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Editorial Review:
Amazon.com:
The official title of I Live in Fear is Record of a Living Being, and coming as it did after Kurosawa's triumphant Seven Samurai it was perhaps inevitably a box-office failure. With barely a decade passing after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japanese filmgoers avoided this serious drama about the gloomy specter of nuclear annihilation. It's not always an easy film to watch, but that's only because the story wields substantial emotional power, taking form as a kind of modern King Lear with its scenario of family strife and internal plotting. As such, it bears tangential relationship to Kurosawa's own rendition of Lear, his final epic Ran.
Playing a character twice his age, Toshirô Mifune (barely recognizable from Seven Samurai) is the patriarch of a large extended family (the 'I' of the title) who has decided to move to a Brazilian farm to escape the psychological torment of the atomic bomb. Charging him with 'mental incompetence,' his adult children plot to override his decision, and a mediator (Takashi Shimura) attempts to balance the battle. This turns the film (like much of Kurosawa's work) into a quest for truth: Is the father insane with fear? Are his fears truly justified? In Japan of the 1950s these were not easy questions, and the death during production of Kurosawa's best friend (composer Fumio Hayasaka) lends the film additional gravity and import. If the story and its execution seem at times ambivalent, it's only because Kurosawa (and Japan itself) was still struggling to find meaning--to create a record of a living being--in a world that could be destroyed at any moment. --Jeff Shannon
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Very Watchable, GREAT Ending
This film, originally "Record of a Living Being", is not among Kurosawa's greatest (Rashomon, Seven Samurai, etc.), which is just fine considering the achievements he has brought forth during his career. However, this film is good in its own way. First, Toshiro Mifune's role is different, as he plays a much older, family man, and plays it very well. Also, the entire film is good to sit through and is not dull. Plus, there is a clear message in the film about people who "live in fear" (although ... Read More
Rating: - Nuclear Paranoia From A Master
This 1955 release is one of those smaller Akira Kurosawa films that is overlooked in favor of his bigger films like "Rashomon" and "Seven Samurai" but it's still worth seeing. The great Toshiro Mifune plays an industrialist in post-World War II Japan who is slowly going mad with the notion that a nuclear war is coming and tries to convince his family (and his mistresses) to flee Japan with him. Mifune's obsessive portrayal is the stuff of great tragedy especially as he vainly pleads with his greedy ... Read More
Rating:  - just must see
"Toshiro Mifune was the most logical of any other his movie." It will be when you watch the VHS in your house TV that you know this mean. And you may notice the fact you don't notice now. Very educational, however, has unique pathos with tear in my eyes.
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