Phonearl Good start, but then it gets ruined

LouHomey From my favorite movies..

Plustown A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.

Myron Clemons A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.

gavin6942 A Japanese veteran, driven partially mad from the war, travels to the snowy island of Kameda where he soon enters a love triangle with his best friend and a disgraced woman.Akira Kurosawa has said, "Of all my films, people wrote to me most about this one. I had wanted to make The Idiot long before Rashomon. Since I was little I've liked Russian literature, but I find that I like Dostoevsky the best and had long thought that this book would make a wonderful film. He is still my favorite author, and he is the one — I still think — who writes most honestly about human existence." First of all, for Kurosawa fans, it is a shame the full, uncut version of this film is lost. You might think that three hours is already a long movie (and you would be right), but apparently the original cut was more in the realm of five hours. Considering in retrospect that Kurosawa may be the greatest Japanese director of all time (it is him or Ozu), any footage would be valuable...For me, what I really like is the use of Dostoevsky. Surely the author never thought his book would be used in a Japanese film, with a Japanese setting, but he never would have expected a film at all. Like Kurosawa, Dostoevsky is possibly my favorite author. He has a way of capturing the psychology of man and putting it on paper in a way no one else ever has. I'm not sure if this is what Kurosawa means about "human existence" (I think not), but we clearly agree on solid source material.

Andres Salama In 1951 Akira Kurosawa followed up his critical and commercial breakthrough Rashomon (especially outside Japan, where it become the first widely released Japanese film) with this strange adaptation of Dostoyevsky's famous novel (Kurosawa would return to form the next year with the widely acclaimed Ikiru). Masayuki Mori is the Idiot, who wants to do so much good to the world that he looks like an imbecile to most people. Toshiro Mifune is Akama (Rogozhin in the novel), showing a weird scowl during most of the movie. The entirely black clad femme fatale Taeko (Nastasya Filippovna in the original Dostoyevsky novel) is the object of their rivalry, and is played here by the legendary Japanese actress Setsuko Hara, still alive as of 2015, in a completely different register from the characters she played in the films of Yasujiro Ozu.Kurosawa originally made a 265 minutes (more than six hours!) film, and that version was shown to a preview audience, which reacted negatively to it. The studio then cut the running time to three hours, and Kurosawa more or less disowned the movie. It is believed that the original version no longer exists. Despite the cuts and studio interference, it is a fascinating, if completely anti naturalistic film. The movie looks like a mess, surely due to the studio cuts, but, with its melodramatic moments and ultra weird performances, is mostly a fascinating, enjoyable, if sometimes confusing mess.However, at three hours the movie is a bit too much (apparently it was shown in two parts of roughly an hour and a half). Watching a six hour movie of this is unimaginable to me.Set in Northern Japan after World War II (though the setting is really atemporal, as we see little of cars or other technologies of the time). The wintry Hokkaido locations are a plus.

ebossert A Japanese veteran, driven partially mad from the war, travels to a snowy island where he soon enters a love triangle with his best friend and a disgraced woman. Due to severe cuts and editing by the studio, this film includes some intertitles that explain important portions of storyline and character development. Studio cuts aside, I was not impressed with the footage that remained. For example, the drawn out dinner party sequence represents everything I hate about Akira Kurosawa's films. It's like an overdramatic soap opera with utterly confusing character decision-making and completely ridiculous contrivances ("I'd like to announce that Mr. Kameda is the owner of a 125-acre farm.") Give me a break. Other scenes are dry, drawn out, and/or hammy (the "Which of us will it be?" scene near the end is flat-out embarrassing, as is the ending). When Setsuko Hara overacts, you know you're in the presence of an incompetent director. The more I see from Kurosawa, the more he solidifies himself as the most overrated, overpraised director I've ever encountered. It's frankly unbelievable to me how someone with such a dopey, sappy, schmaltzy style of direction is consistently worshipped as a master of masterpieces.

Hitchcoc Visually, this is magnificent. There is more cinematography in this film than any I've every seen. The framing of scenes is unmatched. Unfortunately, with all the cutting, it's so hard to follow. We leap from one scene to another, and while those are such interesting scenes, we often don't know how we got there. Like Von Stroheim's "Greed," the Philistines moved in. Kurosawa hadn't the financial clout to oppose them and had to dismantle what would have been a magnificent film. It is long, but only seems so because it takes us time to absorb what has happened in the interim. The story is really interesting. The man who is termed an Idiot (I"m not sure if it has the same complete meaning it does today) is a spiritual, insightful man who picks up on the emotions of people through their eyes. He falls in love with a kept woman after viewing her picture, but he has a rival in Toshiro Mifume of samurai fame, a bullying, unstable brute who still seeks his mother's approval. The "Idiot" has become the way he is after being pulled from his execution at the last minute. He was falsely convicted of war crimes. He is unbalanced, but is able to see in people what their fears and weaknesses are. He's also not afraid to speak his mind and this leads to great pain. For all the shortcomings, this is a film of great depth and needs to be viewed.