Like The Most Beautiful before it, 1945’s Sanshiro Sugata, Part Two is a film that Kurosawa was pressured into making — only this time, he wasn’t quite able to overcome his lack of enthusiasm for the material. All the fight scenes are pretty rousing — this time out, the melancholy title character (played once again by Susumu Fujita) is forced to pit his judo skills against champion fighters in newer, deadlier fighting styles, including an American boxer and a pair of karate masters, so it’s almost as if Kurosawa were making a 19th-century version of The Deadliest Warrior. (The climactic fight sequence, on a snow-covered mountainside, so underlit that Sanshiro and his opponents almost resemble shadow puppets, is especially dynamic.)But the secondary characters aren’t fleshed out as vividly as they were in the original Sanshiro Sugata; for instance, it’s kind of amazing to see Kurosawa devote so much screen time to establishing the character of a young rickshaw driver who starts training in Sanshiro’s dojo, only to completely forget about him halfway through the picture. Sanshiro’s love interest, Sayo Murai, gets shortchanged even more — her role is restricted basically to a series of shy smiles. Even with the most memorable new characters, the cackling, flamboyant Higaki brothers (who arrive on the scene to challenge Sanshiro to a duel in hopes of avenging their brother’s humiliating public defeat at Sanshiro’s hands in the first movie), I couldn’t help but feel as though Kurosawa could have done more with them. I think these guys needed to do more to get under Sanshiro’s skin — this movie needs the equivalent of the bit in Rocky III where Clubber Lang shoves Burgess Meredith out of the way and gives him a heart attack. You know what I mean? If you’re going to make a judo melodrama, why not crank up the stakes as high as they’ll go?
Ah, but maybe by saying that, I’m merely revealing my bloodthirsty North American nature. Sanshiro Sugata, Part Two is one of the very few Kurosawa films to contain white characters, and we do not come off very well: basically, all the whites in this film are overgrown, violent bullies who take an unseemly delight in humiliating helpless Japanese people. In the opening scene, an American sailor gives his rickshaw driver a verbal and physical thrashing until Sanshiro steps in and throws him off a dock; and not long after, we see an exhibition match between an American boxer and an older, clearly overmatched Japanese jujitsu fighter, who goes down to a very undignified defeat. Interestingly, Lister, the boxer, isn’t really the villain in this situation; he’s merely a stand-in for an entire way of life that Sanshiro finds disgusting — fighting as sensational bloodsport, a way of stoking onlookers’ crudest, most animalistic appetites.
That’s part of what’s so interesting about Sanshiro as a character — he’s a great fighter who seems to hate fighting. No one can defeat him in the ring, but once the match is over, his victories fill him with such guilt that in the long run, it’s as if his opponents have defeated him psychologically. Only at the very end of the movie, after Sanshiro spends a long, cold, but conciliatory night sleeping in a hut with the Higaki brothers, whom he has just defeated, does he finally find enough inner peace to allow himself to feel the exhilaration of victory. The final shot is a close-up of Susumu Fujita as he looks up into the sky and his face breaks into an uncharacteristically unrestrained grin. But as Stephen Prince observes in his notes on the film for the AK100 booklet, Sanshiro’s triumph would be witnessed by very few moviegoers; when the film was released in 1945, most of Japan’s movie theatres had been reduced to rubble.
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