The Idiot

Akira Kurosawa followed up his international success of Rashomon by going serious literary adaptation with an adaptation of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. Transposing the action from Tsarist Russia to postwar Japan (including the first explicit mention of the US occupation in a Kurosawa film), Kurosawa set out to make a two-part, over four-hour long film that the studio, Shochiku, suddenly got cold feet about releasing at such length. Given the ultimatum of cutting the film down to less than three ...