BootDigest Such a frustrating disappointment

Exoticalot People are voting emotionally.

Actuakers One of my all time favorites.

Kaelan Mccaffrey Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

Ricc0 "No Greater Love" is the first part of the 9 hours 47 minutes trilogy directed by Masaki Kobayashi based on the six-volume novel by Junpei Gomikawa. A captivating, haunting, and touching anti-war epic film where Kobayashi masterfully criticizes and confronts the Japanese practices and applications via WW2 through a self-righteous character who is trying to "catch the train of humanism before it's too late".Kaji is a socialist and a pacifist with great morals. His self- righteousness is shown from the first beginning when he refuses to sleep with his girlfriend for the concern of being enlisted soon in the army and not be able to fulfill his duties towards her. He has his own theories and principles also in dealing with work environment and laborers. He gets a job offer to be a supervisor in an iron mine in a small Manchurian village. Since he opposes war, he accepts it as his only way out of conscription. He also gets to be with his girlfriend (they soon marry).Kaji now in his new work faces moral dilemmas that prove day by day not to be easier than those he was going to face in the military. He struggles with the old, brutal, and oppressive mentalities. Things get nastier when 600 Chinese men are brought to the mine as prisoners of war.. plots, deceptions, racism, torture.. the list goes on. Many try to shake his convictions by convincing him that the theories may prove wrong when applied, and also that peace theories do not apply in war time. His answer was that either the theories are wrong or they were faultily applied. Yet, even his wife doubts his intentions for a moment.. will he surrender?Kobayashi's humanist film is a delicate study of the human psychology during hardships and the capabilities of the man to stand still and fight for what is right. It is also a sincere revision to a difficult era in Japanese history, reacting responsibly in opening a new page for the coming generations. "It's not my fault that I'm Japanese.. yet, it's my worst crime that I am", states Kaji. What can we do to deserve this beautiful name "man", one prisoner ask him.Kaji represents in his fight to become the man not the beast all humanity not only of course the Japanese.. every generation from the first beginning. The masterful Kobayashi contributes greatly to this epic film with extraordinary execution.. and Tatsuya Nakadai was a great choice for the leading role. A piece of art considered by many to be one of the greatest ever.

WILLIAM FLANIGAN Viewed on DVD and Streaming. Restoration = ten (10) stars; cinematography = nine (9) stars; score = eight (8) stars. Director Masaki Kobayashi's two-part(complete with scored intermission), moderately-sized, propaganda epoch using coal mining in China as a backdrop. Scenes of high drama are often book ended by heavy-handed scenes that stretch credulity to the point of unintentional humor and self caricature. Four prime flavors of protagonists bounce off one another in the Director's tale: a newly-hired, mine management-team member who is a compassionate liberal; conservative mine managers/labor-enforcers; military mine guards/minders; and ethnic/semi-ethnic "Chinese." Kobayashi seems to be struggling to maximize the inclusion of events depicted in the original source material (a super-sized contemporary novel) that results in loss of dynamics and consistency especially in the second half of the movie (the latter is also too long). The Director provides a number of truly startling and indelible scenes including: half-dead/dead Chinese slave labors being disgorged/pulled from sardine-can military box cars; and the execution (by samurai-style beheading) of slaves who may (or may not) have tried to escape. Exterior scenes shot at an immense open-pit coal mine in China are spectacular (the coal mine is the real star of this film!). Kobayashi also displays many hard-to-swallow oddities starting with his film's central plot point: a conservative mining company hires a left-wing, college student (who thereby avoids military call up) to booster the management team of a brutal and labor-intensive mining operation in far off China. There are many more. Among my favorites: the absence of any freshly mined coal (just pieces of jagged light-colored "ore"); a 3,300-volt electrical fence (to prevent Chinese slaves from escaping) complete with an impressive high-power infrastructure, but no visible means to power it all; labored Chinese dialog phonetically delivered by Japanese actors (ethnic Chinese physical and voice actors seem to be among the missing); and Chinese "comfort women" depicted as seasoned pros who clearly seem to enjoy practicing their profession ("happy hookers") and are never fully booked (about 50 sex workers are supposed to be servicing 10,000 non-slave and 500 slave labors!). Acting is OK but trends toward the histrionic and hammy in the second half of the film. Cinematography (wide screen, black and white) and scene lighting are excellent. Score is very good, but tends to have too many redundant phrases in its orchestration. Subtitles can be a bit long given their rapid flash-by rates. Most signs, armband, etc. are translated. Audio distortion mars the orchestral recording for the opening credits. Restoration is as good as it gets--the film looks like it was just released! Just go with the flow in this partial rewrite of history. WILLIAM FLANIGAN, PhD.

