Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (Martin McDonagh, 2017)

Sam Rockwell, Frances McDormand, and Zeljko Ivanek in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

Mildred Hayes: Frances McDormand
Bill Willoughby: Woody Harrelson
Jason Dixon: Sam Rockwell
Anne Willoughby: Abbie Cornish
Robbie Hayes: Lucas Hedges
Desk Sergeant: Zeljko Ivanek
Red Welby: Caleb Landry Jones
Chief Abercrombie: Clarke Peters
Charlie Hayes: John Hawkes
James: Peter Dinklage
Momma Dixon: Sandy Martin

Director: Martin McDonagh
Screenplay: Martin McDonagh
Cinematography: Ben Davis
Production design: Inbal Weinberg
Film editing: Jon Gregory
Music: Carter Burwell

Frances McDormand and Sam Rockwell got the Oscars they deserved: Mildred Hayes's sour persistence and Jason Dixon's stupidity make them just short of caricatures; they needed the nuances provided by McDormand and Rockwell to come to any semblance of life. But the performer who gives Martin McDonagh's Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri the grounding it needs is Woody Harrelson, one of those actors, like John Goodman or the late Bill Paxton, whose presence in the cast could make any movie just a little bit better. Chief Willoughby, the butt of Mildred's billboards, is not the dumb small-town police chief that we (and of course Mildred) first believe him to be. He's a more complex figure, who even achieves a measure of tragic grandeur with his suicide, carefully leaving a note on the hood he puts over his face to tell his wife not to remove it but to leave that to the police, and then leaving behind notes for his nemesis, Mildred, and for Dixon ("I'm dead now, sorry about that") that set the remainder of the film in motion. He gives McDonagh's acerbic screenplay a bit of warmth, though maybe not enough: I found Three Billboards a less satisfying film than the wonderful In Bruges (2008). But like that film, it has a fascinating texture provided by a supporting cast full of skillful players: Lucas Hedges as Mildred's somewhat exasperated son; Zeljko Ivanek as the desk sergeant trying to bring order out of the office chaos ("You do not allow a member of the public to call you a fuckhead in the station house"); Caleb Landry Jones as the advertising manager who gets the brunt of the town's protests and is tossed out of a window by Dixon; Clarke Peters as the level-headed new chief who manages to restore order after Willoughby's death; John Hawkes as Mildred's hair-trigger ex-husband encumbered with an air-headed girlfriend; Peter Dinklage as Mildred's suitor bearing up under constant reminders that he's a "midget"; and Sandy Martin as Dixon's demanding racist mother. There are also scenes that come out of nowhere, as when Mildred, tending the flowers at her billboards, carries on a tender, one-sided conversation with a deer that has wandered into the field and is watching her. In the runup to the Oscars, when it was a contender for best picture, Three Billboards encountered some criticism for not taking more seriously Dixon's treatment of black people, especially since the real town of Ferguson is in the same state as the fictional Ebbing. There's some justice to the charge that McDonagh is being insensitive, but satire is always insensitive. It's not a great film, I think, but maybe that judgment is premature. As Mildred says, "I guess we can decide along the way."

Call Me by Your Name (Luca Guadagnino, 2017)

Armie Hammer and Timothée Chalamet in Call Me by Your Name

Oliver: Armie Hammer
Elio: Timothée Chalamet
Mr. Perlman: Michael Stuhlbarg
Annella Perlman: Amira Casar
Marzia: Esther Garrel
Chiara: Victoire Du Bois
Mafalda: Vanda Capriolo
Anchise: Antonio Rimoldi
Mounir: André Aciman
Isaac: Peter Spears

Director: Luca Guadagnino
Screenplay: James Ivory
Based on a novel by André Aciman
Cinematography: Sayombhu Mukdeeprom
Production design: Samuel Deshors
Film editing: Walter Fasano

