Sandwiched between “Stray Dog” and “Rashomon”, this less revered drama from Akira Kurosawa takes on tabloid journalism with a decidedly American flavor. Toshiro Mifune is handsome, and somewhat bland, as a reclusive painter who is exploited in the press for having an innocent lunch with a famous singer, hiring hack lawyer Takashi Shimura to sue the tabloid, if the drunken lawyer doesn’t get more money from the opposition to tank the case. The only knock on this film is that the shots at tabloid journalism are one sided at best, and there’s a decided amount of melodrama in a b-story involving the lawyer’s dying daughter, but I’ve always thought Kurosawa’s storytelling to be crisp, especially in the montage sequences showing the escalating feud between Mifune and the tabloid, and in Shimura’s masterly performance, playing both sides of the fence, we see shades of the angry doctor from the prior “Drunken Angel”, and the dying clerk of “Ikiru” to come.