No Regrets For Our Youth (1946) * Worst Hit *

A few regrets for the genre however...

Genre: Drama (Japan)

Starring: Setsuko Hara (The Idiot • Tokyo Story), Susumu Fujita (The Hidden Fortress • Judo Saga)

Directed By: Akira Kurosawa (Dreams • Yojimbo)

Overview: We follow Yukie's tumultuous times at school in her youth, and later with the man she loves, as he is accused of being a spy and is arrested.

I've never had such a hard time writing an overview. This film changes directions so many times it's hard to tell when the real story starts, and that's the problem.

We begin with a young bunch of friends as they deal with a school under fascist control. Some friends are revolutionaries, namely Wild who ends up being arrested for his crimes. Five years later, he is released and we see a love kindled between Yukie and him, but alas she is too shy and years (read: endless melodrama) go by before she sees him again. Finally they are united and his secret activities attract the attention of government eyes once again. On and on and on, 13 years of painful storytelling with nothing visual to entertain us in the meantime, not to mention characters with dramatic turns and poses right out of "Days of Our Lives".

Finally, to top it all off, imagine a dialogue heavy melodrama with such convoluted misspelled quotes as these:

Old Man: I am the defending man for Wild.
Young Man: Wild?
Old Man: The detials are similar to your say. Why all Wild does is said spying...I wanted to guide the hot bloody.

Hot bloody indeed. Guess why it took two days for me to get through this? GUESS.

Just don't bother kids. Even if you're a completist, for the love of God, just wait for a far less muddy print that's better translated.

Setsuko Hara, a girl who cry on dime

Overall Rating: 34% (Deep Regrets For Viewing, However)

Aftertaste:

I was going to be lenient on my script category, but no.

When it comes down to it I'd have shaved over half an hour of this Soap Opera-paced melodrama and focused on the actual tribulations the couple suffers, rather than watching the girl as she doesn't muster up the courage to be with the man she loves for years. Long drawn out discussions with her parents about deciding to move to Tokyo are equally unnecessary. If you need to see this, start when Yukie and Wild actually hook up and save yourself an hour, because the story becomes genuinely dramatic and the occasional enjoyable artistic scene and montage is present, but otherwise, this is certainly not essential Kurosawa canon.