chaos-rampant I thought Masaki Kobayashi could do no wrong.I really wanted to like this. I even tried to and tried hard. Kobayashi is one of a short list of my favorite directors, also a titan of Japanese cinema by any standard I can think of, but more, I was convinced that if the cathartic tragedy he favoured, one that indicts and devastates, could make the leap from the jidaigekis set in Tokugawa Japan to any other genre, that genre would be the war drama.Set in 1943 Manchuria, WWII in full bloody swing, The Human Condition follows the trials and tribulations in occupied China of Kaji, a young idealist drafted in the service of the Japanese army. He is transferred to the hinterland to work as a supervisor in the ore mines of the area, a place where thousands of Chinese prisoners of war slave away in inhuman conditions for the benefit of the Japanese motherland. Kaji, full of youthful optimism as he is, attempts to befriend the Chinese POW's in an effort to both make their living conditions better but also improve their labour efficiency to appease his demanding military superiors.And there the movie starts crumbling under its own weight. For a film clocking in at 3 hours and 20 minutes, there's really an awful lot of scenes where two or three characters discuss the most obvious things and feelings; not a whole lot of subtext going on, chunks of dialogue delivered right on the nose, all done in generic takes. A story is being played out here but there's no cadence, punctuation, or interesting viewpoint. Worse, the movie is melodrama enough to constitute somewhat of an anachronism; it would have made much more sense coming out in 1949 instead of 1959. Consider the movies Samuel Fuller was making a few years ago, consider that Akira Kurosawa was about to revolutionize the jidaigeki and the alienated drifter a year later with Yojimbo, or the soulcrushing indifference of a stark world portrayed in a film like Fires on the Plain. Speaking of protagonists, it's Kaji, the main character we're called to identify with, played by samurai icon Tatsuya Nakadai before he was even a supporting actor in Yojimbo, who presents the biggest problem. His attitude and worldview of unconditional humanism are all too naive and convenient to hit the right emotional chords. Idenitifying with Kaji's holier-than-thou idealism is hard, not because people like him don't exist in real life, I hope they do, but simply because this kind of clean-cut idealist character doesn't fare well in a dramatic context.Bear with me here. Now every dramatic character (and by extention his actions that forward the plot) has to be defined by and rooted in some sort of inner conflict. In Kaji's case, it's between work (supervising prisoners into forced labour) and ideology (every human being should be treated with dignity and respect). But his ideology brings him into direct conflict with every major Japanese character in the movie; the army officers, his boss, the other supervisors - ruthless people who, in no uncertain terms, could have his head on a plate if they were so inclined. Why Kaji repeatedly goes against everyone even at the risk of his life is never so much as hinted at. If he has nothing to lose, what can he stand to gain from this? What do we, as viewers, learn that we didn't know?Usually some sort of character flaw forces the character to take action in an effort to redeem himself. Kaji's only flaw is his idealism. In that sense, Kaji is more of a martyr or a saint than a real flawed human being whose story is worth telling and the audience investing in. I don't see myself in him, he doesn't meaningfully exist in the world as I know it. It's only natural then that we may become frustrated by his idealistic persistance, a feeling that is shared (ironically) by his antagonists inside the movie (the abusive supervisor and the army officials). If this is a clever trick on Kobayashi's part to have us sympathize with Kaji's enemies (and maybe feel bad about it), then I tip my hat to him. Because it was done at the expense of a movie.Another thing that bothered me was how forced the drama felt at times. For example, near the end (and this is no spoiler that matters), a Chinese prostitute whose prisoner lover was executed by the Japanese, throws rocks at Kaji and calls him "Japanese devil". The only responsibility Kaji had at the execution was that he simply couldn't prevent it from happening. He's not even a military officer, just a labour supervisor. There's no reason for the prostitute to throw rocks at Kaji instead of the real culprits. It seems to happen for no other reason than to milk more sympathy and pity for a character that hasn't earned it. His tolerance only seems to invite more abuse which only reinforces his martyrdom.That's not to say that THC is not without its moments of beauty. Some of the cinema in the film is marvelous, with beautiful landscape shots and certain scenes and images that resonate with emotional power: the starving bodies of Chinese prisoners dropping like flies from train wagons, the lenthy execution scene, a parade of prostitutes visiting the concentration camp.Overall, I'm very disappointed with The Human Condition. Based on the glowing reviews here, I was expecting a masterpiece to equal Kobayashi's other work from the 60's. It turns out THC is a war melodrama that might have been very popular in a devastated post-war Japan that was thirsty for the populist theme of humanism valiantly raising its chin in the face of an oppressive system, but I found it too simplistic and convenient and lacking the sophistication of Kobayashi's epics from the decade to come.

matrac The greatest film ever made! And I've seen many, many films. This even supercedes The Seven Samurai which I consider a masterwork. The Human Condition is 10 hours and in 3 movies. A stunning performance by Tatsuya Nakadai. Find the 3 parts, hie yourself off to a monastery and watch them, with a bit of a breather between each movie. Stroheim's Greed was about 10 hours before the Hollywood hacks cut it back. This one is intact. It is subtitled and not dubbed.