Ikiru (Akira Kurosawa, 1952)

Takashi Shimura in Ikiru

Cast: Takashi Shimura, Shin'ichi Himori, Haruo Tanaka, Minoru Chiaki, Miki Odagiri, Yunosuke Ito, Bokuzen Hidari, Minosuke Yamada, Kamatari Fujiwara, Makoto Kobori, Nobuo Kaneko, Nobuo Nakamura, Kyoko Seki. Screenplay: Akira Kurosawa, Shinobu Hashimoto, Hideo Oguni. Cinematography: Asakazu Nakai. Production design: Takashi Matsuyama. Film editing: Koichi Iwashita. Music: Fumio Hayasaka.

Takashi Shimura, one of the finest actors in Akira Kurosawa's films, often took a back seat to the more flamboyant and handsome Toshiro Mifune, but he gets a chance to shine on his own in Ikiru. It's a story of growing old, a topic more prominent in the films of Yoshijiro Ozu than in Kurosawa's -- at least until Kurosawa began to age. Shimura's Kanji Watanabe is a bureaucrat with a rather greedy and unloving family who learns that he has terminal stomach cancer and decides that he wants to experience life before he dies. Hedonism doesn't work out for him, so he turns to service to others, particularly the people he has seen over the years shoved around by the bureaucracy of which he is a part. It's a somewhat more satiric film than most of Kurosawa's, but also somewhat more didactic. Nevertheless, it's held together by Shimura's fine performance.

I Live in Fear (Akira Kurosawa, 1955)

Toshiro Mifune and Takashi Shimura in I Live in Fear

Kiichi Nakajima: Toshiro Mifune
Dr. Harada: Takashi Shimura
Jiro Nakajima: Minoru Chiaki
Toyo Nakajima: Eiko Miyoshi
Sue Nakajima: Kyoko Aoyama
Yoshi Nakajima: Haruko Togo
Kimie Nakajima: Noriko Sengoku
Asako Kuribayashi: Akemi Negishi
Ryoichi Sayama: Hiroshi Tachikawa
Old Man From Brazil: Eijiro Tono

Director: Akira Kurosawa
Screenplay: Shinobu Hashimoto, Fumio Hayasaka, Akira Kurosawa, Hideo Oguni
Cinematography: Asakazu Nakai
Production design: Yoshiro Muraki
Music: Masaru Sato, Fumio Hayasaka

In some ways, I wish Toshiro Mifune and Takashi Shimura had swapped roles in Akira Kurosawa's I Live in Fear. It would have been an easy exchange: Mifune, at 35, would have fit into the role of the dentist trying to mediate between a cranky patriarch and his family, and the 50-year-old Shimura could well have played the patriarch, a man a couple of decades his senior. Instead, we get distracted away from the story -- and the message it is somewhat heavy-handedly trying to convey -- by the fact that Mifune, the vital young actor from Rashomon (1950) and Seven Samurai (1954), films that made him an international star, is playing a man twice his age -- a tour de force not only of acting but also of costuming and makeup. This is not to say that Mifune doesn't do a fine job of it, slumping his body into an elderly arthritic crouch, peering through thick glasses with his face set in a perpetual scowl. It's true that Mifune brings a necessary virility to the role of Kiichi Nakajima, who has produced a large and recalcitrant group of offspring, including not only his legal family but also children from at least three mistresses. They come together to protest Nakajima's decision to sell everything and move to Brazil, where he thinks they will be safest from the nuclear holocaust that he believes to be imminent. Shimura's Dr. Harada, who has volunteered to serve on an arbitration panel for family court, is tasked with deciding on the family's claim that Nakajima is mentally incompetent. The problem with the film is not only that Mifune's performance seems like a misstep in casting, but also that the theme of the film is too large for the domestic melodrama of the story to carry. It asks whether Nakajima is insane for being so obsessed with the Bomb, or are we insane for not being more obsessed with it? During the postwar occupation Japanese filmmakers had been prohibited from even mentioning the atomic bomb, but when they were finally freed to deal with what had happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki they found, as filmmakers from other countries have also done, that the topic tends to overwhelm attempts to put it in dramatic form. I Live in Fear is an honorable attempt, and the scenes in which Nakajima fights with his family are well-written and -acted. But the dramatic resolution feels freighted with too much striving for symbolic resonance: Harada visits Nakajima at the rather grim mental institution to which he has been committed and which Nakajima thinks is another planet, and when the sun shines through his barred window, he takes it to be the Earth on fire. To date, only the satirists have been able to give a dramatic shape to our nuclear madness.

