Both the final film of this period in which Akira Kurosawa would directly wrestle with the demons of the Second World War and his most literal representation of living in an atomic age, the galvanizing I Live in Fear presents Toshiro Mifune as an elderly, stubborn businessman so fearful of a nuclear attack that he resolves to move his reluctant family to South America. With this mournful film, the director depicts a society emerging from the shadows but still terrorized by memories of the past and anxieties for the future. —The Criterion Collection
The son of an army officer, Kurosawa studied art before gravitating to film as a means of supporting himself. He served seven years as an assistant to director Kajiro Yamamoto before he began his own directorial career with Sanshiro Sugata (1943), a film about the 19th century struggle for supremacy between adherents of judo and jujitsu that so impressed the military government, he was prevailed upon to make a sequel (Sanshiro Sugata Part Two). Following the end of World War II, Kurosawa’s career gathered speed with a series of films that cut across all genres, from crime thrillers to period dramas. Among the latter, his Rashomon (1951) became the first postwar Japanese film to find wide favor with Western audiences. It was Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai (1954), however, that made the largest impact of any of his movies outside of Japan. Although heavily cut for its original release, this three-hour-plus medieval action drama, shot with painstaking… read more
Minor Kurosawa, starring Toshiro Mifune as an aging, Lear-like businessman whose fear of impending nuclear war tears his family apart. Rather a surprising misfire; while nuclear anxiety was and remains a timely subject, this talky family drama never really taps into the full tragic potential of the subject. Strong performances by Mifune and Takashi Shimura, who played the dying man in the director's immortal "Ikiru."
Kurosawa should have kept a few things un(der)stated. For the most part engrossing.
Perhaps it was the topical nature of this film that led to its "failure" (a Kurosawa flop isn't quite the same as "Freddy Got Fingered"). Yet watching it during this time of nuclear crisis in post-tsunami Japan makes it eerily oracular and relevant nearly 60 years later. The Japanese title, "A Record of Living Beings" does a better job of encapsulating this social drama. Mifune astonishes as the elderly patriarch.
I have to admit that if I had viewed it before the disaster, the atomic age anxiety depicted in the film may have felt thematically forced, as if amplified for the sake of drama. But there is renewed fear and awareness today and with some trying to flee the country to save their own skins, leaving the rest behind to struggle. Makes me wonder how such a film would be received if made today.
The final film in Akira Kurosawa’s post-war period to be directly influenced by the war and the reconstruction economy, with Toshiro Mifune as an elderly family patriarch whose neurotic paranoia over… read review
