Postwar Kurosawa: Eclipse Series 7

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Akira Kurosawa came into his own as a filmmaker directly following World War II, delving into the state of his devastated nation with a series of pensive, topical dramas. Amid Japan’s economic collapse and U.S. occupation, Kurosawa managed to find humor and redemption existing alongside despair and anxiety. In these five early films, which range from political epic to Capraesque whimsy to courtroom potboiler, Kurosawa revealed the artistic range and social acuity that would mark his career and make him the most popular Japanese director in the world.; ; NO REGRETS FOR OUR YOUTH; (Waga seishun ni kuinashi); Yukie, the spoiled bourgeois daughter of a university professor, takes a soul-searching journey from the elegance of Kyoto to the farms of impoverished, rural Japan, the rise and fall of ultranationalism corresponding with her own moral awakening.; ; ONE WONDERFUL SUNDAY (Subarashiki nichiyobi); Yuzo and Masako, a newly poor middle-class, meet one Sunday in Tokyo with only thirty-five yen to spend. Kurosawa alternates sadness and joy in his depiction of these young lovers adjusting to the grim postwar economic realities.; ; SCANDAL (Shubun); In Kurosawa's look at the abuse of freedom of speech, painter Ichiro (Toshiro Mifune) and singer Miyako (Yoshiko Yamaguchi) are photographed together by a paparazzo and wrongly by a tabloid of having an affair.; ; THE IDIOT (Hakuchi); Childlike ex-POW Kinji (Masayuki Mori) returns home after the war, only to become trapped in an existential love quadrangle. Mifune and Setsuko Hara also give haunting performances in this tale of otherworldly purity, based on the classic Dostoyevsky novel.; ; I LIVE IN FEAT (Ikimono no kiroku); Kurosawa's evocation of nuclear-age anxieties, Mifune as a wizened Tokyo whose overpowering fear of the bomb alienates him from his entire family and society.