We have met the enemy: The Human Condition

M. Kobayashi's six-part epic wartime melodrama The Human Condition is as dark, unrelenting, powerful as anything you'll ever see - not for everyone for sure, and hardly a cheerful or uplifting moment in the whole nine hours, but we were totally captivated by the story and the unrelenting struggle for survival, with so many great scenes, and all centered on a strong lead character, Kaiji: the story follows him from his time as a manager in a Manchurian mine with war prisoners scripted into forced labor (Kaiji is a progressive socialist, and his ideas are squashed time and again), his entry into the Japanese Army near the end of WWII on the Manchurian front, and, in the last two parts, his struggle with a small band of survivors to make his way past enemy Chinese and Russian troops through Manchuria to reunite with long-suffering wife, Michiko. In earlier post I compared this epic with Doctor Zhivago, and there are similarities, but by the end I see it as much less romantic and far darker - perhaps a better comparison would be with Grapes of Wrath - the constant struggle for ideals, survival, against terrible odds and circumstances. Throughout, the worst opponents are not the "enemy" but the fellow-Japanese soldiers (and sometimes civilians) with their rigid adherence to discipline and their indifference to brutality and tyranny: the worst being the veteran soldiers who torment the new recruits, the Japanese leaders and translators who do the dirty work for the Russian troops, and the mine operators squeezing every bit of life out of their POW workers. The many unforgettable scenes include the arrival of the POWs at the mine, the torture of the Terado, forced to die during "latrine duty," Kaiji's confrontation with the veterans in their bunkhouse, and the many crowd scenes shot outdoors - miners working, prisoners in rebellion, digging the trenches, the march to the mines, the march under Russian guard. A great if difficult movie, or really series of movies, by a director little known in the U.S. and little known for any other major work, but this one's enough.