[Rashomon is a] torpid, stylish Japanese study in human frailty, like nothing so much as a tiny aquarium in which a few fish and a lot of plants have delicately been tinkered with by someone raised in Western art-cinema theaters and art galleries. Five characters, two unfrequented real-life sets—a ruined temple and a forest—and a script which is probably the first to describe a highly contrived sword-fight-and-seduction through the biased eyes of four different people. The villain is a conceited, slothful, bug-ridden bandit …—a type now familiar in Hollywood adventure-comedies about Mexico—who has a hard time pulling himself away from a good nap to ravish the wife of a traveling samurai. Makes its play for posterity with such carefully engineered actions as one in which the dozing barbarian scratches his crotch while the sword across his knees somehow rises (Maya Deren-fashion) as though it had...