Nobody dies or gets beaten up in Luca Guadagnino's Call Me by Your Name, which makes it something of an advance on previous Oscar-nominated films about same-sex relationships such as Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee, 2005) and Moonlight (Barry Jenkins, 2016), which carried the implicit warning that being gay is dangerous. On the other hand, that's because the film's characters are people in a supposedly tolerant milieu, an haute middle-class academic family, not cowboys or residents of housing projects. Otherwise, we're still dealing with sexual "deviance" and its societal consequences, which in Elio's case include a sensitive and well-meaning Talk from his father, a phone call in which Oliver announces that he's going to marry a woman he's been seeing for a while, and an extended closing shot of Elio weeping into the fireplace. Don't get me wrong: I like Call Me by Your Name, in which Guadagnino and his handsome, skilled actors beautifully sustain a mood of sexual tension throughout the film. The problem I have with it is that it seems compromised by what its producers and director believe a mainstream film is allowed to show audiences these days. Put it another way, if the characters in the scene in which two people consummate their relationship were male and female, would the director have panned away from the bed to a window for a lingering view of a tree? That's a cliché as old as movie love scenes, redolent of a bygone era of censorship. So instead of watching even a discreetly filmed moment of sexual congress, which we've grown used to in "straight" movies -- all deftly angled closeups of apparently nude bodies and orgasmic faces -- we're treated like easily shocked children. It's especially noticeable after the director has already taken the usual discreet approach twice in scenes in which Elio has sex with Marzia. Reportedly, James Ivory's Oscar-winning screenplay specified full nudity and more explicit sex in the scenes with Elio and Oliver, but Guadagnino shied away. The result is a kind of emasculation of their relationship, turning Call Me by Your Name into all foreplay and no climax.

Baby Driver (Edgar Wright, 2017)

Jon Hamm, Eiza González, Ansel Elgort, and Jamie Foxx in Baby Driver

Baby: Ansel Elgort
Debora: Lily James
Doc: Kevin Spacey
Buddy: Jon Hamm
Bats: Jamie Foxx
Darling: Eiza González
Griff: Jon Bernthal
Joseph: CJ Jones
Eddie: Flea
JD: Lanny Joon

Director: Edgar Wright
Screenplay: Edgar Wright
Cinematography: Bill Pope
Production design: Marcus Rowland
Film editing: Jonathan Amos, Paul Machliss
Music: Steven Price

As the old moralizing adage has it, anything worth doing is worth doing well. But what if something is not worth doing? Do we really need another car-chase-crammed, Tarantino-tinged, hyperviolent heist thriller? Even if it's as well done as Edgar Wright's Baby Driver? Is "It held my interest" enough? If so, Baby Driver held my interest because Wright created some intriguing characters and assigned them to first-rate actors like Ansel Elgort, Jon Hamm, Jamie Foxx, and Kevin Spacey.* I could wish that they had been given more interesting things to do than commit crimes and try to kill one another off, or that we didn't have to sit through another insane demolition of bright shiny cars to find out who survives and how and why. I could wish for some backstory for Baby (né Miles) beyond the fact that he lost his bickering parents in a car crash and somehow wound up as driver for Doc and caregiver for a deaf-mute black man named Joseph. I could wish that the romance of Baby and Debora didn't seem so formulaic -- you've got a handsome young leading man so he must have a pretty girlfriend, one who puts them in jeopardy. Or I could just sit back and enjoy the thing, especially the wittily chosen music track and the way Wright fits the action to the tunes: The film has a credited choreographer, Ryan Heffington, and since there are no traditional dance numbers it seems that he was hired to help the actors move to the music -- in fact, the whole film was inspired by Wright's work on music videos.

*This may be Spacey's last major movie, given the many charges levied against him. Even Baby Driver is a little hard to watch without those coming to mind.

Here's to the Young Lady (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1949)

Setsuko Hara and Shuji Sano in Here's to the Young Lady

Keizo Ishizu: Shuji Sano
Yasuko Ikeda: Setsuko Hara
Sato: Takeshi Sakamoto
Goro: Keiji Sada
Yasuko's Mother: Chieko Higashiyama
Yasuko's Sister: Masami Morikawa
Yasuko's Brother-in-law: Junji Masuda
Yasuko's Father: Yasushi Nagata
Yasuko's Grandmother: Fusako Fujima
Yasuko's Grandfather: Sugisaku Aoyama
Bar Owner: Sachiko Murase

Director: Keisuke Kinoshita
Screenplay: Keisuke Kinoshita
Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda
Art direction: Motoji Kojima
Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara, Shizuko Osawa
Music: Chuji Kinoshita

