Sansho the Bailiff

Sansho the Bailiff stands as a humanist landmark alongside something like Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali, which would come out a year later.

A masterpiece managed with exquisite patience, the film is slow-moving only in the sense that it doesn’t have to move for anybody; Mizoguchi’s hands and eyes search out every crevice along the eternal landscape, granting his characters clemency, or breaking their legs, based on the roll of an infinite-sided die.

Moving and atmospheric, this quest tale is among the best of its kind.

Told with the stark simplicity of a fairy tale, Sansho The Bailiff demonstrates how compassion can overcome the forces of hatred and oppression, and shows how trying it is to remain decent and humane in an inhospitable world.

Its impulses, which are profound but not transcendental, follow an esthetic program that is also a moral progression, and that emerges, with superb lucidity, only from the greatest art.

It employs the power of tragedy to enrich.

Legend, adventure and poetry fuse to make this engrossing, if overlong, film material.