Thanks to the folks at Criterion and their Eclipse line of DVDs, the early works of many masters of international cinema have become easily accessible to U.S. audiences, providing valuable background for cinephiles eager to explore the more obscure corners of those filmmakers’ work. As the Eclipse set The First Films of Akira Kurosawa proves, however, these releases aren’t necessarily for people beyond those niche markets. Collecting the first four features by the Japanese icon (whose famous works include Rashomon, Seven Samurai and Ran), the set illustrates the origins of some of Kurosawa’s stylistic signatures, but it’s more of a historical curiosity than a satisfying moviegoing experience. The informative liner notes by Stephen Prince are often more interesting than the movies themselves.

These films were all made in the early 1940s during World War II, when the Japanese government imposed heavy restrictions on the content of films. It’s interesting to see how Kurosawa worked under these guidelines, turning out something like the propaganda drama The Most Beautiful (about female workers at a Japanese optics factory), a mix of blind patriotism and bitter melancholy. While the plot of the movie finds the women almost pathologically eager to do everything they can for their country, Kurosawa also subtly shows the toll that such blind devotion can take, as the characters work so hard that they make themselves ill, or go nearly insane with worry that they aren’t keeping up with the proper production standards.

The Details

The First Films of Akira Kurosawa

From a historical perspective, The Most Beautiful is the set’s most interesting film, although the other three are all more in line with Kurosawa’s later work. The 1880s-set samurai drama Sanshiro Sugata and its sequel are clumsy, choppy martial-arts pictures that suffer from inconsistent characterization and lackluster fight sequences. The Men Who Tread on the Tiger’s Tail, a samurai fable based on a Japanese folk tale and staged in the style of Noh theater, fares better, demonstrating Kurosawa’s talent for integrating traditional theatrical forms into his bold filmmaking style.

Unfortunately, all four movies are presented in scratchy, blotchy prints with murky sound (Sanshiro Sugata, Part Two in particular looks terrible). The audience for these movies is small, surely, but they would have benefited from a little bit of restoration work. Ultimately, this set is for die-hard fans only; for everyone else, there’s no shortage of other Kurosawa material to start with.