Stop me if you've seen this one: A middle-aged working-class single man meets a pretty young woman from the upper classes and.... Okay, right. It's a romantic cliché, one that's so irresistible that Samuel Goldwyn once ordered a screenplay to be written on the basis of a title alone, The Cowboy and the Lady (H.C. Potter, 1938), and it's the inspiration for the teaming of Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn. But what sets Keisuke Kinoshita's Here's to the Young Lady apart is its country and time of origin: postwar Japan. In part the film is a manifestation of the occupying forces' desire to bring about a more egalitarian Japan, one in which a system of caste and class would be broken down, but it's also a reflection of economic reality in a recovering country whose male population had been decimated by the war. So Keizo Ishizu, a 34-year-old man who owns a thriving auto repair business and has dreams of getting into manufacturing, is introduced by his friend Sato to Yasuko Ikeda, from a cultured and educated family, as a potential wife. Ishizu is smitten instantly by the lovely but very shy young woman, but he also has doubts that she would ever be interested in him -- and he is sort of a schlub, whose chief recreation is drinking at his favorite bar. But then Ishizu visits Yasuko at her home and meets her family, learning that they are on the brink of financial disaster. Kinoshita starts with mostly long shots of the living room of the Ikeda home, but then switches to some shots from Ishizu's point of view that reveal the threadbare upholstery and well-worn furnishings. It turns out that Yasuko's father is in prison because after the war he was tricked into joining a company that was on the shady side. When its fraudulent practices were exposed, he honorably took the blame, even though it's suggested that he was ignorant of them. Moreover, a loan is about to come due, one that was taken out to help the family -- which includes Yasuko's mother, grandparents, sister and brother-in-law -- to survive. Ishizu has every reason to flee from this entanglement, but he's so taken with Yasuko that he agrees to court her for a while to see if their marriage would work out. She suggests that they go to the ballet, where he winds up in tears -- partly because he realizes that he can never be a match for her in culture. He takes her to a boxing match, where she winces at the violence but nevertheless winds up cheering for one of the fighters. And so on as obstacles to their marriage rise. We know how it will end, but Kinoshita makes that ending almost plausible, especially with the help of a talented cast that features the always magnificent Setsuko Hara. One blot on the film is the overbearing and sometimes inappropriate use of Chuji Kinoshita's repetitive score, augmented by the overuse of Chopin's Fantaisie-Impromptu in C# minor, the one spoiled for many of us by its use as the melody for the popular song "I'm Always Chasing Rainbows."

All the King's Men (Robert Rossen, 1949)

Broderick Crawford, John Ireland, and Mercedes McCambridge in All the King's Men

Willie Stark: Broderick Crawford
Jack Burden: John Ireland
Anne Stanton: Joanne Dru
Sadie Burke: Mercedes McCambridge
Tom Stark: John Derek
Adam Stanton: Shepperd Strudwick
Tiny Duffy: Ralph Dumke
Lucy Stark: Anne Seymour
Mrs. Burden: Katherine Warren
Judge Monte Stanton: Raymond Greenleaf
Sugar Boy: Walter Burke
Dolph Pillsbury: Will Wright
Floyd McEvoy: Grandon Rhodes

Director: Robert Rossen
Screenplay: Robert Rossen
Based on a novel by Robert Penn Warren
Cinematography: Burnett Guffey
Art direction: Sturges Carne
Film editing: Al Clark, Robert Parrish
Music: Louis Gruenberg

Where psychological realism is concerned, Robert Rossen's All the King's Men plays more like a temperance lecture than a political movie. One moment Willie Stark is a naive, teetotaling reformer, faithful to his wife, and the next he's a drunken, avaricious demagogue and womanizer. All it took was a bender and a hangover, along with a little bit of disillusionment about the reason he was being promoted as a gubernatorial candidate. It's possible, however, that some of the subtlety in the characterization of Willie Stark ended up on the editing floor. The first cut of the film was notoriously overlong -- over four hours -- until it was subjected to some ruthless editing from Robert Parrish, who was called in as "editorial adviser," receiving no screen credit but rewarded with an Oscar nomination. All the King's Men is still something of a ramshackle affair in its structure and character development. While it won the best picture Oscar, it's no masterpiece. What it is, however, is a moderately good entertainment, with some effective location filming by Burnett Guffey in various California settings, and a showcase for some good performances: Broderick Crawford as Willie and Mercedes McCambridge as his factotum (and sometimes mistress, if you know how to decode the censorship runarounds) won their own Oscars, and John Ireland was nominated. But the film falls apart where it comes to politics, never quite showing how Willie managed to con the voters into their avid support while stifling and even bumping off the opposition. Instead, we get sidetracked into the relationship between Jack Burden and Anne Stanton, the melodramatic suicide of her uncle, and her brother's transformation into an assassin. Maybe someday we'll get a solid portrayal of populist demagoguery in the movies, whether based on Huey P. Long or Donald J. Trump, but All the King's Men isn't it.

