Directed by Shohei Imamura • 1958 • Japan
Starring Hiroyuki Nagato, Misako Watanabe, Ko Nishimura

Director Shohei Imamura’s typically hardscrabble vision of human survival in postwar Japan blends black comedy with raw social commentary as it follows a quintet of unsavory characters who come together for a desperate heist: digging up a stash of morphine that was buried under a butcher shop during World War II. As the group turns on each other one by one, what emerges is a mordant microcosm of social decay.