THE HUMAN CONDITION: A SOLDIER'S PRAYER Movie Review

One of the most extraordinary achievements of the post-war Japanese cinema is director Masaki Kobayashi's epic trilogy of films, each more than three hours in length, based on the acclaimed novel by Jumpei Gomikawa. Together, the three films—No Greater Love, The Road to Eternity, and A Soldier's Prayer (The Human Condition is the name of the trilogy)—tell the story of Kaji (Tatsuya Nakadai), a pacifist who attempts to avoid military service in 1943, but is drafted when a catastrophe ensues at his draft-exempt job. As Kaji endures a mind-numbing military ordeal that eventually leads to imprisonment in Manchuria following the Russian invasion, his last shreds of idealism are stripped away as he discovers that the brutality under which he served in the Imperial Japanese Army was not unique; the horrors do not vanish because one's captors wear different uniforms—it is, he tragically discovers, the human condition. Kobayashi's own military experience led to his fight to make this masterwork, the first large-scale Japanese production to be openly critical of Japan's military policies. Kobayashi's own military experience was not unlike that of his hero—“I am Kaji,” he has written. Putting that story in the form of this sweeping, nine-hour, widescreen saga was a four-year struggle for the director; The Human Condition's success in Japan—as well as its prizes at the Venice Film Festival— gave him the power to follow it with a series of superb, socially critical period dramas that would secure his reputation both at home and abroad.

NEXT STOP … Harakiri, Kwaidan, Rebellion (a.k.a. Samurai Rebellion)

1961 190m/B JP Tatsuya Nakadai, Michiyo Aratama, Yusuke Kawazu, Tamao Nakamura, Chishu Ryu, Taketoshi Naito, Reiko Hitomi, Kyoko Kishida, Keijiro Morozumi, Koji Kiyomura, Nobuo Kaneko, Fujio Suga; D: Masaki Kobayashi. VHS NO