Of the many literary adaptations of Kurosawa’s filmography, none is as perfectly controlled and theatrical as this undervalued masterpiece from 1957, a staging of Maxim Gorky’s Russian tragic-comedy transplanted from late 19th century Russia to mid-19th century Edo Japan. The ensemble cast includes big names like Toshiro Mifune and Isuzu Yamada, a few months after playing Macbeth and Lady Macbeth in “Throne of Blood”, but the joy of the film isn’t in the singular performances, as good as they are, it’s in the way Kurosawa weaves a collective characterization of disillusionment and hope in a two-set slum, creating with both theatrical long takes and his standard telephoto editing techniques, a miasma of recognizable tropes and stereotypes. For its rigid structuralism and deliberate theatricality, impossibly talky and faithful to the play, Japanese audiences and critics found it less than crowd-pleasing, and indeed, Kurosawa’s next film, “The Hidden Fortress”, back to samurai comedy, was the biggest moneymaker of his career, but it’s obvious that these pet projects, along with “The Idiot” and “I Live in Fear”, films that didn’t break the box office, were personal favorites, and the craftsmanship involved is evident in every glorious frame.