Lost in Criterion

Apparently considered one of Akira Kurosawa's worst films, Dodes'ka-den started life as a joint project between the top four directors in Japan calling themselves the Four Horsemen but ended up being one of the lowest points of Kurosawa's life. We explore a theory on why Japan didn't connect with the subject matter as we talk class and caste in Japanese history and a depressing and visually stunning movie.

Andrzej Wajda's Danton explores the French revolution through the Polish director's own experience under Soviet rule, a rule he saw as anti-worker and therefore anti-progress. Using the titular Danton and Robespierre, the film presents the tension of revolution, or perhaps violent revolution, if Wajda makes such a distinction, and particularly a revolution that seeks only to rotate who is in power instead of upturning power hierarchies.

Revolutions that promise equality without upheaving power structures aren't revolutions. Equality must always broaden.

Vittorio De Sica stars in Roberto Rossellini's Il Generale Della Rovere, the story of a conman coerced into impersonating an Italian resistance general, but really it's two stories: the first half is De Sica's character's everyday life promising to rescue people's family members from Nazi imprisonment if they can raise the money and his arrest and trial for doing that, then the second half is a war prison film of the same man on the inside doing his new con job. A fascinating and great movie, but like many others, would have been better if more people making it were communists instead of just nationalists.

A very different François Truffaut film to any we've seen before, The Last Metro draws on the director's memories of a childhood during Occupation to craft a story that is not autobiographical by any means, but instead tells the story of the community around a theater and the various ways people persevered.

David Lean's adaptation of Hobson's Choice brings the atmospheric panache that made his Great Expectations so amazing but putting it into a comedy about a guy who doesn't want his adult daughters to get married in a situation that seems like a dark parody of an Ozu plot. Ultimately, though, it's a pretty light story about a woman who exercises her own self-determination by forcing a man to be more assertive.