Black River

#11 in my ranking of Masaki Kobayashi's films. This is The Lower Depths but angry. This feels like the closest Kobayashi ever came to making a Kurosawa movie, and it's still distinctly his own. It's a look at people living in the shadow of an American military base on the eve of the American military's…

I Will Buy You

#7 in my ranking of Masaki Kobayashi's films. This is the Japanese baseball version of Ace in the Hole, but it's missing one component that could have pushed it into greatness. The characters are well-drawn, the situation appropriately murky, and the tension real, but there's a moral component to the story that Masaki Kobayashi seems…

The Thick-Walled Room

#9 in my ranking of Masaki Kobayashi's films. It's easy to see why Japanese authorities would have wanted cuts from Masaki Kobayashi's first attempt at his hard-hitting style of story about the individual against an oppressive system. Not only did it highlight some smaller forms of the war crimes of the Japanese army during World…

Fountainhead

#17 in my ranking of Masaki Kobayashi's films. Masaki Kobayashi drew down the number of main characters and expanded the narrative scope around his smaller cast for Fountainhead, in comparison to Beautiful Days. Instead of about six main characters, we're down to two, while also having enough story to comfortably fill 130 minutes of screen…

Beautiful Days

#10 in my ranking of Masaki Kobayashi's films. Masaki Kobayashi was still in the phase where he couldn't make the films he really wanted, but it seems obvious to me that he was bringing his passion to the movies he was making. Beautiful Days is in the same mold as Somewhere Beneath the Wide Sky…