LIVE IN FEAR I Movie Review

Record of a Living Being
Kimono No Kiroku

As daring as Stanley Kubrick's 1964 Dr. Strangelove may be, you might be surprised to know that Japan's Akira Kurosawa conceived of a satirical film on the subject of the bomb as early as 1955. Though he finally realized that a darkly comic essay on the subject of nuclear war would be far too controversial—this was, after all, just ten years after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—Kurosawa did create a film that dealt with one man's fear of nuclear holocaust, and he gave the movie a core of deep and bitter irony rather than flat-out humor. I Live in Fear is the story of a wealthy industrialist (Toshiro Mifune) whose fear of the escalating 1950s nuclear arms race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union is driving him past the point of simple anxiety. Mifune has fixated on the idea that Brazil will be the one safe place on Earth in the event of atomic war, so he begins to make preparations to move there, along with his wife, his family, and his mistresses. They resist, and Mifune's steep descent into paranoia and madness finally leads to his complete hallucinatory break with reality in the film's Twilight Zoneish final moments. Kurosawa was making a sophisticated statement for such an early period in the Cold War; he wasn't asking whether or not the world was going to blow itself up, but rather was questioning how mankind was going to live with the knowledge that it might. Though I Live in Fear is a bit more static and talky than much of Kurosawa's other work of the period, the film gets under your skin in ways that “issue” films rarely do. It's like that classic description of a paranoiac; psychiatrist to patient: “What can I—or anyone you can think of—do, say, or show you to prove that your fear of X is unfounded?” Patient to psychiatrist: “Nothing.” While it's hardly irrational to fear nuclear war, the genius of Kurosawa lies in his knowing that the fear can be far more deadly than the bomb.

NEXT STOP… Rashomon, The Atomic Cafe, Dr. Strangelove

1955 105m/C JP Toshiro Mifune, Takashi Shimura, Eiko Miyoshi, Haruko Togo; D: Akira Kurosawa; W: Akira Kurosawa, Shinobu Hashimoto, Hideo Oguni; C: Asakazu Nakai; M: Fumio Hayasaka.VHS FCT