The Lower Depths

Akira Kurosawa adapted the famous play by Maxim Gorky about a group of outcasts typifying social conflict into a film of remarkable power. It had long been a dream of the director Akira Kurosawa to make a film adapting the great Maxim Gorky play “The Lower Depths” about the struggles of a group of destitute people living in a flophouse. It had been done before several times by other directors, but Kurosawa felt a strong connection with Russian literature. He’d already done a version of Dostoevsky’s “The Idiot,” and another of his films was inspired loosely by Tolstoy’s “The Death of…