Review – The Most Beautiful

This picture begins with a title card urging the audience to “Attack and destroy the enemy,” which one assumes is the Imperial Japanese equivalent of “Buy Bonds.” Unfortunately the exhortation is typical of the tone of the entire movie. The story follows several women who work in a lens grinding factory in Hiratsuka in 1944. When the men’s production quota is doubled but theirs not increased as much, they mope and complain until theirs is doubled as well. A woman fakes her thermometer readings so her fever won’t show and she can go back to work. Another woman remains at her post despite her mother’s imminent death at home. The whole picture is about how eerily cheerful – or at least dutiful – the protagonists are while enduring their many hardships. Thus this is an interesting piece of losing-side war propaganda but otherwise simply not one of director Akira Kurosawa’s finer moments. Mildly amusing