Clash by Night (Fritz Lang, 1952)

Robert Ryan and Barbara Stanwyck in Clash by Night 

Mae Doyle: Barbara Stanwyck
Jerry D'Amato: Paul Douglas
Earl Pfeiffer: Robert Ryan
Peggy: Marilyn Monroe
Joe Doyle: Keith Andes
Uncle Vince: J. Carrol Naish
Papa D'Amato: Silvio Minciotti

Director: Fritz Lang
Screenplay: Alfred Hayes
Based on a play by Clifford Odets
Cinematography: Nicholas Musuraca
Art direction: Carroll Clark, Albert S. D'Agostino
Film editing: George Amy
Music: Roy Webb

There's a wonderful directorial touch in the middle of Fritz Lang's Clash by Night that almost makes up for the talky melodrama of the rest of the film: Stealing from the romantic gesture executed by Paul Henreid in Now, Voyager (Irving Rapper, 1942), Lang has Robert Ryan light two cigarettes at once and hand one of them to Barbara Stanwyck. She looks at it with distaste for a moment, then tosses it over her shoulder, takes out her own pack of cigarettes, and lights one herself. It's possible that the moment is spelled out in Alfred Hayes's screenplay, or in the play by Clifford Odets on which it's based, but I like to think of it as Lang's own employment of Stanwyck's great gift for playing women in charge. In fact, Stanwyck's character, Mae Doyle, is hardly ever fully in charge -- she can't control her life because of the men in it, which she describes as either "all little and nervous like sparrows or big and worried like sick bears." The problem with Clash by Night is not the cast, which is uniformly watchable, or the direction, which does what it can with the material, particularly by exploiting the film's setting -- Monterey, the bay, the fishing fleet, and Cannery Row -- but the screenplay. It's full of Odets characters who can't resolve their internal conflicts but also can't stop talking about them. Even the secondary characters, like Jerry D'Amato's father and uncle, can't help putting in their two cents, often in florid Odetsian metaphor. The title of the film comes from Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach," in which the speaker laments the loss of faith in a world that has "neither joy, nor love, nor light, / Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain." It's a place where "ignorant armies clash by night." That bleak Victorian pessimism, however, doesn't translate very well to a story in which the clashing armies are men and women, a battle of the sexes that's a little too conventional in concept. Mae returns to her family home in Monterey, and immediately starts making a mess of things by attracting not only the good-hearted Jerry but also his cynical burnt-out friend Earl. Since Jerry is played by the somewhat schlubby Paul Douglas and Earl by the handsome Robert Ryan, we can see immediately where this is going to go, and the wait for it to get there gets a little tedious. There's also a rather pointless secondary plot involving Mae's brother, Joe, and his girlfriend, Peggy, who are played by Keith Andes and Marilyn Monroe. The backstories that stars and their personae bring to the roles they play are often valuable. Here, however, Marilyn's presence in the cast has unbalanced our subsequent reaction to the film, which can never be watched without the irrelevant knowledge of the actress's skyrocketing career, troubled relationship with her directors (including Lang, who terrified her so much that she vomited before performing a scene), and pitiable demise. Peggy is a small role, and she plays it well, but it was never meant to be the principal reason many people watch Clash by Night.

Le Petit Soldat (Jean-Luc Godard, 1963)

Michel Subor and Anna Karina in Le Petit Soldat

Bruno Forestier: Michel Subor
Veronica Dreyer: Anna Karina
Jacques: Henri-Jacques Huet
Paul: Paul Beauvais
Laszlo: László Szabó
Activist Leader: Georges de Beauregard

Director: Jean-Luc Godard
Screenplay: Jean-Luc Godard
Cinematography: Raoul Coutard
Film editing: Agnès Guillemot, Lila Herman, Nadine Trintignant
Music: Maurice Leroux

