http://max256.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/record-of-a-tenement-gentleman-1947-yasujiro-ozu-american-flag.jpg

It isn’t really used to make a point, (at least not in the part I saw), but it made me laugh.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drunken_Angel

I haven’t seen the film you reference but now I’m very curious about it. Too bad you didn’t enjoy Devil’s Wanton, but your point about it the Betgman parody is funny and poignant. I blogged about something similar not too long ago re: the same movie. How perfectly Bergmanesque was it that ehen the couple goes to the theater to see a comedy, it had the devil, a skeleton, and a giant spider? In Bergman’s world, those things are passed off as comedy.

The most interesting Kurosawa movie with regard to the war is in my view The Men Who Tread on the Tiger’s Tail from 1945, which isn’t well known because it’s not at all up to his later movies. It was made right at the moment when the war ended, and it’s about a group of warriors who have been defeated, and encounter a guard post. And they must decide if they’re going to attack it, and die fighting honorably, or trick their way past it. They decide not to fight, because they realize that dying honorably in a pointless battle isn’t such a wonderful thing after all, and that’s how it ends.

It may be just me, but this seems to capture pretty well what happened in Japan at that moment. A shift in attitude. And the irony is that the movie was banned because the warriors happened to have a lord with them, and that represented dangerous feudal attitudes. The censors of the occupation government were not particularly clever, but then I guess censors rarely are.