Customer Reviews:

Avg. Customer Rating: 4.4 / 5.0

"Kindness is one thing. Debt is another ...":

For those who are most familiar with Kurosawa's epics, "The Lower Depths" may seem shocking in its austerity - there are only two sets (interior and exterior of the doss-house where the action takes place), there's no background music at all, and the script is a faithful line-for-line rendition of Maxim Gorky's play (a sort of Chekhov of the slums) transposed from Russia to Japan.

Before shooting started, Kurosawa rehearsed solidly for six weeks, with the actors on set in full costume and makeup and the... more info

Kurosawa at his best:

This adaptation of Gorky's play "the Lower Depths" by the master director Akira Kurosawa is quite a labyrinth. Each player has a path to follow, a fate that binds. Just as the dying woman is inexorably bound towards death, the tinker, thief, geisha, gambler, samurai, and pilgrim all are caught in a chillingly hopeless web of life and death. Outwardly we see the bottom dwellers, society's dregs from post feudal Japan. Yet the poverty of the individuals is really a portrayal of the poverty of the spirit of... more info

Two Terrific Adaptations of Gorky's Lower Depths...:

LOWER DEPTHS (1936) by Jeam Renoir

Lower Depths is an intricate story of poverty and those who fall into the deepest of socioeconomic despair based on the writer Maxim Gorky's play with the same name. The story takes place in the outskirts of Paris in a poorhouse where P?pel (Jean Gabin), a thief, is planning a raiding. P?pel is having an affair, which he tries to break off, with Vassilissa (Suzy Prim), the proprietor's wife, as he has come to realize that he loves Natacha (Junie Astor),... more info

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