After [Masaki Koboyashi's] The Human Condition, the two most important Japanese films about the Second World War were Kon Ichikawa's The Harp of Burma and Fires on the Plain…. In making two such different films on the same subject—the horrors of war experienced by besieged and abandoned Japanese soldiers—Ichikawa reveals his own lack of a consistent point of view or personal commitment. Ichikawa's anti-war films are the opposite of Kobayashi's, whose films may be more didactic but reveal a much more coherent and persuasive understanding of history.

Ichikawa's anti-war works are far less intellectually serious than The Human Condition. They take their coloration from the novels from which they are adapted and from the personalities of both Ichikawa and his screenwriter wife, Natto Wada. Ichikawa has always willfully insisted that the ideas expressed in his films are of no particular consequence. We are apt, therefore, to...