Kurosawa's take on the soulless scandal mongering of the paparazzi nine years before -La Dolce Vita-. Mifune understated and very charismatic as the artist implemented in gossip with the beautiful but underused Yamaguchi. Takashi Shimura appears memorably at first in a seemingly comic turn as the crooked lawyer. Things become unbearably maudlin from this point onwards. A Kurosawa flaw I've noticed in most of his films. Scenes of morose despair are hammered home far past being effective and end up exhausting the viewer. The tragic end of the saintly daugher well played by Yoko is a case in point. It's all just quite a bit too much after a promising first 2/3rds of the movie.
Review of Scandal