One Wonderful Sunday (Akira Kurosawa, 1947)

Isao Numasaki and Chieko Nakakita in One Wonderful Sunday

Yuzo: Isao Numasaki
Masako: Chieko Nakakita
Yamamoto: Atsushi Watanabe
Dessert Shop Owner: Zeko Nakamura
Yamiya: Ichiro Sugai
Dance Hall Manager: Masao Shimizu
Waif: Shiro Mizutani
Sono: Midori Ariyama
Apartment Superintendent: Toshi Mori

Director: Akira Kurosawa
Screenplay: Akira Kurosawa, Keinosuke Uekusa
Cinematography: Asakazu Nakai
Production design: Kazuo Kubo
Music: Tadashi Hattori

Akira Kurosawa's One Wonderful Sunday brings to mind two near-contemporary films: Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life (1946) and Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves (1948). In its own odd way, Kurosawa's film blends a bit of the fantasy of the Capra film with the neorealism of the De Sica, though it doesn't quite succeed in the attempt. All three are products of the postwar world. The Americans, having won the war, naturally put the stress on optimism; the Italians and the Japanese, having lost, and having been sunk in the economic crisis caused by losing, naturally put the stress on endurance, on clinging to shreds of hope. Kurosawa's protagonists are a young couple, Yuzo and Masako, who can't afford to get married, but pool their resources, a meager 35 yen, to try to enjoy a Sunday together. Yuzo's depression shadows the outing, but Masako is determined to cheer him up. She's a little bit bossy, however -- when they first get together at the train station, he has just picked up a half-smoked cigarette from the pavement, hoping to smoke it later, but she strikes it out of his hand. Then she drags him into a model home in a new housing development, even though it's well beyond their means and is, he notes, shoddily built. Their housing plight -- he lives with a friend, she with her sister's family -- is emphasized when they visit a place that has a room to rent, only to discover that it's only minimally livable and that they can't afford even that. But Yuzo manages to climb out of his depression when he finds a bunch of kids playing baseball in the street and joins their game. And so it goes through the day as they oscillate between depression and hope. A visit to what remains of the city's zoo confronts them with some sad-looking animals. A large, fat pig slumbers in a cage that used to belong to a lion, causing Yuzo to remark, "The world is run by pigs." And then it starts to rain. Yuzo suggests that they go to his place -- his roommate will be out until late, he says -- but Masako resists, angering him. Then she notices a poster for a concert featuring Schubert's Unfinished Symphony. They can afford the 10-yen tickets, so they run through the rain to the concert hall. But scalpers have bought up all the 10-yen tickets and are selling them for 15 yen, and when Yuzo protests, they beat him up. When they go to Yuzo's room after all, where Masako treats his wounds, he tries to persuade her to sleep with him and she leaves. More depressed than ever -- even the roof is leaking -- Yuzo broods until Masako returns, contrite, but her sobs make any further sexual moves impossible, so they decide to spend the last of their money in a coffee shop. Even there, they are stymied: The coffee shop bills them for café au lait, instead of the regular coffee they thought they ordered, so Yuzo leaves his overcoat, saying he'll return the next day to make good on the bill. Now penniless, they begin to live in their dreams. They pretend that the ruins of a house are the coffee shop they want to open some day and, discovering an old band shell, try to pretend that Yuzo is conducting the performance of Schubert's Unfinished that they missed. At this point, Kurosawa departs from neorealism and has Masako address the movie audience directly: If they'll applaud for all the sad, impoverished lovers in the world, then she and Yuzo will be able to hear the music he's pretending to conduct. It works, and they hear the music. They part as the film ends, promising each other to meet again next Sunday. In fact, Kurosawa's borrowing from Peter Pan and asking for the audience's applause didn't work in Japan, where audiences were simply puzzled, though when the film was shown in France years later, French audiences responded enthusiastically. The sentimentality of One Wonderful Sunday is hardly characteristic of Kurosawa, but it's tempered by some masterly use of locations -- blended with more stylized studio sets -- and good performances by the leads: Isao Numasaki, in fact, does manage to evoke both James Stewart in Capra's film and Lamberto Maggiorani in De Sica's, even though he couldn't have seen the latter and probably didn't see the former. There are moments when Kurosawa prolongs the depression of Yuzo and Masako a bit too much, and the film seems a little overextended for the slightness of its narrative, but it's clearly a formative work for a master director, as well as a heartfelt depiction of the plight of his country.