Le Petit Soldat was Jean-Luc Godard's second feature film, made in 1960 but held up by French censorship because of its political content until 1963. Its characters are dour and talky, but there's a great deal of life stirring in the film as they try to navigate the existential dilemmas they find themselves in. The protagonist, Bruno Forestier, is a kind of freelance soldier of fortune, a Frenchman exiled in Switzerland, not coincidentally Godard's country of birth. He poses as a photographer, and utters Godard's famous statement, "Photography is truth. And cinema is truth 24 times a second." Bruno woos the pretty Veronica Dreyer, a Danish woman who shares the surname of the great film director Carl Theodor Dreyer, by taking pictures of her. Blackmailed by French intelligence into assassinating a pro-Arab leader, he gets caught and tortured in scenes that are quite graphic: He's handcuffed in a bathtub and his hands are singed by the flame of a lighter, he's waterboarded, and he's given electric shocks. (Michel Subor, the actor who plays Bruno, evidently underwent all of these tortures, though not for the extended periods Bruno experiences.) Eventually he gets free and goes through with the planned assassination, having struck a deal with the French that he and Veronica can escape to Brazil, but in the meantime the French have discovered that she's been working with the Arabs and she's tortured to death. All of this is staged in the deadpan manner characteristic of early Godard, and with a certain amount of ironic humor, especially in the scenes in which a frustrated Bruno pursues his target in a car down two-lane French roads, never quite able to get alongside the target to take the shot. Clearly, there's a lot to chew on in Le Petit Soldat, a Godardian mélange of politics and sex and alienation -- Bruno says, looking in a mirror, "When I look myself in the face, I get the feeling I don't match what I think is inside." Whether you think it's worth watching -- and I do -- probably depends on your taste for mid-20th-century Angst.

The Princess Bride (Rob Reiner, 1987)

Fred Savage and Peter Falk in The Princess Bride

Westley: Cary Elwes
Buttercup: Robin Wright
Inigo Montoya: Mandy Patinkin
Prince Humperdinck: Chris Sarandon
Count Rugen: Christopher Guest
Vizzini: Wallace Shawn
Fezzik: André the Giant
Grandson: Fred Savage
Grandfather: Peter Falk
The Impressive Clergyman: Peter Cook
The Albino: Mel Smith
Miracle Max: Billy Crystal
Valerie: Carol Kane

Director: Rob Reiner
Screenplay: William Goldman
Based on a novel by William Goldman
Cinematography: Adrian Biddle
Production design: Norman Garwood
Film editing: Robert Leighton
Music: Mark Knopfler

Screenwriter William Goldman's death happened just a day or two after I watched The Princess Bride, and the film was mentioned in almost all of the newspaper articles about his life and career, on a par with the two movies that won him Oscars for screenwriting, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (George Roy Hill, 1969) and All the President's Men (Alan J. Pakula, 1976). But when it was released, The Princess Bride was something of a box office flop and got no attention from the Oscars. It has since become one of many people's most-loved movies, a beneficiary of its availability on home video. Countless parents who skipped it when it was in the theaters rented it for their kids and wound up watching it, too. Its huge success has been attributed to Rob Reiner's breezy direction, to the attractiveness of its cast, and to its immense quotability: Almost no one today utters the word "inconceivable" without expecting someone to reply, "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means." But most of all, The Princess Bride works because it's a celebration of storytelling, a reminder of the kind of transformation that a well-told story can bring about, the way the grandson in the film's frame story comes to regard his grandfather as more than an unwelcome cheek-pincher, and a "kissing book" can have unexpected rewards, especially since, as the boy puts it, "Murdered by pirates is good." Some unique chemistry of writing, acting, and directing has made The Princess Bride the classic of a subgenre, the spoofy movie, which has almost been played out by its imitators.

The Steel Helmet (Samuel Fuller, 1951)

Richard Loo, Richard Monahan, and James Edwards in The Steel Helmet

Sgt. Zack: Gene Evans
Pvt. Bronte: Robert Hutton
Lt. Driscoll: Steve Brodie
Cpl. Thompson: James Edwards
Sgt. Tanaka: Richard Loo
Joe: Sid Melton
Pvt. Baldy: Richard Monahan
Short Round: William Chun
The Red: Harold Fung

Director: Samuel Fuller
Screenplay: Samuel Fuller
Cinematography: Ernest Miller
Art direction: Theobold Holsopple
Film editing: Philip Cahn
Music: Paul Dunlap

