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 the bomb drives a rift amongst his family, who worry when the old man threatens to spend their life savings on a farm in South America, as he calls it, the only safe place on the planet. Coming after the biggest success of his career with “Seven Samurai”, this carefully observed slice of post-war fatigue and paranoia was met with yawns by the Japanese critics and audiences, not unlike “The Idiot” following the grandeur of “Rashomon”, but Kurosawa’s commentary is heartfelt, as is Mifune, almost unrecognizable in old age makeup, suggesting that as Japan heads further into their economic miracle, the wounds of the past decade will forever be scarred on the psyche of those who lived to tell about it.