Ran (Akira Kurosawa, 1985)

Jinpachi Nezu and Mieko Harada in Ran

Lord Hidetora Ichimonji: Tatsuya Nakadai
Taro Takatora Ichimonji: Akira Terao
Jiro Masatora Ichimonji: Jinpachi Nezu
Saburo Naotora Ichimonji: Daisuke Ryo
Lady Kaede: Mieko Harada
Lady Sué: Yoshiko Miyazaki
Shuri Kurogane: Hisashi Igawa
Kyoami: Pîtâ
Tango Hirayama: Masayuki Yui

Director: Akira Kurosawa
Screenplay: Akira Kurosawa, Hideo Oguni, Masato Ide
Based on a play by William Shakespeare
Cinematography: Asakazu Nakai, Takao Saito, Shoji Ueda
Production design: Shinobu Muraki, Yoshiro Muraki
Film editing: Akira Kurosawa
Music: Toru Takemitsu
Costume design: Emi Wada

Lavish in color and pattern, Ran may be Akira Kurosawa's most pictorial film, to the point that the images and costumes and sets sometimes threaten to overwhelm the human drama at its core. To the extent that this is Kurosawa's second effort at translating a Shakespeare play into medieval Japanese terms, I have to say that I prefer his adaptation of Macbeth, the 1957 Throne of Blood, to this reworking of King Lear. It seems to me that in Ran, Kurosawa stumbles over the analogous figures from Shakespeare in ways that he doesn't in his earlier film. Turning Lear's daughters into Hidetora's sons robs much of the delicacy and painful sadness of the Shakespeare play, especially in the final reunion of Lear and Cordelia. And King Lear is a more complex play than Macbeth, with its intricate subplot involving Gloucester and his sons, and the multiple intrigues of the households of Goneril and Regan. Kurosawa has pared down and fused some of these secondary stories, but he still loses sight at times of his central figure, the Lear analog, Lord Hidetora. Tatsuya Nakadai is unquestionably one of the world's great film actors, but he's too sturdy a figure for the enfeebled Hidetora, and the stylized old-age makeup often hides his features -- except for the great, glaring eyes. There are grand things, however, in the film, including a wonderfully villainous performance by Mieko Harada as the Lady Kaede, and a curiously effective Fool, performed by the androgynous actor-dancer known as Pîtâ.

