After five years of frustration, in which he couldn’t find funding for “Runaway Train” and was fired from “Tora! Tora! Tora!”, Akira Kurosawa returned to film-making with this wildly episodic adaptation of stories by Yamamoto, one of his favorite writers, and adapted to color photography and a static full screen ratio that he would favor for the remainder of his career. The results are mixed, partly because what survives is only 140 minutes of an original 240 minute cut (similar to the fate of “The Idiot” 20 years earlier), cutting together disparate stories of folks in a shantytown with no particular focus on any one main character, a shocking transgression from the director’s usual cinema of heroes. The best parts – a retarded teenage boy who “rides” around the shantytown on an invisible trolley, two drunken best friends who swap wives and become confused by the lack of familiarity with the color coordinated opposites, a worker with a facial tick who defends his mean wife to coworkers – are compassionate in the face of waste and poverty (like “The Lower Depths”), but often the stories fall to tragedy and melodrama, like the focus on a homeless man and his son, who suffer food poisoning after begging for scraps. Kurosawa’s painter’s eye easily lends itself to imaginary color backdrops, which give the film an almost dreamlike quality, but I’ve always wondered what that original four-hour cut looked like, and if the dispersed characters were just a bit more fleshed out than what we were left with.