Sunday, May 08, 2011

Sanshiro Sugata


It had been a very long time that I was looking for these Kurosawa movies until I found them last week for a reasonable price. Actually I had found them, as I wrote before, in HMV but this used video store, Bird Dog has a Out of Business Sale so I found 4 movies in a pack, all from Kurosawa and one German that I heard about in 2008 or 09. I'll wrote about the German one because I haven,t watched that yet but Sanshiro Sugota which is one of the first Kurosawa movies was interesting.
The movie is about how martial arts develops in Japan and the Sanshiro travels through this development era.
I always liked martial arts but not all of them. My favorite has been always Judo and that's what the story is about. The DVD provider or actually I think it is the movie provider, states at the beginning that the movie has been modified from the original copy without the director's consent because he was not available to provide them with a better copy or give them the permission. But the movie has fine picture and sound and of course it is in its original Japanese language but has the caption. I believe that's extraordinary for a movie which was made in 1943!
(Photo: A match between Sanshiro the Representative of Judo and another fighter, a representative of Jujitsu, is a one-way match. Sugota throws the guy on the floor over and over until he is not able to stand on his feet any more and is defeated)

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