Kurosawa, working for the first time in color (not counting the single dash of pink in the otherwise black-and-white High and Low), constructs an audaciously colored mosaic of a Japanese shanty-town — a basically muddy gray landscape brightened here and there by the gaudy hues of the slum dwellers' costumes, home decorations, dreams, moods, hallucinations. One of the last surviving classicists, Kurosawa keeps this large, dense work in very sharp focus — literally, in terms of the vivid surface detail of the images, and also in terms of the clarity of vision, the simplicity of expression. Nothing diverts or devitalizes Kurosawa's anguished humanist sentiments over the course of their initial conception to their eventual transmutation into tangible objects, colors, faces, gestures, habits: a selfless teenage girl, never rising from her kneeling position even to sleep, folds dainty paper flowers to support her indolent father; a rigid, eyelidless zombie, moving about as if on casters, never fails to padlock his worthless shack in the morning when he goes out to nowhere; a beggar boy totes a tiny pail to restaurants' backdoors, collecting throwaway scraps for his father's meager dinner; a wife's brassy personality comes into focus on the chest of her tiger-stripe shirt, where concentric black circles zero into bull's-eyes over her nipples. The lineup of lower-depth characters quickly stretches out far enough to remind you of Kurosawa's famous fondness for 19th-century Russian novels and American detective fiction; but with the first character introduced — a retarded boy who runs an imaginary streetcar up and down the slum all day long — the movie crescendos to an early emotional climax which it never quite equals thereafter, but which few other movies ever remotely approach. (1970) — Duncan Shepherd
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