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Some spoilers based in history.

Kurosawa's fifth feature film finds him, at last, in those beginning years where one could very well read this as the first "real" Kurosawa picture, especially as this is his first to be produced following Japan's defeat in World War II. No longer is he dragooned into making propaganda pieces for Emperor Hirohito's Japan, however, with their surrender to the Allies, a new censorship council took leadership in the cinema of Japan. The SCAP (Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers), American General Douglas MacArthur, oversaw the American occupation of Japan following the war. More specifically, however, it is the CIE (Civil Information Educational Section) which oversaw the production of Japanese media until 1952.

In his autobiography (if I am to recall correctly), Kurosawa thinks of himself as a socially-minded artist rather than one that is politically-minded. Always has Kurosawa looked to dissect the human condition, but for the first time (discounting the inherent politick of his early work in The Most Beautiful and Sashiro Sugata, Part Two), Kurosawa tackles the politics of prewar Japan by co-writing and directing this film, one inspired by the Tokyo University (or Takigawa) incident of 1933, which led to the forced resignation of Professor Yukitoki Takigawa, whose leftist ideals—flowing into the minds of his students—were read as Marxist, communist threats by the state. Utterances of Manchuria and the Reds arise, and one can't help but recall the Xinhai Revolution when China overthrew the monarchy just a couple decades prior to the events of the film.

Yet, Kurosawa pays no attention to the bureaucracy—indeed, the government operates within the background and compels the story forward—but he instead looks to the reactions of his characters, how they continue to live as they are suppressed. Though tragic and troubling, however ultimately optimistic, is the end result of the film. No Regrets for Our Youth is not a political tragedy, but a social tragedy.

We follow the daughter of Professor Yagihara (the analogue for Professor Takigawa), Yukie, as she shares an unassumed love triangle between two classmates, the compliant Itokawa and the outspoken Noge. A love triangle story this is not, however, for, above all else, Kurosawa explores the misfortune of political unrest through Yukie, a character situated on the outskirts of the quiet insurrection. Yukie later falls in love and marries Noge (loosely based on Hotsumi Ozaki), now a journalist who promotes the leftist ideology of his teacher in Yagihara. Like the real events on which the film is based, Noge is eventually captured and executed.

[As an aside, this film would make a great companion piece with Terrence Malick's A Hidden Life, as both sport narratives about real-life figures who defied their state and were later executed, leaving their wives to persist after their deaths.]

Before her legendary collaborations with director Yasujirō Ozu, Setsuko Hara would work first with Kurosawa in what is the first and only instance he would direct a story with a female lead. However, one gets a very different Hara in this. That famous smile of hers is seen here, but that smile is mostly snuffed out; instead, she leads a life of tragedy and turmoil following her husband's death. The final act, where she trades her relatively posh life to live with her in-laws in rural Japan, finds her at her most unrecognizable. She desperately asks of her husband's parents to let her live with them, to till the fields and work hard for them as some fashion of recompense for their son's death. Her hands that once played the piano now plant acres of rice paddies. However, the village around the family are victims of rumor and hearsay, treating them with harsh disdain, crying out that they are spies. But perseverance rules out.

As for technique, we see something here that would later become typical of Kurosawa: the classic montage of running jump cuts as with quickly follow various characters running in one direction in-frame. This would seem to be the first occurrence of the Kurosawa staple, one that would more famously be seen Seven Samurai as the title samurai react to the ringing of the village alarm bell. Here, he also favors the closeup with much of our attention paid to the smiles and painted sorrows of Hara's face.

As mentioned before, this feels like the first genuine Kurosawa picture (whatever that may entail), yet as early on in his career as it still very much is, there is a synthesis of many styles here. The analytical montage of Sergei Eisenstein appears here (in one such example: a tumble down a stairwell), the Western sensibilities of John Ford and American cinema (perhaps most of all acknowledged in Tadashi Hattori's score), the faint whispers of Japanese stylizations, and his own accordance to weather and ensemble storylines.

No Regrets for Our Youth, despite being produced during America's occupation of Japan, is Kurosawa's first feature that registers most as him, the auteur in the making. But also, perhaps even above the auteur, this is Setsuko Hara's film. So deeply entrenched within the character we are by the end of it that we ineffectively long for Kurosawa to make another film with a woman as the heroine. No masterpiece, but this is the first encounter with a true artist.

Akira Kurosawa [Ranked]