Perhaps the least known period of Akira Kurosawa's career is the short period during the late 40s and early 50s in which he wrote a total of five screenplays for his childhood friend, Senkichi Taniguchi. Judging by this film alone, there's very little that separates Kurosawa's scripts from his own films. It probably helps a great deal that Kurosawa regulars Toshiro Mifune and Takashi Shimura play the leads, but we see plenty of America's greats of genre cinema being channeled.