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I Live in Fear

Ikimono no Kiroku

Japan

1955

103 Min
Black and White
1.33:1
Japanese
  • Currently 3.8/5 Stars.
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DIR Akira Kurosawa

PROD Shojiro Motoki

SCR Shinobu Hashimoto, Akira Kurosawa, Hideo Oguni

DP Asakazu Nakai

CAST Toshirô Mifune, Minoru Chiaki, Masao Shimizu, Eiko Miyoshi, Takashi Shimura

MUSIC Fumio Hayasaka

Cannes (In Competition), Melbourne (Akira Kurosawa Retrospective)

Synopsis

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

Director

Original

Akira Kurosawa

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

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WhatsUpWill

13Mar13

Good intentions. Poor script.

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Cbarky99

12Aug12

Considered minor Kurosawa, and granted, the scope of the story is intimate and personal. However, given the importance of the Kurosawa-Mifune collaboration, Toshiro's work here, effortlessly playing significantly older, deserves to be highlighted, and the theme of the story would be reflected in Kurosawa's other films as well. Plus, that ending is sheer sad poetry.

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Vlad C.

8May12

Occasionally brilliant.

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Untitled

By Adam Suraf on December 13, 2008

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

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DVD

Buy the DVD from The Criterion Collection.