Nakadai, a Stalwart of Japanese Cinema, Arrives in New York

From samurai showdowns to yearning melodramas, Akira Kurosawa to Masaki Kobayashi, the Japanese actor Tatsuya Nakadai has been, at his best, a chameleon of genre, mood, and directorial style. Film Forum’s long-planned multi-week series devoted to this versatile, handsome star, which begins Friday, harvests his 50-year career to yield a healthy portion of the most satisfying output from a reliable boom time in Japanese cinema.The 75-year-old Mr. Nakadai, who lives in Japan but will appear in person at the theater for the first week of the program, enjoyed what has become a storied start in the movies. Trained for the stage, the actor’s exponential rise from smaller roles in the mid-1950s (and a walk-on in Kurosawa’s 1954 classic “Seven Samurai”) to anchoring the near-10-hour 1959-61 war epic “The Human Condition” is only the half of it. During the three years spent making Kobayashi’s multipart monster, he also tucked away the one-two samurai thrust of “Yojimbo” and its one-upping sequel, “Sanjuro.”Bookend all that with circumscribed but standout roles as a lonely soldier in Mikio Naruse’s “Untamed” (1957) and as an indefatigable detective in “High and Low” (1963) opposite Toshiro Mifune, and it becomes clear that Mr. Nakadai, who has appeared in more than 100 films in total, was not only filling hungry needs from disparate directors, but operating during a privileged era.“His career provides an overview of a golden age,” Film Forum’s irrepressible repertory programmer, Bruce Goldstein, whose series is co-presented with Japan Foundation and features fresh prints and rare imports, said. “And you can see that the directors love him. He has more close-ups than any superstar I’ve seen.”What the close-ups captured — unbroken gazes that induce heightened attention, by turns lilting and taut physicality, intense focus or imploring poses — depended partly on the director. But “Harakiri” (1962), which launches the series, throws Mr. Nakadai’s range into near-binary relief all by itself through its flashback structure. We see his Edo swordsman as a doting family man contorted by misfortune and upheaval one moment, and then as a sober but sardonic judge and rampaging executioner of the corrupt feudal house that would see him die.Mr. Nakadai’s scruffy, solitary samurai is the film’s retributive storyteller, wresting the plot from his own tragic fate, while Kobayashi’s reframing camera itself suggests that the mansion rooms and courtyard of the broken samurai clan are morally bankrupt rather than just stringently spare. This skill for drawing and directing our attention is one of Mr. Nakadai’s deceptively simple strengths as a genre stalwart: In the outré mask-transplant tale of Hiroshi Teshigahara’s “The Face of Another” (1966), we are hyperaware of his perversely liberated character witnessing his life as we witness it, too.Never mind such an extreme scenario — Mr. Nakadai’s famous eyes can always draw us in and reflect us away at the same time, from his torch-carrying nightclub manager in Mikio Naruse’s melodrama “When a Woman Ascends the Stairs” (1960) to his embattled King Lear proxy in Kurosawa’s “Ran” (1985). Mr. Nakadai’s potential for portraying a startled remove also serves comedy well, as in Kon Ichikawa’s “I Am a Cat” (1975), about a frustrated intellectual. (The three Ichikawa films at Film Forum, incidentally, can also serve as a partial memorial to the director, who died in February.)Mr. Nakadai’s role in “Ran,” which screens along with a few other selections from the ’70s and ’80s, might be the one most remembered in America, but his contribution to cinema probably rests most solidly on his work in the ’60s. Indeed, for a period after his heady run in that decade, Mr. Nakadai seemed to scale back his efforts in response to what he saw as a cinematic landscape changing — and not for the better.“He himself said that, in the mid-’60s, something happened to Japanese cinema,” Mr. Goldstein said. “He started playing golf. He didn’t retire, but he took it easier in the late ’60s and then came back. But he’s never stopped working.”Indeed, Mr. Nakadai remains active in Japan today, both onstage and in television. He also runs his own theater company and school. On his trip for this series, the avowed fan of New York will attend a variety of related events here and in Washington, D.C., along with an appearance by another piece of walking Japanese history, Teruyo Nogami, Kurosawa’s closest associate, who started as his script supervisor on “Seven Samurai.”Film Forum’s series kicks off a fortuitous summer of the rising sun that includes a strong edition of the Japan Cuts festival at Japan Society, animated features by Satoshi Kon and classic restorations from the Kawakita Memorial Film Institute at the Walter Reade Theater, and numerous must-sees at the New York Asian Film Festival. The Nakadai program holds its own nicely, whether as a primer of Japanese classics or as an exciting collection of favorites and rarities for longtime fans.Through August 7 (209 W. Houston St., between Sixth Ave. and Varick Street, 212-727-8110).

Nakadai, a Stalwart of Japanese Cinema, Arrives in New York

Nakadai, a Stalwart of Japanese Cinema, Arrives in New York

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