"Oh, The Way People Live!"

The Lower Depths (Toho) is a fascinating minor work by a continually amazing major artist: Japan's Akira Kurosawa. Filmed in 1957, Depths is presented simply as a Japanization of Maxim Gorky's classic proletarian comedy, but in fact the film has a hissing demonic energy and a vast life-welcoming humor that are unmistakably Kurosawa's own.

Like the play, the picture does not rigorously develop a plot. It establishes a milieu, a geography of moral failure, an ultimate, absolute flophouse. And in this flophouse it engenders characters as straw breeds lice: a smalltime crook, a sentimental whore, a police spy who regularly gets beaten by his wife, an alcoholic actor, a slugnutty wrestler, a landlord and landlady like two scorpions in a bottle, and watching them all a funny little old man who laughs and laughs and shakes his head and says, "Oh, the way people live!"

The old man, interpreted with earthy humor and shining grace by Bokuzen Hidari, is the vortical figure in the film. The other characters turn to him as men turn instinctively to a light in darkness. He is a holy idiot, a saint who is wanted by the police. He looks like a lamb, he looks like a dragon. Unhuman understanding blazes in his eyes-or is it merely the firelight reflected? Prophetic wisdom flames from his mouth-or is he simply playing the oracle? "Lies are not always evil, nor is the truth always good . . . Blessed are those who believe in something, even if it is nothing . . . You shouldn't forget what you love. The things you love are the things you live for."

Played like a play-the action takes place on one set, one quarter of the film was shot in one take-the picture nevertheless never turns stagy, never stops moving as a movie must. Occasionally, a scene is boring, but usually because it intends to suggest the tedium of stagnation, the sameness of life and death in the viscous depths of hopelessness. Occasionally, as in the horrific climax, the picture is crudely exciting. And in one brief episode, a hilarious Oriental hoedown in which four flophouse characters do what looks like a medieval Japanese version of the Twist, Kurosawa is so far out the rickshas don't run there any more.

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