"Dodes'ka-den" is Kurosawa's first color film, and he has adjusted his color to suit each vignette, from the childlike brightness of the streetcar motorman's fantasy, to the dull monochromes of the ragpicker's obsession, to the unreal abstract-expressionist behind the wrecked-car home of the beggar and his boy. In their dreams and their fate, this last pair defines the farthest imaginative reach of the movie, belonging more to the conventions of art than of life—and to an art that exhibits all the emotional and, indeed, the intellectual range of a wide-eyed child painted by Keane.

The beggar's is perhaps the saddest—and the most ludicrous—life in "Dodes'ka-den," but it is not much more gratuitous or suffocatingly sentimental than anything else in the film—which succeeds in little but the painful recall of better works in its type. I have in mind the lovely community-life films of Yasujiro...