So this is an interesting one: it’s an early Akira Kurosawa movie, made during the war, that’s pretty much explicitly a propaganda film, about women who work in a factory producing lenses for targeting systems to support the war effort. Initially, that made me hate the movie and its characters. Their chipper enthusiasm for supporting the war effort, to the point of volunteering for increased quotas to do their part better, made me think of them as irritating bootlickers making things worse for their coworkers trying to get by. I would at least like to think that I’d feel the same consternation about an American propaganda film of the same stripe (leaving aside the morality of which side was ‘right’ in WW2 specifically) since at least in today’s climate where America’s war-related efforts seem, to put it mildly, significantly less justified than in WW2, I think I personally lose a lot of sympathy for characters who would interpret war in maybe any context as an opportunity to do their part for a nation state, vs. a hardship to survive through – and of course these characters specifically are propagandistic stereotypes who take the former to the extreme. BUT that said – as the movie goes on, enough of the flavor and storytelling of reality creep in to make it potentially a worthwhile movie anyway. The girls do not have an easy time of things, and while it’s very difficult to tell from just the movie itself what the people making it’s point was intended to be, I think it’s unflinching enough that it can serve as an acceptable portrait of a specific and very real time and place and situation. The “Most Beautiful” of the title ends up being

And so – it’s one of those interesting movies that rides the line between supporting an abhorrent explicit textual message, while also potentially working well as a sad portrait of people accidentally working to support such a message. And while I was repelled by the factory workers at first, I think the emphasis on a cast of young women factory workers is neat, and I oddly would have liked to learn even more about the exact specifics of their job and how the assembly line operated, since it’s an interesting portrait of that mechanical process as well. Not a whole-hearted recommendation by any means, but an interesting and memorable movie.