Where silver always beats gold!
Akira Kurosawa is considered one of the finest film directors in cinematic history. The second feature-length film that he ever directed is titled The Most Beautiful (番美しく). Released in 1944, the movie is a World War II Japanese propaganda film shot in an almost documentary style about a group of young women working in a factory in Japan that has to increase production to meet an almost impossible quota as part of the Japanese war effort. The men are to increase their quota 100%, whereas the women are only expected to increase 50%. Dismayed by the lower quota, and wanting to do all they could to support their army, the women set about trying to increase their production by 66%. The story is mainly about the personal sacrifices and difficulties that the women face while trying to meet this quota.
The Most Beautiful is considered a minor work by Kurosawa, however, his directorial style and approach to the film are considered significant by film historians and Kurosawa enthusiasts.
Still image from Akira Kurosawa’s second film, The Most Beautiful (1944).
Back to SilverMedals Referencepedia...
With such great raw material to work from, you’d think it’d be easy to make a great series from it. Apparently it wasn’t. The BBC1 series Rogue Heroes based on the Robert MacIntyre book of the same name is an altogether silly comic-book effort to tell the incredible story of the formation of the elite British Special Air Service during…read more
The silver medal won by German athlete Luz Long in the long jump at the 1936 Munich Olympics fetched $488,435 at auction on October 16, 2022, a record for an Olympic silver medal sold at public auction. In all, 20 bids were made for the medal, which had attracted a significant amount of worldwide media attention. Many other pieces of…read more
It didn’t have as compelling a birth as the first Special Air Service regiment. It didn’t have its great founder driving point in a souped-up jeep during attacks on German air bases. It didn’t have the romance of the desert as its initial stomping grounds. About the only thing it seemed to have going for it was the reputation of…read more
The world’s second-ranked Google search queries of 2018.
By the time Burt Reynolds signed up for the movie Armored Command (Allied Artists, 1961), his second full-length feature movie, he had already put together a respectable resumé as a stage and TV actor having appeared in at least 15 television shows in not only bit parts but in regular roles. An ex-athlete from Florida with a rugged sexiness that…read more
After the fifth installment of the James Bond movie series You Only Live Twice hit the theaters, Harry Saltzman and Albert R. “Cubby” Broccoli, the producers of the lucrative franchise, had a problem. Their Bond didn’t want to be Bond anymore. Indeed after spying, killing, and sexing his way through five James Bond movies, Scottish actor Sean Connery was ready to…read more
