Let me start by saying I am a big fan of Japanese cinema generally and of Kurosawa specifically. I've seen many of Kurosawa's movies but for quite some time I resisted Dodes'ka-den. Based on the first half of the movie, my hesitancy about seeing it was well founded. I cannot comment on the whole movie because I became intensely frustrated and walked out around the midpoint.Dodes'ka-den shows people living in a junkyard somewhere in Japan. The characters are all very broadly drawn with no nuance in their portrayal. In other words, they are almost pure types: There are the two laborers who get drunk every night to the dismay of their slatternly wives; the urchin living in a car with his architecture-obsessed lunatic guardian; the nasty drunk and his semi-catatonic daughter who makes artificial flowers 20 hours a day; the aggressive nut job who picks fights; the catatonic nut job who likes ripping fabric into strips; the obsessive brush-maker and his slutty wife; the teenager who thinks he's a trolley driver and his highly religious mother....All of these people are hopeless misfits and outcasts; they display their various pathologies and vices ad nauseum during the film, and it wears thin pretty damned quickly...There is no plot; rather, the film consists of a series of vignettes of the characters being weird and/or nasty either on their own or in various combinations. The scenes alternate regularly from one person to the next and so the time passes slowly onwards. Realism isn't the point here, and there isn't a hint of narrative -- it is a fantasy, but to what purpose? The antics of the characters seem forced, mannered, repetitive and flat. There is no discernible social critique or message. I felt the movie was nearly a complete waste, much like the lives of the people it portrays.Again, these impressions are just from the first half of Dodes'ka-den. Perhaps something happens later that rewards the endurance (or passivity) of the hapless viewer who sticks around to see how it all ends up. I felt only the vaguest stirrings of curiosity about the ending as I raced out of the theater.If you are really patient or undemanding, or someone who wants to see absolutely every Kurosawa film, you might consider seeing Dodes'ka-den. But for those of you who have feasted on Kurosawa's earlier, better-known movies this title is likely to be a severe disappointment.

This is similar to another one of Kurosawa's films 'the Lower Depths' but instead of using theatrical comedy, this film tends towards a more realistic drama to carry out its multi-character case study. Each of the slum residents, who again like in LD are from diverse backgrounds and each of them have a story to tell, and those stories range from heartbreaking to inspirational, though mostly their pasts are not revealed so the viewers had to take a wild guess on how each of them ended up living in the slums.The plus point of this film against LD is that each character has their own arc so we can solely focus on the person matter without interruption from other characters; in LD everyone tells their stories in the same room which can be quite confusing at times. The minus point is that there seem to be a less clearer picture of the daily, mundane activities by the slum residents to carry on with their lives, aside from the scenes where the little boy begs for leftover foods. Overall, this is a very well-made movie that still put many modern movies of similar theme to shame.

The title is the sound that one of the characters makes as he drives his imaginary trolley across the garbage dump where the characters live. The film is based on a series of stories by Shugoro Yamamoto and tells the story of a group of people who effectively live in ramshackle homes on the edge of the dump. It's a mix of laughter and sadness.First color film made by Akria Kurasowa has been something I've wanted to see for a long time. Weirdly it was often listed as being only available in a shortened version from a three or four hour original due to an error in the run time in some promotional material. I was holding out for the full version, waiting to see what Kurasowa wanted us to see, only to find out on the recent release by Criterion that the 140 minute version is the full version.Finally sitting down to see the film last night I'm of mixed emotions about the film. First and foremost its visually linked to every film that followed. You can see every other of Kurasowals remaining six films reflected in this movie, down to the painted sunsets. Its a striking film in its use of color and you can understand why it took him so long to a film stock he would he happy with (of course there are failed projects as well). The film is a visual work of art.(Though be warned if you're going to see this on your widescreen TV this was shot 1.33 so will appear in normal TV ratio.) The rest of the film is a mixed bag. Part of the problem is that the lives of all of these people don't quite come together. As separate tales they all work well but as a filmic whole they don't hang as one. I don't blame Kurasowa since one can't always hit things out of the box, especially when some one like Robert Altman who specialized in multi-character films of this sort occasionally bombed himself.This isn't to say that there aren't reasons to see the film. As will all Kurasowa films there are always reasons to see his films, whether they work or not. The first trip of the "trolley" is one of the best things Kurasowa ever did and is worth the price of a rental. Its one of the most magical moments in film history as the trolley is inspected and taken out. The father and son living in the car is touching (though ultimately very sad) and there are other bits and pieces that shine (like the cast which is across the board great) and one should at least try the film as something different from a man we usually associated with samurai films or crime dramas.Its an intriguing misfire from a master filmmaker which means in this case means its better than most other filmmakers successes.Between 6 and 7 as a whole, much higher in pieces.

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.