Postwar Kurosawa

The seventh entry in the Criterion Collection's extra-less Eclipse line, the Postwar Kurosawa boxed set collects five of the films that legendary Japanese director Akira Kurosawa made in the aftermath of World War II reflecting Japan's economic collapse, the U.S. occupation, and the nation's gradual reconstruction. Like most children of his generation, Kurosawa was raised to embrace nationalist fervor, but in this particular quintet we can see the dissolution of Kurosawa's traditional respect for Japanese authoritarian rule. No Regrets for Our Youth (1946) follows the spoiled young daughter of a university professor as she journeys from the comforts of Kyoto to the impoverished farmlands of rural Japan, where she experiences a moral awakening that overrides her ultra-nationalist upbringing. One Wonderful Sunday (1947) mixes happiness and melancholy as a young middle-class couple struggles to adapt to postwar Japan's economic reality. Scandal (1950) is a still-relevant contemporary drama about the abuse of free speech, in which a young painter (the great Toshiro Mifune) and a pop singer (Yoshiko Yamaguchi) become tabloid fodder after being photographed by paparazzi. The Idiot (1951) transfers (somewhat poorly) Dostoyevsky's novel to postwar Japan, with Mifune and Setsuko Hara giving memorable performances in a story about an ex-POW who returns from the war and becomes trapped in a love quadrangle. I Live in Fear (1955) is another impressive vehicle for Mifune, here playing a wizened Tokyo patriarch whose fear of the atom bomb puts him at odds with his family. Although some of these films, which come out of Kurosawa's most prolific period, are more dated than others, they offer an essential thematic bridge between the militaristic tone of Kurosawa's earlier films and the grand samurai epics (beginning with Seven Samurai in 1954) that would later cement his status as an undisputed master. Recommended. (J. Shannon)