Dodes'ka-den

A highly ambitious social panorama, with the shanty dwellers of a contemporary Tokyo rubbish dump serving as a microcosm for Kurosawa's Gorki-style celebration of the human condition through the triumph of loyalty and the imagination. Many of the threatened shortcomings of earlier Kurosawa films here reach fruition: extremely crude psychological characterisation of the gallery of down-and-outs, lushly melodramatic score, explicit statement of themes by several of the characters for anyone who's missed the point, grossly stylised acting and design (particularly the use of colour symbolism, this being Kurosawa's first film in colour). Nevertheless, there's a laudable fluidity in the way the characters are knitted together into a cyclical narrative, and some of them have moments of quiet poignancy.