Ein Leben in Furcht

Akira Kurosawa's I LIVE IN FEAR (1955) is one of his lesser-known and sadly underrated films, with a revelatory performance by Toshiro Mifune as a character nearly double his real age at the time. Mifune plays the old owner of an iron foundry who has become so paranoid about the possibility of another atomic attack that he first tried to build a bomb shelter and now is planning to move his entire family to a farm in Brazil.

Naturally his adult children and even his wife have no desire to move from their comfortable Tokyo home and try to get him declared mentally incompetent. Takashi Shimura is a dentist serving as conflicted judge on the court mediation panel. This excellent look into the personal psychology of 1950s nuclear paranoia is a huge step above the numerous propaganda films of the era and an ideal complement to the numerous allegorical sci-fi horror films from the same period (especially GODZILLA, from the year before and also starring Takashi Shimura), as well as some of the more interesting Cold War post-apocalyptic films like WORLD WITHOUT END (1956) and PANIC IN YEAR ZERO (1962).