Mifune again stars, this time as Nakajimi, a perpetually scowling, apparently deranged old industrialist. His obsession with removing himself and his family to Brazil to escape nuclear annihilation has triggered an investigation into his mental health, with the family hoping to have him declared incompetent. From the opening sequence, it’s clear that the film wants to show that his fears are realistic and that, far from being incompetent, he may be the only sane person in a world that accepts the possibility of worldwide destruction. The credit sequence is a series of overhead shots of streets crowded with faceless commuters, all moving in orderly but seemingly mindless patterns. This powerful image of sheeplike mentality and groupthink is made all the more ominous by a jazz score filigreed with theremin sounds that eerily portend rifts in the orderly body politic.

Unlike most of Kurosawa’s films, which celebrate action and its cathartic effects, I Live in Fear has a claustrophobic feel, forcing its hero into a constricted space from which he can’t move. Nakajimi cannot act; he’s frozen by his fears, which, significantly, don’t become palpable until he’s declared incompetent by the Family Court. The sense of unwilling containment comes not only from his terror of the bomb but from a family that crowds in on him in the court scenes, crushing him with its desire to strip him of his power and take control of his assets. Kurosawa repeatedly visualizes this sense of a quiet mob of relatives pressing in on him.

Nakajimi not only has to carry the weight of his fears and his family; he’s also explicitly a symbol of postwar Japan as a weak, demented old man. As the patriarch, his family must look up to him, honor him. But this patriarch is weak and perhaps insane, unable to cope in the face of forces beyond his control. His response is that of many Kurosawa heroes, though ultimately it’s a hopeless act: he burns down his foundry. He then becomes the madman his family has said he was.

I Live in Fear’s distillation of postwar Japan into the figure of Nakamiji is compelling and troubling. Mifune is mostly convincing, though occasionally hyperdramatic in his glares and grimaces. Like the other two films in this series, this one has a tuberculosis angle. Kurosawa’s good friend and frequent collaborator, composer Fumio Hayasaka, died of the disease during production, no doubt adding another shade of black to an already dark vision.