The Most Beautiful

The Most Beautiful (1944)

一番美しく

Young women at a precision optics factory in wartime Japan push to exceed production quotas, enduring illness, injury, and personal hardship to “serve the country.” Led by Tsuru Watanabe, they fight fatigue and setbacks to keep their line moving—even when duty collides with grief.

Date of release
1944-04-13
TMDB
5.6 / 10 (59)
Runtime
1h 25m
Genres
Drama, War
Director
Akira Kurosawa

Casting

Interesting facts

The Most Beautiful is a 1944 Japanese drama and propaganda film written and directed by Akira Kurosawa. The semidocumentary film follows a group of female volunteer workers at an optics factory during the Second World War, during which the film was produced.

Production

According to Stephen Prince, Akira Kurosawa had been chosen by the navy to direct an action film about Zero fighter planes, but by 1943 he thought it unlikely that the navy would spare planes for a film as it was becoming clear that Japan would lose the war. Instead Kurosawa made this "patriotic morale booster".

Actress Yoko Yaguchi clashed over the alleged ways Kurosawa treated the actors. However, the pair found a connection, despite these clashes, and married in 1945. Although Prince writes that Kurosawa later chastised himself for doing so little to resist Japan's descent into militarism, the director also remarked that, of all his films, The Most Beautiful was dearest to him.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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