I consider Akira Kurosawa (1910-1998) the greatest of film-makers, though I dislike at least one of his films (Dodesukaden) and am underwhelmed by some others (The Lower Depths, Madadayo). I am rapidly losing hope that there is a great Akira Kurosawa film that I have missed. I have seen  four of the five included in the new Criterion Eclipse (without bonus features) Postwar Kurosawa films: the then-contemporary romance of "One Wonderful Sunday" (1947), "Scandal"(1950, also something of a romance though involving a female movie star and a tabloid reporter, this becomes the titular scandal), the updated to postwar,  Japan lumbering adaptation of Dosteovesky's The Idiot (1951—lumbering even with 99 minutes cut from Kurosawa's version!), and the portrayal of a Japanese factory owner consumed with fear of more nuclear bombs, "I Live in Fear" (Ikimono no kiroku, 1955, also released as "Record of a Living Being"). (The one I haven't seen is the 1946 "No Regrets for Our Youth.")

"I Live in Fear" provided a chance for Toshiro Mifune to go mad onscreen, less picturesquely than he wood as the Japanese Macbeth at the end of "Throne of Blood" (Kumonosu jô, 1957). Before being haunted about the need to remove his family to Brazil, Mifune('s character Kiichi Nakajima) was a conventional businessman (as in the later "High and Low" and, seemingly, in "The Bad Sleep Well").

Control of the assets an imperious patriarch has accumulated. Well, I don't know how much he inherited, but he has come through the destruction of productive capacity by  US bombings with a foundry staffed by loyal workers, and supporting not only his children by his wife but those by two concubines. He wants to take all three women and all his children to what his research has told him is the place most likely to continue to support human life after an all-out nuclear war.

His legitimate children (all of whom strike me as slackers) seek to have their father ruled legally incompetent and to prevent his selling the factory which they intend to support them in their lives of idleness. (There is something Tennessee Williams about those vying for inheritances in this in my view.)

Kurosawa regular Shimura Takashi plays a dentist who is a part-time Domestic Court Counselor and who takes the case very seriously, although his son tells him he shouldn't, because whatever his decision is, it will be appealed. That is, another son not appreciating his father's fervent attempt to do the right thing. (Wasn't this the generation that supported the imperial expansion? Well, guilt might be mixed into Kiichi's concern about saving his family from the thermonuclear disaster he anticipated obliterating them all.)

Kiichi seems paranoid, but the danger of H-bombs wreaking damage far greater than the A-bombs that only the Japanese had experienced was significantly non-nil, and the greedy, selfish children's dismissal of danger was not entirely irrational (and the complacency about securing the nuclear weapons of the former Soviet Union and the trustworthiness of those now holding them of recent years is far from being unassailable, IMHO). Dr. Harada is unable to judge Kiichi insane to be worried about the nuclear threat that hung particularly heavy on Japan on the tenth anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (and following upon Japanese fishermen dying from US nuclear testing on the island of Bikini in 1954 and a concern about radioactive contamination of tuna in 1955).

Kurosawa intended to make a satire, but instead made a family melodrama with something of foretaste of the tragedy of Lear, in what was his culminating masterpiece, "Ran"*.(1985). The movie lost money and was not exported until 1961. It has some astonishing visual compositions (is there a Kurosawa film that doesn't) and a bravura portrayal of the bent-over old capitalist twice his age at the time. There are flashes of humor, but I could not claim that the film is entertaining. What it is is a great master grappling with grim subject matter.

The print and or transfer of this film are considerably better than that of the non-Criterion DVD of the 1949 "The Quiet Duel," the early postwar Kurosawa film I most recently watched before "Fear."

©  2009, Stephen O. Murray

* I have discussed "Ran" as the greatest movie of the 1980s at
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1520719/akira_kurosawas_culminating_achievment.html?cat=40.

Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD