Akira Kurosawa – “Madadayo” (1993)
Few directors get to choose the film they go out on, but some embrace their mortality with their final film more than others. Japanese master Akira Kurosawa didn’t actually intend “Madadayo” to be the final picture of his 57-year career: he spent the next five years writing scripts, but an accident in 1995 that confined him to a wheelchair prevented him from fulfilling his desire to die on a film set. But that just makes this quiet, tender little film, and its title (which translates as “Not Yet”) all the more poignant. Based loosely on the life of academic and writer Hyakken Uchida, it stars Tatsuo Matsumara as a German professor who retires on his 60th birthday, just as the Second World War gets under way. Every year from then on, his former students gather to pay tribute to him, with the professor beginning each celebration with the titular toast of “Not yet.” Like a sort of “Oldboyhood,” we see him age over decades, surviving an American air raid, adopting a cat, and sinking quietly into depression, and it’s a real outlier in Kurosawa’s career as a result: he was one of cinema’s greatest plotters, and yet has so little interest in narrative here that the film wasn’t especially well-received at the time (true of most of his work post-”Ran”). But it seems like a misreading: this is Kurosawa coming to terms with, embracing, and defying old age and oncoming death by, in part, paying tribute to another Japanese master, Ozu, with the film feeling like a very conscious nod to the “Tokyo Story” helmer. Perhaps there’s a reason it hasn’t entered the canon in the way “Seven Samurai” or “Yojimbo” did, but it’s nevertheless a lovely, lyrical and very personal way for one of the greatest filmmakers we ever had to bow out. [B+]
Fritz Lang – “The Thousand Eyes Of Dr. Mabuse” (1960)
The German Expressionist sci-fi master who went to Hollywood and carved out great success there, by the late 1950s Fritz Lang was ready to come home. His health was failing (he was going blind), and he’d become increasingly frustrated and furious with the studio system, and so, in 1959, Lang left his adopted homeland and returned to Europe, almost immediately making his two-part so-called Indian epic, “The Tiger Of Eschnapur,” and “The Indian Tomb.” But for his final trick, Lang would return to more familiar territory, reviving Norbert Jacques’ character of proto-supervillain Dr. Mabuse, who had appeared in Lang’s 1922 silent “Dr. Mabuse The Gambler,” and 1933’s “The Testament Of Dr. Mabuse.” Made on a B-movie budget for producer Artur Brauner, it brings this early franchise kicking and screaming into the paranoia-infused Cold War (it’s a precursor to ’70s thrillers like “The Conversation” and “The Parallax View” in some ways). It centers on a police inspector investigating the murder of a journalist (future “Goldfinger” star Gert Frobe), an American businessman (Peter van Eyck), and a beautiful woman (Marian Menil) with a sinister husband, as they are all drawn to the Luxor Hotel—a surveillance-happy locale where, it appears, the resurrected or revived Dr. Mabuse is keeping an eye on them all. Director’s final films, deliberately or not, tend to end up being personal, and on first examination, ‘Thousand Eyes’ appears to be an exception: it’s well-executed, unpretentious B-movie thriller fun, albeit in the spare style of late-period Lang. But Lang’s tragic history shoots through the film: the idea of a sinister villain in the shadows, long-thought vanquished, reappearing, has real weight as a result. Lang, nearly blind, would never direct again (though he played himself in Godard’s “Le Mepris” three years later, and he would pass away in 1976. [B]
John Cassavetes – “Big Trouble” (1986)
There might have been more unlikely ways for John Cassavetes to end his career than “Big Trouble”—a “Friday The 13th” sequel, maybe, or a breakdancing film. But as far as the final film of the pioneer of American independent cinema goes, “Big Trouble” was about as unexpected as either of those options. The “Killing Of A Chinese Bookie” and “Woman Under The Influence” director had been given six months to live by his doctors in the early 1980s, and had intended to go out with the acclaimed “Love Streams,” which won the Golden Bear at Berlin, but Cassavetes outlived his prognosis, and ended up with a surprising offer: “Big Trouble,” which was meant to reunite “The In-Laws” stars Peter Falk and Alan Arkin with that film’s screenwriter Andrew Bergman, who was set to make the project his second directorial outing. But Bergman and the producers fell out, and (presumably through frequent collaborator Falk), Cassavetes was offered the project, a lightly noirish comedy about a harassed father (Arkin) trying to raise college tuition for his three musical prodigy kids, who ends up in a double-indemnity life insurance scam with a terminally-ill acquaintance (Falk) and his wife (Beverly D’Angelo). The director found the backers almost impossible to deal with, and they recut the film without his input, causing Cassavetes to disown it, calling the project “aptly-named.” The film’s undoubtedly a giant mess, but he was being a little harsh on it. There are gaping holes, particularly in the lackluster third act (whether this was from the post-production job or already present in Bergman’s screenplay is unclear), and it appears that the director’s heart is barely in the proceedings: it’s such an enormous outlier in his filmography that you can hardly believe he made it. But the cast are a lot of fun, particularly Arkin and Charles Durning, and the film can, in spots, prove amusing. Does it even come close to the rest of the Cassavetes filmography? Not in the least. But given the circumstance, it’s tough to begrudge its existence too much. [C]
Sergio Leone – “Once Upon a Time in America” (1984)
A film that celebrated its 30th anniversary back in June (and guess where it places in our rundown of the Summer Movies of 1984?), Sergio Leone’s sweeping, sprawling “Once Upon A Time In America” has itself, as a final film, a story almost as grand and tragic and ironic as the one it tells. Subjected to an extended gestation period as rights issues (to the source novel “The Hoods” by Harry Grey) were sorted, then in development in some form for more than a decade before being released in a re-chronologized truncated form by Warner Brothers, it famously flopped hard both critically and commercially. Leone was reportedly deeply hurt, both by the struggles he’d had and lost with the studio over the theatrical cut and its subsequent failure to find an audience. He died five years later, with a host of unrealized projects to his name, too early to see ‘OUATIA’ start to make its critical resurgence. But, along with “Heaven’s Gate,” Leone’s swan song is now more or less the poster child for critical reevaluation, with the restored version—which reinstated the director’s vision of non-linear storytelling and reinserted nearly 2 hours’ of footage—playing to rapt adoration at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. An epic tale of brotherly love, brotherly rivalry, greed and ambition against the backdrop of the organized crime racket that sprang from a Lower East Side Jewish ghetto in the 1920s, it’s a fascinating, minutely detailed but grandly overarching film that somehow shows (if you compare it with the studio cut) just how much more there can be to a film than plot. After all, the outline of both films is the same, but there truly is a world of difference in how the story is presented, and therefore the effect it has, from one to the other. Finally restored to something approaching masterpiece status after a troubled production, release and then a few decades in the wilderness, “Once Upon a Time In America” is such a fitting finale to a spectacular, individual, spiky career that the only pity of it is that Leone himself would not live to see it rehabilitated, or even that such a thing might be on the horizon. [A-]
