Dodes'ka-den (1970)
Directed by Akira Kurosawa
On a Tokyo dump’s shantytown edge, interwoven vignettes follow residents scraping by: a boy who “drives” an imaginary trolley, a homeless father and son designing a dream house, a young woman brutalized at home, drunks, schemers, and saints of small kindnesses. Kurosawa crafts a ragged mosaic of hardship, fantasy, and flickers of grace that keep people moving forward.
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What critics compared Dodes'ka-den to
He made a smaller film, " Dodes'ka-den ," which was not successful.
In the context of the director’s biography, this shift seems to occur with a number of pivotal events: Kurosawa’s decisive split with his star, Toshiro Mifune; the financial failure of his film Dodes’ka-den and the independent company that produced it; his disastrous aesthetic impasse with the American producers of Tora! Tora! Tora!; and finally, his attempt at suicide.
If Dodes’ka-den , a flawed but deeply felt ensemble piece perched at the edge of financial ruin, signaled for many Japanese cinema titan Akira Kurasawa’s fallibility, then Kagemusha (The Shadow Warrior) ushered him into the good graces often accorded aged artists who understandably fall back on the themes and variations that marked their earlier major works.
Economic disparity may be the greatest subject of the twenty-first century for intimate horror, and Watch a lot of Kurosawa you haven’t seen lately, especially “High & Low,” “Dodes’ka-den,” “I Live In Fear,” “The Lower Depths” and “The Bad Sleep Well.”