Rashomon Rides West: A Retrial for The Outrage

Legendary Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa (1910–1998) was shaped as much by American cinema as by Japanese tradition. American cinematic genres, be it the film noir, gangster pictures and above all, the Western coursed through his work. As a result, some of his masterpieces proved unusually hospitable to remakes.

Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (1954) became ‘The Magnificent Seven’ (1960) while his ‘Yojimbo’ (1961) - itself indebted to Dashiell Hammett’s 1929 novel Red Harvest with shades of the 1958 Randolph Scott Western Buchanan Rides Alone - had a completely different recycled life as Sergio Leone’s ‘A Fistful of Dollars.’ This film not only kickstarted the European ‘Spaghetti Western’ genre but also turned a little-known television actor named Clint Eastwood into a global star.

It was perhaps inevitable that ‘Rashomon’ (1950), Kurosawa’s most radical and philosophically unsettling work based on the classic Japanese writer Ryūnosuke Akutagawa short story, would invite an American response.

Yet, the American reincarnation, ‘The Outrage’ (1964), has long endured disdain as an ill-advised remake of a sacred text. Directed by Martin Ritt, the film transposed Kurosawa’s timeless Japanese parable of truth and self-deception to the scrubland of the American Southwest in the late 19th century.

It was adapted not directly from the film but from the Fay and Michael Kanin Broadway play Rashomon (1959). Like the Japanese classic, the plot centres on a rape and a murder, retold by four witnesses whose testimonies never align. Each version reveals less about the crime than about the teller. These competing accounts unfold in flashback, and are told by three men sheltering from a storm, whose arguments over truth and human nature echo the film’s moral disquiet.

At the centre stands Juan Carrasco (played by an almost unrecognisable Paul Newman), a Mexican bandit accused of the assault of a woman (Claire Bloom) and the death of her husband (Laurence Harvey). Carrasco recounts the episode as a swaggering triumph of brute vitality. The husband, speaking through a medium, casts himself as an honour-bound aristocrat driven to suicide by disgrace. The woman’s version, alternately fragile and calculating, portrays abandonment by two men more loyal to pride than pity. A final, supposedly neutral witness offers a sober correction only to expose how even objectivity bends under the weight of self-interest.

At the time of its release, ‘The Outrage’ was generally met with critical hostility. Yet six decades on, it looks every bit a diamond in the rough - uneven, but thoroughly engrossing.

Much of the controversy rests on Paul Newman’s performance, cast against type as a Mexican bandit, based on Toshiro Mifune’s feral outlaw Tajōmaru in the original.

Newman was then at the height of his stardom, with three Best Actor nominations behind him and fresh from his iconic turns in ‘The Hustler’ (1961) and ‘Hud’ (1963). But in ‘The Outrage,’ Newman was accused of hamming it up, with his thick Mexican bandido accent, darkened skin, crooked teeth and a manic grin which seems to lend itself to a parody. In fact, his first appearance in the film – handcuffed to a tree stump and almost insouciantly listening to the charges against him - is startling.

Whatever critics may say, Newman stoutly defended the performance, and with good reason. Like Mifune’s bandit, his Carrasco is a grotesque projection of masculine bravado and myth-making. Newman committed himself fully, researching and pouring heart and soul into a role that risked absurdity in pursuit of something stranger and more unsettling.

Indeed, if one looks beyond his eight Oscar-nominated performances and his beloved blockbusters with Robert Redford, Newman’s so-called ‘misfires’ showcase some of his most interesting turns. One that immediately comes to mind is the eerily prescient ‘WUSA’ (1970) - a paranoid political drama that also featured Laurence Harvey. ‘The Outrage’ belongs to the same risky company.

Harvey, at the height of his success following his Oscar-nominated turn in ‘Room at the Top’ (1959) and the even more consequential ‘The Manchurian Candidate’ (1962), plays the wronged husband with icy hauteur.

The film’s scene-stealer is the stalwart Edward G. Robinson as the wonderfully cynical, though compassionate con-man who anchors the film.

As a staunch, yet hard-nosed liberal who consistently chose pungent themes dealing with truth, power and moral compromise, Ritt – who made such complex films like ‘The Spy who Came in from the Cold’ (1965) and ‘Sounder’ (1972) - was an ideal American interpreter of Kurosawa. While Kurosawa’s original remains a masterclass in cinematic form and moral inquiry that rewards endless rewatching, Ritt’s version is a worthy attempt that should be a bracing rediscovery.