Akira Kurosawa's
Waga Seishun ni Kuinashi
No Regrets for Our Youth
1946

directed by
Akira Kurosawa

This one is great. Just mind you get a good copy; mine (from eBay) was very inferior indeed.
The movie starts right before the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931. A girl has two friends, one labelled 'fascist' by Kurosawa; the other one is executed as a spy. As his wife, she goes to live with his parents in a small village, where the villagers really pester the three National Enemies, these filthy traitors, by ruining their newly planted rice etc.
Boy, does Kurosawa rub those Japanese noses in the fact that they were so foolish to go for that patriotic crap.
Very ironic when you consider the US army burned Judo Saga after the war for being so patriotic.

What really struck me is the recurrence of the word 'fascism'. There is a trend that says fascism belonged in Italy as Mussolini's private brand, so to speak. Not so. Franco was a downright fascist, down to the symbols you could find long after his demise at every Spanish village entrance. Maybe they're there still. So was Hitler's Germany fascistic; the term encompasses much more than 'Nazism' does.

Watch out for a really marvelous, very short, performance by Shimura Takashi
as a police inspector



Postwar Kurosawa [DVD] DVD
First, in Kurosawa's first major work "No Regrets for Our Youth" (1946), a frivolous, self-centered girl grows in body and spirit amid the run and tumult of postwar Japan. Denjiro Okochi, Eiko Miyoshi star. Next, in "One Wonderful Sunday" (1947), a veteran and his fiancee attempt to have a romantic afternoon in downtown Tokyo. With Chieko Nakakita, Isao Numasaki. AKA: "Wonderful Sunday." Then, in "Scandal" (1950), painter Toshiro Mifune sues a magazine for romantically linking him to a singer, then hires a lawyer of questionable motives to represent him. Co-stars Yoshiko Yamaguchi. In "The Idiot" (1951), Kurosawa transposes Dostoyevsky's classic from Russia to Japan as he tells the story of an epileptic soldier and a businessman vying

Produced by Toho Co. Ltd.
Japan 1946

110 minutes, B/W, Academy screen

Credits:		Cast:
producer screenplay photographed art director music by	Kenji Matsuzaki Akira Kurosawa Eijiro Hisaita Asakuza Nakai Keiji Kitagawa Tadashi Hattori	Tagihara His wife Tukie, his daughter Noge His father His mother Itokawa Police commissioner	Denjiro Okuchi Eiko Mihoshi Setsuko Hara Susumu Fujita Kuninori Kodo Haruko Sugimura Aritake Kono Takashi Shimura

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