The Most Beautiful

Kurosawa’s rarely-screened second feature (made in between his two Sanshiro Sugata movies) was his sole film expressly designed to satisfy Japan’s wartime “national policy.” Based on Kurosawa’s own original story, The Most Beautiful mixes documentary and drama as it tells the tale of a group of women volunteers labouring at a wartime optics factory. Kurosawa regular Takashi Shimura plays the facility’s head of production. Yoko Yaguchi, in her final screen role, is heroine Tsuru, the patriotic team-leader who remains dedicated to duty despite the fact her mother back home is dying. The actress and Kurosawa would wed the next year and remained married until Yaguchi’s death in 1985. The director dismissed most of his early works but remained fond of this one. A 1987 New York Times review described the film as “surprisingly personal,” considering its propagandistic origins. “Kurosawa’s ‘documentary’ is enriched by the kind of beauty that only truth can give . . . The performances ring with a kind of truth that one finds usually only in real documentary . . . In The Most Beautiful can be found the beginnings of the intense concern for actuality which animates so many of his pictures” (Donald Richie). B&W, 16mm, in Japanese with English subtitles. 85 mins.