I LIVE IN FEAR - DVD

I LIVE IN FEAR
A film by Akira Kurosawa

When a wealthy foundry owner decides to move his entire family from Tokyo to Brazil to escape the nuclear holocaust which he fears is imminent, his family, afraid of losing their status and inheritance tries to have him declared mentally incompetent.

Made at the height of the Cold War, with the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki still a recent memory, this blazing attack on complacency stemmed from the same H-Bomb paranoia that gave birth to the Godzilla films.

Kurosawa regular Toshiro Mifune delivers an extraordinary performance (as a man twice his age), as does Takashi Shimura, who two years before had starred as the cancer-stricken clerk in Ikiru. I live in Fear, through one of Kurosawa's least commercially successful films, was the picture he expressed himself proudest of having made.

Japan | 1955 | black & white | Japanese language with English subtitles | 99 minutes | Academy ratio 1.66:1 | Region 2 DVD

Review

'Kurosawa remains the cinema's supremely humanist emotional manipulator. See it and worry.' --Time Out