First-rate film by a first-rate director, in which pretty much every shot is a composition of expressive beauty. The story is rich and juicy, full of the dramatic potential which can jump a stylistic gear into melodrama with very little effort, but also weighted with a powerful message about personal moral responsibility. Toshiro Mifune, embodies this moral message in his passionate,intense performance as Murakami. The moment when, visiting the home of his fellow detective (the excellent Takashi Shimura) Murakami smiles for the first time in the movie on meeting his colleague's children is particularly moving. And it is again the presence of children that transfigures the amazing final struggle between hero and villain. The use of sound is remarkable, especially in the last act, when what we hear through the other end of the telephone is deployed to powerful effect. There was always a surprise around the corner, whether one of pace or image or sound or performance or turn of the narrative - though in fact it's a very straightforward story, told in a linear fashion, but that description really doesn't do justice to a sequence such as when we go to the ballistics lab at the police station, Mifune learns about a bullet found at the scene of a crime, and then he dashes off without any warning - and we follow him - to a shooting range at which we'd seen him early on in the film, retrieving a spent bullet of his own, and then we dash back to the ballistic lab, and then go into a microscopic close-up POV ballistics man, comparing the two bullets. It's completely the right thing to do, because we are suddenly at one with the hero's concerns. The director's particular gift is to tell the story from the perfect, most poetically expressive, point of view. It reveals in its beauty the sheer dross that is the bulk of screen fodder, dwelling on which can make you a little sad, but knowing work such as this exists is so uplifting, it reminds you of the value of real reel art and artists.