in order to diverge from traditional, naturalistic modes of cinematic representation. If we're willing to accept that the Germans were not the only filmmakers to create expressionist cinema (and that those above-mentioned characteristics are not prerequisites for expressionist film), then I would argue that Dodes'ka-den (DKD) is a prime example of this type of film. Like Dreams, DKD is a little unhinged for a Kurosawa film, dabbling, as it does, in the unreal. However, DKD is also, unlike Dreams, a great film and probably my favorite Kurosawa picture. Why? Mostly, I think, it's the colors. This was, I believe, Kurosawa's first color film, and the man saturates the movie with vibrant primary colors, creating a completely unreal contemporary Japan. We are used to the neon lights and gleaming Tokyo skyscrapers; we are not used to a city that appears to have been colored with crayons. DKD is, as I said, a peculiar film inasmuch as many of its characters live in a junkyard, appearing to live in an alternate universe. That is, I think, the point--these are the Tokyo outsiders, the people left behind during the great move forward following World War II. The film also represents one of Kurosawa's more heartfelt movies; there is genuine sentiment here and genuine pathos (such as when the boy's father describes their dream home). It's an amazingly moving film from a man better known for stunning, John Ford-like vistas and samurais. Everyone should have known Kurosawa had in him a movie as touching and thought provoking as this (Ikiru foreshadows the emotional resonance of this film in many ways). I will also argue, to the last, that this is Kurosawa's greatest achievement. His samurai films, though capable pictures, pale in comparison to works by Kobayashi (Hara-kiri is the greatest, most intelligent samurai film committed to celluloid). Rashomon, Hidden Fortress, Seven Samurai, Yojimbo, Sanjuro, Kagemusha, and Ran are all fine films, but they're merely good (and, frankly, I think that word is too generous for Hidden Fortress and Kagemusha). DKD is a great movie, as is Ikiru. They are the crown jewels that show Akira was not a one-trick samurai pony. They reveal his artistry and mastery of cinema.
6 out of 8 people found the following review useful: less a movie, more a strange experience, 1 July 2005 Author: planktonrules from Bradenton, Florida
This is one of the weirder movies I have recently watched. That's because it seems less like a movie and more like an experimental film. Kurasawa's experiment was to take a variety of individuals who live at a garbage dump and weave their experiences into a tapestry that offers glimpses of their generally harsh existences. Not every episode is depressing and harsh, but overall this is definitely the tone. Let's see,...we have a case of incest/rape, attempted murder, wife swapping, alcoholism, infidelity, death of a little boy after eating tainted fish, a man with severe depression (he never talks during the movie and looks very scary), a hopeless dreamer who would probably be diagnosed with schizophrenia, a mentally retarded young man who thinks he is a street car conductor and spends all his waking moments "driving" his street car through paths among the garbage piles, a man married to a total shrew (I think I liked her character even less than the incestuous rapist!), etc., etc. In fact, it is depressing enough that it seemed almost like an Ingmar Bergman movie set in Japan, as Bergman made MANY movies that tended to deal with mental illness and the hopelessness of life. Is it any wonder that after making this film Kurasawa tried to kill himself?! So, did I like it? No. It was not a fun experience. But, it was a very well-made movie that definitely kept my attention and as a result, I really wanted to see what happened to these people. It was sort of like watching a train wreck--you don't WANT to see all the carnage but you can't help but watch! Of all the vignettes, I think that the older man who tended to look out for everyone and who didn't really seem to fit in (he was too well-adjusted and wise to be living in a garbage dump) was perhaps meant to represent Kurasawa himself. Maybe. I dunno.If you've seen a variety of Kurasawa films and have a high tolerance for strange art films, give this one a watch. However, do NOT make this your first experience watching his movies--it's sure to scare away many viewers!
1 out of 1 people found the following review useful: Trolley Freak!, 30 May 2009 Author: TheatreX from Louisville, KY
The title of this movie doesn't make a lot of sense, until you see it in operation, because it's the sound that a retarded young man makes while he's operating his imaginary trolley, which is what he does all day. And he is just one of many odd characters in this surreal & at times, tragic tale of a group of slum-dwellers in Japan.There are two drunks who trade wives, there's a man with aspirations to be a architect, and his young son who he sends out to beg for food. There's a wise old man who seems to be the pillar of sanity within all that goes on around him, and there's a businessman with some severe nervous tics that has a wife that treats him (and everyone else) like dirt.There's no particular plot to this, really, it's a bunch of stories that drift back & forth between each other, sometimes funny, sometimes tragic. All in all I thought it worked pretty well, & I had been dying to see this for a long time just based on its description. I was not in the least disappointed, and I'd definitely recommend this. 9 out of 10.
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