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.

Sanjuro (Akira Kurosawa, 1962)

Toshiro Mifune, Takako Irie, and Reiko Dan in Sanjuro

Sanjuro: Toshiro Mifune
Hanbei Muroto: Tatsuya Nakadai
The Spy: Keiju Kobayashi
Iori Izaka: Yuzo Kayama
Chidori: Reiko Dan
Kurofuji: Takashi Shimura
Takebayashi: Kamatari Fujiwara
Mutsuta's Wife: Takako Irie
Kikui: Masao Shimizu
Mutsuta: Yunosuke Ito

Director: Akira Kurosawa
Screenplay: Ryuzo Kikushima, Hideo Oguni, Akira Kurosawa
Based on a novel by Shugoro Yamamoto
Cinematography: Fukuzo Koizumi, Takao Saito
Production design: Yoshiro Muraki
Music: Masaru Soto

Akira Kurosawa's tongue-in-cheek Sanjuro is not so much a sendup of samurai films as it is an effort to carry a genre to its logical and sometimes absurd extremes, the way the James Bond movies took spy films to a point of exciting but improbable and often comic point of no return. It reaches its peak in the final combat between Sanjuro and Hanbei, with an explosion of gore (produced by a pressurized hose that nearly knocked actor Tatsuya Nakadai off his feet) that's surprising and shocking but also very funny once you put it in the context of the usual bloodless deaths of samurai films. But Kurosawa has made us aware of the just-a-movie unreality of Sanjuro's action throughout, with his careful arrangements of the nine samurai under the spell of the sloppy ronin who calls himself "Sanjuro Tsubaki," which means something like "30-year-old camellia," a name he makes up on the spot. The not-so-magnificent nine are always grouping themselves for the camera, either in little triple triads or in chains that fill the widescreen. Their arrangements come to annoy Sanjuro so much that once, when they're trying to sneak up on someone, he tells them not to move in single file behind him: "We look like a centipede!" In addition to Mifune's irresistible scene-stealing, there's a delightful comic performance by Takako Irie as Mutsuta's wife, dithery and concerned with propriety, but also with a fund of commonsense that Sanjuro wisely heeds. Tatsuya Nakadai is wasted as the villain who's the only plausible challenger to the hero -- a kind of Basil Rathbone to Mifune's Errol Flynn -- a role that otherwise doesn't give Nakadai much to do but glare at the fools he's allied with.