Dersu Uzala (Akira Kurosawa, 1975)

Yuiy Solomin and Maksim Munzuk in Dersu Uzala

Capt. Vladimir Arseniev: Yuriy Solomin
Dersu Uzala: Maksim Munzuk
Anna Arsenievna: Svetlana Danilchenko
Vova Arseniev: Dmitriy Korshikov
Turtygin: Vladimir Kremena
Olenev: Aleksandr Pyatkov

Director: Akira Kurosawa
Screenplay: Akira Kurosawa, Yuriy Nagibin
Based on a book by Vladimir Arseniev
Cinematography: Fyodor Dobronravov, Yuriy Gantman, Asakazu Nakai
Production design: Yuriy Raksha
Film editing: Valentina Stepanova
Music: Isaac Schwarts

Dersu Uzala is at its best when it sticks to being an adventure story about the exploration of what was in 1902 an uncharted region of Russia: the extreme Far East bordering China on one side and the Sea of Japan on the other. Capt. Arseniev heads a company of soldier-engineers trying to establish the topography of the taiga, the forests of the region, when he encounters a permanent resident, a solitary hunter named Dersu Uzala, one of the people now known as the Nanai, but in the film called the Goldi. Dersu leads the surveyors through the taiga and uses his deep knowledge of the region to help them survive the changing seasons. Dersu saves Arseniev's life when the two of them are stranded on the shores of a frozen lake; with night coming on, Dersu has the captain join him in cutting tall grasses which they make into a kind of burrow that allows them to survive the fierce winds. Dersu and the captain reunite five years later when Arseniev returns to the region, and Dersu again saves the captain's life by shoving him from a raft that threatens to be swept away into river rapids. This time, the company of soldiers help Dersu, who clings to a branch in mid-river, make his way to shore. These two great action set pieces are the film's highlights, along with the engaging performance by Maksim Munzuk as the resourceful Dersu. Eventually, the story becomes a little mushy as Dersu begins to lose his sight, endangering his ability to survive alone in the forest. Arseniev persuades Dersu to come home with him to the city of Khabarovsk; Arseniev's wife and son welcome the old man, but the arbitrary demands of civilization are oppressive: Dersu rages, for example, against the fact that people pay for such things as water and firewood that he's used to helping himself to in the forest. This attempt at a critique of civilization feels obligatory and more than a little like a movie formula. But Kurosawa's mastery of blending action with personal drama helps the film over its boggy moments.

Throne of Blood (Akira Kurosawa, 1957)

Chieko Naniwa in Throne of Blood

Taketoki Washizu: Toshiro Mifune
Lady Asaji Washizu: Isuzu Yamada
Noriyashi Odakura: Takashi Shimura
Yoshiteru Miki: Akira Kubo
Kunimaru Tsuzuki: Hiroshi Tachikawa
Yoshiaki Miki: Minoru Chiaki
Kuniharu Tsuzuki: Takamaru Sazaki
The Ghost Woman: Chieko Naniwa

Director: Akira Kurosawa
Screenplay: Hideo Oguni, Shinobu Hashimoto, Ryuzo Kikushima, Akira Kurosawa
Based on a play by William Shakespeare
Cinematography: Asakazu Nakai
Production design: Yoshiro Muraki
Music: Masaru Sato

To call Throne of Blood the best film version of Shakespeare's Macbeth, as some have done, does a disservice to those filmmakers who have wrangled with the difficult beauty of Shakespeare's language, like Orson Welles in 1948 or even Justin Kurzel (who pretty much threw the language out of consideration) in 2015. But it also distorts Akira Kurosawa's achievement, which is not to provide us with a kind of Japanese Masterplots version of Macbeth, but to grasp the essence of Shakespeare's tormented vision of ambition and the limits of civilization. Moving the action from medieval Scotland to medieval Japan could be just as gimmicky as staging Shakespeare's play in the Old West or outer space, except that Kurosawa has the skill to make Throne of Blood stand on its own, even for those who have no knowledge of Shakespeare. It's an action film, a ghost story, and a portrait of a marriage -- the contrast of the blustering Washizu and his icy spouse is beautifully handled by Toshiro Mifune and Isuzu Yamada. And the final assault on Washizu is one of the most exciting -- and dangerous -- stunts ever pulled off by a director and a movie star, involving sharpshooting archers and careful choreography as Mifune battles his way through a forest of real arrows. We miss the language, of course -- Macbeth contains some of Shakespeare's most gorgeous speeches -- but Kurosawa gives us some compensations. 

