Film noir is about bad people doing bad things for good reasons. Maybe it’s that sense of broken morality that drew Akira Kurosawa to the works of Dashiell Hammett, and why he converted the American author’s twisted classic, The Glass Key, to a story of rōnin and bandits in the fading day of Edo-era Japan. Maybe it’s the simplicity of the story that means there has never been a bad version of this story, and every filmmaker gets to tell their own version. Not that there could ever be a bad film with Toshiro Mifune cutting through soulless scum and setting them at each other’s throat, all at Kurosawa’s brilliant behest. – Richard Whittaker
Aug. 1, 3-4 & 7
