Very enjoyable but perhaps the least successful of the Kurosawas I’ve been seeing recently. Each individual episode is masterfully shot but the film as a whole doesn’t cohere. It begins as a light and glamorous screwball about a famous artist (Toshiro Mifune) who meets a star (Yoshiko Yamaguchi) in a mountain retreat, the paparazzo take a shot of them together and sell them to the Amour magazine claiming evidence  of a secret affair. They decide to sue and hire a lawyer (Takashi Shimura) with a gambling addiction and a tubercular daughter. At this point the film shifts tone and focus, leaving the glamorous couple behind to focus on the moral failings of a good but weak man. The film then shifts again, this time into a Christmas film, with lots of orchestral versions of famous American holiday songs, culminating in Auld Lang Syne and highlighting the redemptive potential of the holiday season itself. Will the lawyer whose sold out his clients to the pulps honour his now dead daughter and do the right thing for his clients? This is drawn out in the finale which becomes a courtroom procedural. So, a film with serious themes —  the limits of free speech in the age of mass media —  but of dual protagonists, various genres, too sudden shits in tone, that doesn’t quite cohere. What I liked best were the montages, first a 30s style one of the pulp press sinking its teeth into the story, then the cycling races affording opportunities for gambling. There’s also an incredible shot of Mifune looking very dashing, riding his motorcycle with a fully decorated tree at the back being followed by children. It’s a film of many pleasures that is not quite good.

José Arroyo

The Scandal Montage:

At the (bicycle) races:

Cool Yule turns melodrama:

An illustration of the mastery of compositions, a triangle structure of paparazzo at the centre as the lawyer on the left speaks, leaving room for another court official on the right, thus illustrating the tension of the theme, the law vs the press:

José Arroyo