(3 of 3)
Gateof Hell(Daiei; Edward Harrison). The first Japanese attempt to shoot in color according to modern techniques (learned in the U.S. at the Eastman Laboratories and Warner Brothers' studios) is a treatise on cinema chromatics that Western moviemakers may be pondering for years to come. (The film's importance has already been acknowledged with a Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival of 1954.) Western moviegoers will experience the pure delight of soothing their eyeballs, scorched by so many Technicolored prairie fires, with a rainbow hung in a legendary mist.
The story of Gate of Hell, which traces back to a 12th century chronicle, is a fairly close parallel to the Roman tale of the Rape of Lucrece. A beautiful noblewoman, Lady Kesa (Machiko Kyo), is desired by a warrior named Moritoh (Kazuo Hasegawa), a man of demonic ferocity. Lady Kesa is already married, but Moritoh swears he will have her anyway. One night, with a message that her aged aunt is ill, he lures her into his power. Insane with desire, the brute threatens that if she does not get rid of her husband, he will kill them both, and the aunt, too. Lady Kesa affects to give in, and together they arrange how Moritoh. will butcher her husband in his bed. Lady Kesa, however, contrives that her husband shall sleep in another room, and dies in his stead. The moral: "A heart is not to be won by force."
The point is handsomely thrust home by Actor Hasegawa, Japan's leading matinee idol and a bit too handsome, who in every spasm of his currish courage shows violence for what it is: the day of the beast in a human soul. Machiko Kyo, an actress who was trained as a dancer and who appeared in Rashomon and Ugetsu, moves like a figure wooed to life from an antique fan.
At times, Director Teinosuke Kinugasa and his gifted adviser on color, a painter named Sanzo Wada, catch the mood of those monstrous feudal murals of Nippon, where gods and men and demons pother insanely in an ecstasy of bloodshed. A moment later there is peace, and the pink poppy blows by the darkly silver sea. Black horses thunder down the strand, their scarves a screaming purple against the green land. Suddenly a temple appears, mild and holy in white and gold, floating in the midst of a pale lake. And time and again, as the actors move in their flowered robes among the peaceable abstractions of the Japanese architecture, they seem like deities wafted through the realm of pure idea.