With this wartime comedy, Keisuke Kinoshita made his directing debut (although it's listed second among his credits on the IMDb) the same year as Akira Kurosawa. Kurosawa went on to become Japan's most acclaimed director internationally, but it was Kinoshita who won the prestigious Sadao Yamanaka Award for the year's best new director. This adaptation of Kazuo Kikuta's novel depicts the rogue's progress of two con men who arrive in a port city posing as the late local hero's long lost sons. They set out to revive a shipyard project he has started, planning to run off with the money raised, only for the outbreak of World War II to upset their plans. Kinoshita had been working at the Shochiku studios for a decade, most of that time as an assistant director. When poor health kept him out of the military, the studio promoted him to director and gave him a surprisingly large budget for a newcomer, not to mention a cast of name actors, including Chishu Ryu, a regular in director Yasujiro Ozu's films. The result was a box office success that gave Kinoshita the first chance to develop two of his recurring themes, the existence of comedy in surprising places and the ultimate goodness of human nature.

By Frank Miller