The Most Beautiful (Akira Kurosawa, 1944)

Yoko Yaguchi in The Most Beautiful

Noriko Mizushima: Takako Irie
Tsuru Watanabe: Yoko Yaguchi
Yuriko Tanimura: Sayuri Tanima
Chief Goro Ishida: Takashi Shimura
Soichi Yoshikawa: Soji Kiyokawa
Ken Shinida: Ichiro Sugai
Sachiko Yamazaki: Sachiko Ozaki
Fusae Nishioka: Shisuzo Nishigaki
Asako Suzumura: Asako Suzuki

Director: Akira Kurosawa
Screenplay: Akira Kurosawa
Cinematography: Joji Ohara
Production design: Teruaki Abe
Music: Seichi Suzuki

Akira Kurosawa's second feature film, The Most Beautiful, is a kind of docudrama, a vehicle for wartime Japanese propaganda demonstrating the virtues of duty and faithfulness to the war effort. But while it's hardly subtle, Kurosawa imbues it with feeling for his characters: the hard-working young women at a factory manufacturing optical instruments for the military. They grind and check lenses and assemble telescopes and bomb sights. By 1944, it was clear enough that Japan had taken on a greater military challenge than it had anticipated, and the managers of the factory are tasked with accelerating production. So they mandate a doubling of output for the male workers, and half of that for the women, who are mostly still girls. But some of the women, such as Watanabe, who is a leader among the workers, are insulted that their role should be so much lesser than that of the men, and they plead with the company to set a higher goal. The rest of the film is about maintaining morale in the face of illness and fatigue. Watanabe becomes a hero when she accidentally mislays one of the lenses she is calibrating and, fearful that the lens might be flawed, she insists on staying at work well into the night, checking all of the recently produced lenses until she locates it. It's to Kurosawa's credit that the film makes as much drama as it does out of the situation, but he shares much of the credit with Yoko Yaguchi's performance as Watanabe. (He also married Yaguchi after the film was finished.) Heavy on stereotypes and sentiment, with a little too much footage of the workers' fife-and-drum corps, The Most Beautiful is mostly of historical interest, though it has some genuinely affecting moments.

Sanshiro Sugata, Part Two (Akira Kurosawa, 1945)

Susumu Fujita and Osman Yusuf in Sanshiro Sugata, Part Two

Sanshiro Sugata   Susumu Fujita
Shogoro Yano :  Denjiro Okochi
Gennosuke Higaki / Tesshin Higaki : Ryunosuke Tsukigata
Genzaburo Higaki : Akitake Kono
Sayo Murai : Yukiko Todoroki
Yujiro Toda : Soji Kiyokawa 
Yoshima Dan : Masayuki Mori 
Buddhist Priest : Kokuten Kodo
American Sailor: Osman Yusuf 
William Lister: Roy James 

Director: Akira Kurosawa 
Screenplay: Akira Kurosawa 
Based on a novel by Tsuneo Tomita 
Cinematography : Takeo Ito 
Production design: Kazuo Kubo 
Film editing: Akira Kurosawa 
Music : Seiichi Suzuki

Patched together from what aging film stock could be gathered during the end-of-war shortages in Japan, and interrupted during its filming by bombing raids, Akira Kurosawa's Sanshiro Sugata, Part Two, was a labor imposed on the writer-director by the studio, Toho, which wanted a sequel to the hit Sanshiro Sugata (1943), and Kurosawa's lack of enthusiasm for the project shows. The story is routine: Sanshiro has helped judo triumph over jujitsu as the primary Japanese martial art, but he has gone into retreat for several years, honing his spirituality. But one day he comes across an American sailor beating up a rickshaw driver -- a job he once took on himself -- and thrashes the bully. This brings him to the attention of a promoter who wants to stage a fight between the judo master and an American boxer named William Lister. Eventually, after another fighter is beaten to a pulp by Lister, Sanshiro gives in and thrashes Lister, giving the prize money to the fighter who had been beaten. Meanwhile, his old opponent, Gennosuke Higaki, whom he defeated at the end of the first film, warns him that his brothers, Tesshin and Genzaburo Higaki, are out to revenge themselves for Gennosuke's defeat. They are masters of karate, which originated on Okinawa and was just making its way into mainland Japan at the time when the film is set, the late 19th century. Gennosuke gives Sanshiro a scroll depicting the basics of karate to help him in the eventual fight with the brothers. Naturally, the film concludes with a fight between Sanshiro and Tesshin -- the other brother is recovering from an epileptic seizure -- that takes place in the snow, an echo of the fight in the original film with Gennosuke in a windswept field of tall grasses. This battle is the only part of the film that shows much commitment on the part of Kurosawa, who insisted that the principals fight barefoot in the snow, not without many complaints from the actors. Unfortunately, the poor film stock, unable to provide shades of gray, turns much of this fight into a battle of silhouetted figures. Much has been made of the propaganda in the film, particularly the portrayal of the hapless American sailor and boxer, but Kurosawa, no lover of the imperial regime, manages to shift the film's emphasis to the fearsomely wild Higaki brothers.