Although I’m a huge fan of Akira Kurasowa, I couldn’t get into I LIVE IN FEAR (1955) even though the directing and acting are solid. Toshiro Mifune plays a Japanese businessman still in shock from the atomic bomb attacks of WW II: looking at a world where nuclear testing is routine and nuclear war a possibility, he wants his entire family to relocate with him to Brazil in the area of the world most likely to survive nuclear fallout. His family, however, are determined to get him declared incompetent before he spends all their inheritance on his pet project.
It’s possible that cat stress left me in the wrong state of mind to enjoy this but it’s also possible the protagonist’s terror is hard to share when I’ve spent most of my life knowing nuclear annihilation was a possibility. I am curious why one of the main characters on the board hearing the commitment charge is a dentist appointed by the dental association to the post — why would they want a stake in such matters? “It’s an unwelcome kindness just the same.”
THE LOWER DEPTHS (1958) is a better film, adapted from a Maxim Gorky play about scruffy lowlife tenants in a seedy tenement where hoodlums, loonies, drunks (“My bital organs have suffered alcohol poisoning.”) and sex workers mingle, squabble and sometimes fall in love. Well executed but like a lot of filmed plays it doesn’t quite gel, coming off too talky and meandering. It is interesting to see how universal this material is, though — shift it to the United States and you wouldn’t have to change much. “Your turf is just a wee bit smaller than the rest of the world.”
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