Red Beard (Akira Kurosawa, 1965)

The influence of American movies on the work of Akira Kurosawa is well-known. His viewings of American Westerns, for example, helped shape such classics as Seven Samurai (1954) and Yojimbo (1961). But Red Beard seems to me an instance in which the influence wasn't so fortunate. It's a kind of reworking of MGM's series of Dr. Kildare movies of the 1930s and '40s, in which the ambitious young intern Dr. Kildare tangles with the crusty older physician Dr. Gillespie and thereby learns a few lessons -- a dynamic that persists today in TV series like Grey's Anatomy and soap operas like General Hospital. In Red Beard, ambitious young Dr. Noboru Yasumoto (Yuzo Kayama) is sent to work under crusty older Dr. Kyojo Niide (Toshiro Mifune), known as "Red Beard" for an obvious facial feature. It's the 19th century, the last years of the Tokugawa shogunate, and Yasumoto, having finished his studies in Nagasaki, expects that the influence of his father, a prominent physician, will land him a role as the shogun's personal physician. He's angry when he finds that he's been sent to a rural clinic that mainly serves the poor. There is one affluent patient at the clinic, however: a young woman known as "The Mantis" (Kyoko Kagawa) because she stabbed two of her lovers to death. Her wealthy father has built a house for her on the grounds of the clinic, but only Red Beard is allowed to approach and treat her. Yasumoto initially rebels against the assignment, feeling disgust for the patients: When he asks the physician he's replacing at the clinic what smells like "rotten fruit," he's told that that's the way the poor smell. But eventually (and predictably), he learns to respect the work of Red Beard and to value the lives of his patients. Red Beard is hardly a bad movie: Kurosawa brilliantly stages the first encounter of Yasumoto and The Mantis, who has escaped from her house, in a carefully framed sequence, a long take in which the doctor and the madwoman begin at opposite sides of the wide screen -- it's filmed in Tohoscope, an anamorphic process akin to Cinemascope -- with a tall candlestick between them. Gradually, accompanied by slow camera movements, the two approach each other, the doctor trying to gauge the motives and the sanity of the young woman. Finally the calm framing of the scene is shattered into a series of quick cuts, as she attacks with a pair of scissors, and the scene ends with a brief shot of Red Beard suddenly opening the door. Red Beard was shot by two acclaimed cinematographers, Asakazu Nakai and Takao Saito, both of whom frequently worked with Kurosawa, and the production design was by Yoshiro Muraki, who fulfilled Kurosawa's exacting demands for meticulous faithfulness to the period, including the construction of what was virtually a small village, using only materials that would have been available in the period. But what keeps Red Beard from the first rank of Kurosawa's films, I think, is the sentimental moralizing, the insistence of having the characters "learn lessons." Yasumoto, having learned his initial lesson about valuing the lives of the poor, is given a young patient, Otoyo (Terumi Niki), rescued from a brothel where she has essentially gone feral. (During the rescue scene, Kurosawa can't resist having his longtime star Mifune show off some of his old chops: The doctor takes on a gang of thugs outside the brothel and single-handedly leaves them with broken arms, legs, and heads. It's a fun scene, but not particularly integral to the character.) When Yasumoto has succeeded in teaching Otoyo to respond to kindness, it then becomes her turn to teach others what she has learned. The moralizing overwhelms the film, leaving us longing for the deeper insight into the characters found in films by Kurosawa's great contemporaries Yasujiro Ozu and Kenji Mizoguchi.

