The Most Beautiful (Ichiban utsukushiku)
Directed by Akira Kurosawa
Written by Akira Kurosawa
1944/Japan
Toho Company
First viewing/Hulu Plus
[box] Being an artist means not having to avert one’s eyes. — Akira Kurosawa[/box]
Kurosawa makes a propaganda movie with a 90% female cast.
A factory making precision optics for the military relies on teams of female workers that live in dormitories, supervised by house mothers and urged on by shrines to their far off parents and patriotic marching band rehearsals. The story starts when the government imposes a new emergency quota. The factory director (Takashi Shimura, Seven Samurai, Ikiru) makes an impassioned speech telling the workers that productivity is only achieved through personal spiritual perfection.
The ladies are assigned 50% of the output required by the men. They feel slighted and vow to produce 2/3 of what the men do. It’s not easy as one girl after another is waylaid by illness, injury, or death in the family and exhaustion and cold saps their stength. For dramatic tension we get the ongoing saga of one girl who disguises her nightly fever so she can continue to work and the frantic search of the team leader for a bomb sight she failed to calibrate when she was called off to settle an argument between two of the girls.
Kurosawa is definitely not at his best when working under the direction of others nor has he ever been particularly adept at female characterizations. It was not much of a surprise, therefore, that this is a pretty weak effort. The director himself retained a special fondness for the film, though, as it was here that he met his wife of 40 years Yoko Yuguchi, who plays the house mother.
