Akira Kurosawa made his second film, The Most Beautiful, in 1944 and he set it in that year as well, in a Japanese optics factory where an emergency quota increase is pushing the all-volunteer workforce to their limit. Kurosawa focuses the action on the plant’s female employees, and while a few of the women do gradually emerge as individualized characters, the movie is more about their collective morale, the mysterious ways in which seemingly minor setbacks or small triumphs cause their spirits to plummet or to soar.According to Stephen Prince’s notes on the film in the AK100 booklet, this was not necessarily a project that Kurosawa would have necessarily chosen for himself, left to his own devices, but like the movie’s characters, he rose to the occasion and performed his patriotic duty, turning out a morale-boosting drama about the necessity of sacrificing your personal desires for the benefit of the greater good. At the same time, The Most Beautiful is no dreary propaganda picture — Kurosawa gets appealing, naturalistic performances from every member of his very large cast. Most often, he crowds the frame with dozens of faces, but occasionally he rewards his actresses with affectionate close-ups — as in a wonderful montage of one woman after another laughing and smiling as they participate in a factory volleyball game.
And in the final half-hour, Kurosawa complicates the film’s message through the character of Watanabe (played by Kurosawa’s future wife, Yoko Yaguchi), who is left to supervise the rest of the young women when the dorm mother goes away on a trip. Distracted by a quarrel between two of the girls, Watanabe neglects to properly inspect one of the lenses on her table, and is so distraught over the possibility that her negligence might result in a faulty weapon and, in turn, the deaths of who knows how many Japanese soldiers, she stays up all night, obsessively re-inspecting hundreds of lenses. (The episode anticipates policeman Toshiro Mifune’s search for his stolen gun five years later in Kurosawa’s Stray Dog.) Watanabe’s tireless work ethic and her strong sense of duty are at once admirable and masochistic — in the film’s haunting final scene, she refuses to travel back home to pay her respects to her dying mother, and instead returns to her microscope, except her eyes are too full of tears for her to be able to use it.
In a filmography much more preoccupied with men’s lives, The Most Beautiful is the rare case where Kurosawa allowed women to take centre stage. It’s a film of great empathy and respect, and it’s disappointing Kurosawa never made anything else quite like it in the decades that followed.
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