High and Low (Akira Kurosawa, 1963)

High and Low begins surprisingly, considering that Kurosawa is known as a master director of action, with a long static sequence that takes place in one set: the living room of the home of Kingo Gondo (Toshiro Mifune), an executive with a company called National Shoe. The sequence, almost like a filmed play, depicts Gondo's meeting with the other executives of the company, who are trying to take it over, believing that the "Old Man" who runs it is out of touch with the shoe market. Gondo, however, thinks the company should focus on well-made, stylish shoes rather than the flimsy but fashionable ones the others are promoting. After the others have gone, we see that Gondo has his own plan to take over the company with a leveraged buyout -- he has mortgaged everything he has, included the opulent modern house in which the scene takes place. But suddenly he receives word that his son has been kidnapped and the ransom will take every cent that he has. Naturally, he plans to give in to the kidnappers' demands -- until he learns that they have mistakenly kidnapped the wrong child: the son of his chauffeur, Aoki (Yutaka Sada). Should he go through with his plans to ransom the boy, even though it will wipe him out? Enter the police, under the leadership of Chief Detective Tokura (Tatsuya Nakadai), and the scene becomes a complicated moral dilemma. Thus far, Kurosawa has kept things stagey, posing the group of detectives, Gondo, his wife (Kyoko Kagawa), his secretary (Tatsuya Mihashi), and the chauffeur in various permutations and combinations on the Tohoscope widescreen. But once a decision is reached -- to pay the ransom and pursue the kidnappers -- Kurosawa breaks free from the confinement of Gondo's house and gives us a thrilling manhunt, the more thrilling because of the claustrophobic opening segment. The original title in Japanese can mean "heaven and hell" as well as "high and low," and once we move away from Gondo's living room we see that his house sits high on a hill overlooking the slums where the kidnapper (Tsutomu Yamazaki) lives, and from which he can peer into Gondo's house through binoculars. We return to the police procedural world of Stray Dog (Kurosawa, 1949), where sweaty detectives track the kidnapper through busy nightclubs and the haunts of drug addicts, and Kurosawa's cameras -- under the direction of Asakazu Nakai and Takao Saito -- give us every sordid glimpse. It's a skillful thriller, based on one of Evan Hunter's novels written under the "Ed McBain" pseudonym, done with a masterly hand. And while it's not one of Kurosawa's greater films, it has unexpected moral depth, enhanced by fine performances, including a restrained one by Mifune -- this time, the freakout scene goes to Yamazaki's kidnapper.

Stray Dog (Akira Kurosawa, 1949)

Toshiro Mifune and Takashi Shimura, who starred in Seven Samurai, appeared together five years earlier in this noir detective story. In a crowded bus on a sweltering day, Murakami (Mifune), a rookie homicide detective, has his gun stolen by a pickpocket. He gives chase but loses the thief, and shamefacedly has to report it to headquarters. To make matters worse, he soon discovers that the gun has been used in a robbery, wounding the victim. He begins a dogged search for the gun. In an extended sequence Kurosawa's depiction of police work takes us into the lower depths of post-war Tokyo as Murakami follows a lead that suggests the gun may have been sold on the underground gun market. Murakami's guilt becomes more intense after ballistics work reveals that his gun had been used in a robbery homicide and he witnesses the grief of the victim's husband. But he's teamed up with a veteran detective, Sato (Shimura), who persuades Murakami not to quit the force and accompanies him in an effort to retrieve the weapon. It's not only a well-made thriller but also a complex portrait of the lingering effects of the war on the Japanese populace, peering into sleazy nightclubs and cobbled-together hovels. Mifune and Shimura are a fine team, with the former far more restrained than he was in Seven Samurai and the latter adding a deeper note of warmth to the quiet integrity he demonstrated as the leader of the samurai band. Keiko Awaji plays the nightclub dancer who knows the hangouts of the gunman (Isao Kimura, who played the naive young samurai Katsushiro in the later film) but is reluctant to give him up. A vivid supporting cast and Asakazu Nakai's atmospheric cinematography make this more than just a skillful reworking of an American genre movie.    