We tend to think of the American civil rights movement as beginning on May 17, 1954, when the United States Supreme Court handed down the Brown v. Board of Education decision, declaring segregated schools illegal. But it's worth giving credit for the climate change that led to the decision to many precursors, including, of all things, the Hollywood film industry. Timid and tepid as "race-conscious" films like Pinky (Elia Kazan, 1949) and No Way Out (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1950) seem to us today, they were made by major directors, and showed a willingness to confront American racial conflict that would have been unwelcome a decade earlier. But maybe no movie suggests how profound that change in attitudes would become than Samuel Fuller's The Steel Helmet, an unabashedly low-budget movie, shot in ten days, by a director regarded as second-string and a producer, Robert L. Lippert, known as "The Quickie King." It's a war movie with all the clichés of the genre, including the old familiar melting-pot cast of soldiers, except that in the war movies of the 1940s, made as morale boosters, the ingredients in the melting pot were mostly of European origins: Irishmen, Italians, Swedes, and so on, and a mix of Catholics, Protestants, and Jews. But Fuller's Korean War-era melting pot added an African-American medic and a Japanese-American sergeant to the mix. And it directly confronted the issue of racial discrimination when a North Korean POW taunts both men about their lives back home. Granted, the response of the medic, Cpl. Thompson, is a little disappointing, essentially a these-things-take-time shrug, but the fact that a black actor, James Edwards, has been included in the cast, and on a more-or-less equal footing -- he sasses back when sassed -- is extraordinary. And the POW's mention of the American internment camps for Japanese-Americans is one of the first references in a movie to what was then still a little-known blot on American justice. Because Fuller is just so damn good at telling a story and keeping the action hot, all of this goes by without feeling like a blatant attempt to stir the liberal conscience. If his characters are stereotypical -- Sgt. Zack isn't much more than the hard-bitten, cigar-chomping old hand, and Lt. Driscoll is the greenhorn officer a bit out of his depth -- Fuller still knows how to put them into play. He works miracles with locations that are clearly not Korean or even Asian -- they were shot in Griffith Park in L.A. -- and with studio sets -- a door in the Buddhist temple slams and the wall visibly shakes. It's doubtful that The Steel Helmet converted any racists in the audience, but the fact that it must have got them into the theater at all -- it grossed more than $6 million on a budget of a little over $100 thousand -- is a tribute to Fuller.

The Living Magaroku (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1943)

Toshio Hosokawa and Ken Uehara in The Living Magoroku

Sagara Kiyomatsu: Ken Uehara
Sakabe Katsusuke: Toshio Hosokawa
Yoshihiro Onagi: Yasumi Hara
Makoto Onagi: Kurumi Yamabato
Mrs. Onagi: Mitsuko Yoshikawa

Director: Keisuke Kinoshita
Screenplay: Keisuke Kinoshita
Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda
Art direction: Osamu Motoki

There must have been Japanese movies of the 1940s that were as vicious about the American enemy as our war movies were about the Japanese, that had lines as callous as "Fried Jap coming down!" when a fighter pilot gets shot down in Howard Hawks's Air Force (1943), but we don't see them today. Instead we see the wartime work of directors like Keisuke Kinoshita and Akira Kurosawa, whose films seem surprisingly softcore in comparison with America's wartime movies. Sometimes in The Living Magoroku I think that Kinoshita is pulling a fast one on the military censors. This is a movie designed to support the war effort by encouraging people to forsake tradition and do things previously taboo like plant crops on sacred ground, but that's the least interesting plot thread. Instead, Kinoshita is always directing our attention elsewhere: to the psychosomatic illness of Yoshihiro, or to the young couple whose plans to marry are thwarted by convention, or even to the mystique of ancient swords. Granted, that last plot element has propaganda purposes -- Sagara wants his sword to kill 20 or 30 "American weaklings" -- but its the craftsmanship of swordmaking that gets most of the attention. The result is a war movie that's less bloodthirsty than heartwarming, as Yoshihiro finds his manhood, the couple gets the go-ahead to marry, and Sakabe not only gets a sword that will restore his honor after he carelessly sold the family heirloom but also gets the hand in marriage of Makoto. The ending, with the farmers breaking ground in the previously hallowed Onagi fields, is more like a Soviet propaganda movie about collective farming than like a war-effort flag-waver. Even Kurosawa's The Most Beautiful (1944) was about building war machinery, not about planting crops to feed people.