Chief Goro Ishida Soji Kiyokawa as Soichi Yoshikawa Ichiro Sugai as Ken Sanada Takako Irie as Noriko Mizushima Sayuri Tanima as Yuriko Tanimura Sachiko Ozaki as Sachiko Yamazaki Asako Suzuki as Asako Suzumura Haruko Toyama as Masako Koyama Yoko Yaguchi as Tsuru Watanabe Production According to Stephen Prince, Akira Kurosawa had been chosen by the navy to direct an action film about Zero fighter planes. But by 1943, he thought it unlikely that the navy would spare planes for a film as it was becoming clear that Japan would lose the war. So Kurosawa made this "patriotic morale booster" instead. The director shot The Most Beautiful with a "semidocumentary approach." It was filmed on-location at the Nippon Kogaku factory in Hiratsuka, where he had the actresses live, work, and form a fife and drum corps. Actress Yoko Yaguchi clashed over the alleged ways Kurosawa treated the actors. However, the pair found a connection, despite these clashes, and married in 1945. Although Prince writes that Kurosawa later chastised himself for doing so little to resist Japan's descent into militarism, the director also remarked that, of all his films, The Most Beautiful was dearest to him. Reissues The Criterion Collection has released The Most Beautiful on DVD in North America as part of two 2009 Kurosawa-centered box sets; The First Films of Akira Kurosawa, the 23rd entry in their Eclipse series, and AK 100: 25 Films by Akira Kurosawa. Critical reception Paul Anderer of Columbia University has commented on the subtext of the film having been released during the war years for Japan. Anderer said, "It is as if Kurosawa himself were in this lineup (of directors under state scrutiny), frozen inside wartime, when any significant movement or resistance to the authority would be stillborn. Surrounded by a censorship apparatus far more resourceful and intimidating, he would later claim, than anything the American Occupation threw his way, he had few thematic or tonal options: historical tributes to Japanese spiritual and martial values (like Sanshiro Sugata and its weaker sequel), or patriotic odes to factory production and sacrificial domesticity (e.g., The Most Beautiful, 1944)". Critics like Stephen Prince, Kurosawa translator Audie Bock, and historian David Conrad have argued that what is most striking about The Most Beautiful and Kurosawa's other wartime productions is the extent to which they complicate and even undercut the government's desired message. The Most Beautiful "dutifully praises sacrifice but