So i was reading about a political group in flanders belgium called DeVlag a pro nazi collaborationist group in belgium that lasted from 1936-1945 and then i found a IMDB page for a film called Vlaanderen te weer https://m.imdb.com/title/tt12498148/ and i looked at the wikipedia page (it was in dutch i translated with google translate so i may not be 100% right) and the original version was considered lost but there was a reconstruction made from newsreel clips and material from the screenplay but i cant find that either or any posters or screenshots apart from the IMDB page so if anyone has any info on the film or the reconstruction let me know
Previous films: Sanshiro Sugata Sanshiro Sugata 2
Watch date 8/23/20
I wasn't sure if I had seen The Most Beautiful before, or if I was possibly confusing it with No Regrets For our Youth. It turns out I hadn't seen The Most Beautiful before -- I would have remembered being this angry. There's not much to say about this film. In my opinion, it's even worse than Sanshiro Sugata part 2. It is complete propaganda from start to finish. Even Sanshiro Sugata 2 had a neat fight scene and some interesting characters. The Most Beautiful is saccharine garbage.
I don't blame Kurosawa, of course. He was doing the best he could under an authoritarian regime putting absurd restrictions on him. My hope is that making these films allowed him to fully appreciate his later freedom. Maybe he felt, in some sense, that he had to atone for these antihuman works as well.
The "plot" is hardly anything - female factory workers are making glass optic pieces as part of the war effort. They want to work really hard, and get sad when they get sick and have to go back home to their families, which seems to happen over and over during the story. They have no individuality, and exist only to serve the state and the war effort.
I think the most offensive part is how unrealistic it is. From my understanding of this period (based on, including other things, Kurosawa's own writings) even the Japanese weren't this nationalistic and "altruistic". I'm sure the factory owners weren't benevolent cheerleaders, as portrayed on screen, and the real life workers would have been more concerned with finding food to fend off starvation rather than staying up all night in the cold to perfect that piece of glass. People aren't like that, and shouldn't be.
Apparently, Kurosawa was originally supposed to do a picture promoting the Japanese navy, with lots of Zero planes. I would much rather have watched that film.
That article also states:
> Nonetheless, Kurosawa would later remark that, of all his films, The Most Beautiful was dearest to him. Perhaps one reason was that he became very close to Yaguchi and they married. Kurosawa’s parents could not attend the wedding, because they had been evacuated from
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