I believe Criterion put this on their Postwar Kurosawa set, as the themes around that set were all his non-Samurai flicks but also his more dramatic films set around the aftermath of WWII.
I didn't remember the film, but I do remember the poster from my days at the video store way back when:
Toshiro Mifune stars as Nakajima, an oldschool elderly father figure who owns and runs a successful foundry but is willing to sell it and everything else he owns to take his family to Brazil for fear of the Hydrogen bomb. He has memories of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings and has lived in anxiety since then, and now his time has come to flee while he still can. The family is against this and wrestles to take control of his estate so that he cannot force them to go.
The film is very much poignant with its look at the entirety of the issue at hand, with Takashi Shimura as a court appointed case worker assigned to decide the fate of the estate. Also to be considered into this is Nakajima's illegitimate children, his intense degree of logic surrounding everything else in his life, and yet his unwavering opinion of immanent destruction.
As a character study it's very affecting and relevant. For me it made me think, obviously in a Venn Diagram along with a lot of other things, how much does a global collective anxiety about our destructive capabilities in this modern day contribute to something like lower birth rates, failing job market, high housing cost, etc? Given that Japan was one of the canaries in the coal mine re: economic distress, plunging birth rates, and technology destroying the culture, and Japan was the country that had been bombed, can these two things be related?
A prescient and interesting and overlooked Kurosawa film, I still doubt this is one that I'll revisit as much as some others. Its a solid 3.5 with great acting by Mifune as always.
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