Seven Samurai (Akira Kurosawa,1954)

It's a truism -- one that I've often echoed -- that silent movies and talkies constitute two distinct artistic media, and to judge the one by the standards of the other is an error. But it's almost impossible to watch films made by older directors, especially those who came of age when silent films were being made, without noticing the efforts they make to tell their stories without speech. It's true of John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, and Howard Hawks, even though they, especially Hawks, became masters of dialogue in their films. And it's true of Kurosawa, who although he didn't begin his career in films until 1936 and directed his first one in 1943, was born in 1910 and grew up with silent movies. I think it helped him learn the universals of storytelling that are independent of language, so that he became the most popular of all Japanese filmmakers. Others rank the work of Ozu or Mizoguchi more highly, but Kurosawa's films manage to transcend the limitations of subtitles more easily. Of none of his films is this more true than Seven Samurai, which is also generally regarded, even by those with reservations about Kurosawa's work, as his masterpiece. That's not a word I use lightly, but having sat enthralled through the uncut version, three hours and 27 minutes long, last night, I'm willing to endorse it. It's an exhilarating film, with none of the longueurs that epics -- I'm thinking of Gone With the Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939) and Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean, 1962) -- so easily fall into. I don't know of any action film with as many vividly drawn characters, and that's largely because Kurosawa takes the time to delineate each one. It's also a film about its milieu, 16th-century Japan, although as its American imitation, The Magnificent Seven (John Sturges, 1960), shows, there's a universality about the antagonism between fighters and farmers. Kurosawa captures this particularly well in the character of Kikuchiyo (Toshiro Mifune), the would-be samurai who reveals in mid-film that he was raised as a farmer and carried both a kind of self-hate for his class along with a hatred for the arrogant treatment of farmers by samurai. Mifune's show-off performance is terrific, but the film really belongs to Takashi Shimura, who radiates stillness and wisdom as Kambei Shimada, the leader of the seven. There are clichés to be found, such as the fated romance of the young samurai trainee Katsushiro (Isao Kimura) and the farmer's daughter Shino (Keiko Tsushima), but like the best clichés, they ring true. Seven Samurai earned two Oscar nominations, for So Matsuyama's art direction and Kohei Ezaki's costumes, but won neither. Overlooking Kurosawa's direction, Shimura's performance, and Asakazu Nakai's cinematography is unforgivable, if exactly what one expects from the Academy.

No Regrets for Our Youth (Akira Kurosawa, 1946)

Setsuko Hara in No Regrets for Our Youth

No Regrets for Our Youth seems like an ironic title for a film made in a country that in 1946 had much to regret. It is, in fact, a kind of apologia for the students and intellectuals who resisted the rise of militaristic fascism in Japan, a fictionalized treatment of the "Takigawa incident" of 1933 -- an event that perhaps few in the West, except students of Japanese history, know about today. After a professor at the law school of Kyoto University was removed by the Japanese Ministry of Education for statements that the education minister regarded as "Marxist," other faculty members resigned and students went on strike. Kurosawa's film focuses on a professor (Denjiro Okochi), his daughter Yukie (Setsuko Hara), and two of his students, Itokawa (Akitake Kono) and Ryukichi Noge (Susumu Fujita), and spans the years from the incident at the university to the end of the war. It's unusual among Kurosawa's films in that the protagonist is a woman, Yukie, whose relationships with her scholarly father, the accommodating Itokawa, and the rebellious Noge are examined in detail. She chooses to join Noge in his revolt against the Japanese government, which leads to their imprisonment and his death, after which she seeks out his parents, peasants in a remote village. They have been shunned by the other villagers as "spies" and "traitors," but she defies them and helps Noge's parents survive, doing the backbreaking work of clearing land and planting rice. Setsuko Hara, who did some of her most memorable work for Yasujiro Ozu but also appeared in Kurosawa's 1951 film Hakuchi, based on Dostoevsky's The Idiot, is nothing short of phenomenal as Yukie, ranging from the young and flirtatious girl to the worn but determined survivor. Kurosawa, as usual, is a skilled storyteller -- he edited as well as directed the film. The cinematography is by Asakazu Nakai.