Because of a shipping foul-up, The Most Beautiful did not play as scheduled on April 4 in our ongoing Kurosawa Retrospective (though it did arrive in time for our second announced screening on April 9). Therefore, we are repeating it here, partly to take advantage of Donald Richie's presence, so that the author of the definitive study of Kurosawa's career can share with us his insights into this rarely shown film, which is reportedly the only one of his early films for which Kurosawa now has a kind word. Kurosawa's second film, The Most Beautiful is a documentary-like treatment of women in a wartime lens factory: both a “national policy” assignment and his own original story, accounting for the balance between its very Japanese sense of team play, wartime subordination of the personal to the national goal, and Kurosawa's own characteristic belief in the individual.