Kōji Mitsui

Kōji Mitsui (as Hideo Mitsui) in Dragnet Girl.

The son of a Shochiku movie theater owner, Mitsui joined the studio in 1924, making his film debut in 1925 under the name Hideo Mitsui (三井秀男).[3] His short stature, soft features, and expressive face and voice suited him for rebellious “younger brother” roles, and he appeared as a youth lead in many silent and early sound films, notably in several Yasujirō Ozu classics[4] and the “Yota” series, about the antics of a trio of young idlers that also included Akio Isono and Shōzaburō Abe.[3]

Mitsui eventually left Shochiku, returning in 1948 as Kōji Mitsui (三井弘次) and transitioning into character roles.[3] In 1954 he joined other Shochiku performers to create the Madoka (Picture-Perfect) Group, a film production company intended to bring stability to their profession.[5]

Like many popular character actors of post-war Japan, Mitsui occasionally headlined minor films[6][7] but most often shone in key supporting parts. In 1957, Akira Kurosawa borrowed Mitsui from Shochiku to play the pivotal role of Yoshisaburo the gambler in The Lower Depths, whose final line in the film—annoyed that the suicide of one of the characters has ruined their party—is “always shocking, always devastating when viewed,” and Mitsui's delivery, which breaks the fourth wall, is “absolutely on target: ironic, cruel, funny, horrible.”[8] Kurosawa subsequently borrowed Mitsui (who had appeared in a small part in the director's 1950 Shochiku film Scandal) for five more of his Toho films.[8]

Mitsui often played drunken scenes, notably as a “one-scene wonder” in Kurosawa's Red Beard (1965). Life sometimes imitated art; confronted by director Kaneto Shindo over increasingly unusable takes during a drinking scene, Mitsui said, “What’s the difference between doing what you say and actually doing it?”[9] Notoriously, he was the actor (unnamed in Stuart Galbraith IV’s The Emperor and the Wolf[8]) who drunkenly called Kurosawa a “coward” at his home for not wanting to make any more movies following the failure of 1970's Dodes'ka-den (in which Mitsui had a cameo), after which the director tried to commit suicide—and a horrified Mitsui rushed to his side.[9]

In 1971, Mitsui underwent gastric ulcer surgery, further affecting a film career that had slowed by the late 1960s. He increasingly guest-starred on television programs, having appeared on more than 100 shows by the time he played his final role in 1978.[10] When he died in 1979, among the survivors was his younger brother Tadao Mitsui, a renowned anatomist who had studied as a Fulbright scholar at the University of Washington.[11]

In 1957 Mitsui won the Mainichi Film Award for Best Supporting Actor for The Lower Depths as well as his performances in two films directed by Minoru Shibuya, Kichigai buraku (The Unbalanced Wheel) and Seigiha (Righteousness).[3]

That year he also won the Blue Ribbon Award for Best Supporting Actor for The Lower Depths and Kichigai buraku.[3] With these two awards for The Lower Depths, Mitsui was able to distinguish himself among the top performers in Japanese cinema, whom Kurosawa had selected and dress-rehearsed on-set for 60 days to create the ultimate acting ensemble.[12]

Mitsui's onscreen credit in the trailer for Kobayashi's The Human Condition.

Mitsui's portrayal of the lazy nihilist in The Lower Depths is well-remembered as a showcase for his improvisational talents and his “strange and yet hypnotic,” “oboe-like,”[8] “beautiful voice with its unique charm and sense of rhythm.”[13] The film's final act becomes a tour de force for Mitsui, who mockingly impersonates Bokuzen Hidari (whose character's humanistic influence has been defeated by the gambler's cynicism), leads the remaining denizens in song, and ends the film with his brutal remark. According to frequent co-star Kyōko Kagawa, he was “fabulous” in the film and “great in any role.”[8]

Mitsui's largest part for Kurosawa after The Lower Depths was the lead journalist who comments on the wedding reception that opens The Bad Sleep Well (1960); his role as a sarcastic observer was noted by Kurosawa scholar Donald Richie to parallel traits of Yoshisaburo the gambler in the prior film,[14] and Mitsui's “particularly enthralling”[15] performance helped to associate his legacy with sardonic characters as well as boozy ones.

Mitsui was a voice actor in Japan's first sound cartoon, Chikara to Onna no Yo no Naka (1933; now lost), and appeared in Japan's first color film, Carmen Comes Home (1951). A star of Ozu's 1934 original silent version of A Story of Floating Weeds, he was stunt-cast in the director's own widely acclaimed 1959 color remake, Floating Weeds, which Roger Ebert named as one of the ten greatest films of all time.[16]

Mitsui was featured as a seppuku second in footage pulled from pre-war jidaigeki films that was edited into Frank Capra's World War II propaganda film Know Your Enemy: Japan (1945).

In 2008, Mitsui was one of the actors commemorated in the Seven Supporting Characters film festival held at the now-defunct[17] Cinema Artone in Tokyo's Shimokitazawa entertainment district.[18]

In media coverage of the 2017-2018 TV Tokyo reality series “The Supporting Actors,” which featured six popular character actors living together, the stars repeatedly cited Kōji Mitsui as a major influence and an example of a distinctive and superlative member of their profession.[19][20]

At a 2017 event, the actor Tatsuya Nakadai stated that during the filming of Kurosawa's 1963 High and Low, he felt added pressure having to deliver a 10-minute monologue because Mitsui was in the scene.[21] The two also appeared onscreen together in Kobayashi’s The Human Condition (1959) and The Inheritance (1962), as well as Okamoto’s Battle of Okinawa (1971); in 1975, Nakadai appeared in a stage production of Gorky’s The Lower Depths as the gambler character who was closely associated in Japan with Mitsui’s portrayal in Kurosawa’s 1957 film version.

In addition to his many performances for prominent directors such as Kurosawa, Ozu, Kobayashi, and Kinoshita, Mitsui is best known to Western audiences as the duplicitous village elder in Hiroshi Teshigahara's Oscar-nominated[22] Woman in the Dunes (1964), for which he received above-the-title billing on the original film poster along with stars Eiji Okada and Kyōko Kishida.[23]

• Kōji Mitsui at IMDb