Critic Reviews

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.

At some point during the watching, "Sansho the Bailiff" stops being a fable or a narrative and starts being a lament, and by that time it is happening to us as few films do.

This is one of the greats, and I’m too much in awe of it to say much more than: See it—as often as you can.

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

Perhaps Kenji Mizoguchi's greatest achievement, SANSHO THE BAILIFF is a visually mesmerizing picture that pays great and careful attention to the smallest details of nature and environment, highlighted by Mizoguchi's use of the long take and deep-focus shots.

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.

The star, again, is Mizoguchi's favorite actress, Kinuyo Tanaka, and the style is magisterial, exquisitely controlled--with Mizoguchi moving the story inexorably to an almost sublimely redemptive climax. [24 Mar 2006, p.C7]

I have seen “Sansho” only once, a decade ago, emerging from the cinema a broken man but calm in my conviction that I had never seen anything better; I have not dared watch it again, reluctant to ruin the spell, but also because the human heart was not designed to weather such an ordeal.

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

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.