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The time is 1,000 years ago. Rain drums like a dirge on the crumbling ruins of the great temple gate called Rashomon in Kyoto. Huddling in its shadows are three birds of strange omen—a Buddhist priest, a simple woodcutter (Akim Tamiroff) and a cynical wigmaker (Oscar Homolka)—who croak and cluck chorus-fashion about a hideous crime and the baffling trial testimony that followed.
In fluidly mounted flashbacks, four separate versions of the event are re-enacted. Up to a point the facts jibe. A bandit (Rod Steiger) has stalked a passing samurai (Noel Willman) and his wife (Claire Bloom) through a bamboo glade, decoyed the husband with promises of buried loot, trussed him up, and raped his wife before his eyes. The samurai is later found dead. According to the bandit, the wife baited him into killing her husband to gain her. The wife swears she killed him to spare him dishonor. Through a medium, the dead samurai claims that he heartbrokenly committed suicide. All three versions are exposed as self-interested lies when the eyewitnessing woodcutter gives a "true" account.
Under Peter Glenville's firm direction, this misanthropic drama thrums with barbaric violence, yet unfolds with the stylized gravity of ballet. Rashomon is rich in theater craft—Jo Mielziner's doom-dappled lighting, Laurence Rosenthal's eerily instrumented score, Oliver Messel's turntable forest of disenchantment. Apart from a U.N.-like babel of accents, the brilliant cast often achieves a triumph of mime over matter. Radiant, in white kimono, as netted moonlight, Claire Bloom is part lotus flower, part flower of evil. Noel Willman's samurai is a bred-in-the-bone aristocrat, and Rod Steiger's bandit a bite-to-the-bone outlaw.
But the moment of truth for these characters sadly shatters the mythic mood of the play. When the bandit is revealed as a braggart, the samurai as a snuffling coward and his wife as a trollop, the Kanins' script, unlike the film, fumbles away the Swiftian savagery of Akutagawa for something close to farce. What Akutagawa intended as the subtle shadow play of appearance and reality becomes, in the wigmaker's summing up, little more than an optical illusion: "Truth is a firefly. Now you see it; now you don't."
Tall Story (by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse) hinges on that old story of campus comedy, the Big Game in Jeopardy. According to its boosters, Custer College has "higher scholastic standards, a better basketball team, and a lower rate of pregnancy" than any little coed college in the Midwest. The haloed hoopster of the basketball team, a stilt-high science major named Ray Blent (played with engaging cyclonic dis-coordination by Robert Elston), is in love with the pert, bouncy girl cheerleader (Nina Wilcox). When $1,500 in fix money is anonymously planted in his overcoat, visions of marrying his sugarplum dance momentarily through Blent's troubled head. Between the girl, the game, and his duty, poor Blent is soon hooping around like a praying mantis about to be devoured by his conscience.