The Lower Depths

October 06, 2026 • 00:03:27
The Lower Depths
Flicks with The Film Snob
The Lower Depths

Oct 06 2026 | 00:03:27

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Show Notes

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 Ivan Ilych.” Gorky’s play was written in 1902, in the turbulent period before revolution, and it grimly portrayed and satirized the state of…

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