# The Lower Depths (どん底)
**The Lower Depths** (どん底, Donzoko) is a 1957 Japanese drama film directed, produced, and co-written by [Akira Kurosawa](https://www.edgepedia.org/akira-kurosawa), an adaptation of [Maxim Gorky](https://www.edgepedia.org/maxim-gorky)'s 1902 play of the same name transposed from a Russian dosshouse (a cheap lodging house for destitute people) to a run-down tenement (棟割長屋) on the outskirts of Edo-period Japan. It was produced and distributed by Toho and stars [Toshiro Mifune](https://www.edgepedia.org/toshiro-mifune), Isuzu Yamada, Kyoko Kagawa, and Ganjiro Nakamura.[1](https://jfdb.jp/title/9694) • [2](https://www.kinenote.com/main/public/cinema/detail.aspx?cinema_id=25458)
| Key fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| Original title | どん底 (Donzoko), English title The Lower Depths[1](https://jfdb.jp/title/9694) |
| Director, producer, screenplay | Akira Kurosawa, with Hideo Oguni as co-screenwriter[1](https://jfdb.jp/title/9694) |
| Source | Maxim Gorky's play The Lower Depths (1902), which brought Gorky international fame[1](https://jfdb.jp/title/9694) • [3](https://kawasaki-ac.jp/donzoko/) |
| Setting | A tenement lodging house on the fringes of Edo, replacing the play's Russian flophouse[1](https://jfdb.jp/title/9694) |
| Principal cast | Toshiro Mifune (Sutekichi), Isuzu Yamada (Osugi), Kyoko Kagawa (Okayo), Ganjiro Nakamura (Rokubei, the landlord), Minoru Chiaki[1](https://jfdb.jp/title/9694) |
| Production | Toho; black-and-white; cinematography by Kazuo Yamazaki; music by Masaru Sato; art direction by Yoshiro Muraki[2](https://www.kinenote.com/main/public/cinema/detail.aspx?cinema_id=25458) |
| Release | September 17, 1957 per most Japanese databases; October 1, 1957 per JFDB[4](https://www.allcinema.net/cinema/pdf/137942) • [1](https://jfdb.jp/title/9694) |
| Runtime | 125 minutes per JFDB, KINENOTE, and Musabi; 137 minutes per allcinema and eiga.com[1](https://jfdb.jp/title/9694) • [4](https://www.allcinema.net/cinema/pdf/137942) |
## Spoilers
### Story
The film follows the residents of a subdivided tenement house in Edo, people living at the bottom of society, in what Japanese sources describe as a hard-edged ensemble drama that keeps its humor.[1](https://jfdb.jp/title/9694) • [4](https://www.allcinema.net/cinema/pdf/137942) The thief Sutekichi (Toshiro Mifune) has been carrying on an affair with Osugi (Isuzu Yamada), the wife of the landlord Rokubei (Ganjirō Nakamura), but he is actually in love with her younger sister Okayo (Kyoko Kagawa).[1](https://jfdb.jp/title/9694) Osugi taunts the frustrated Sutekichi with a bargain: if he will kill her husband and lift her out of the depths, she will let him marry Okayo.[2](https://www.kinenote.com/main/public/cinema/detail.aspx?cinema_id=25458)
Into this household comes a wandering pilgrim, an old man who goes about preaching a kind of detached enlightenment to the residents, and the atmosphere of the tenement begins to change.[1](https://jfdb.jp/title/9694) The English-language synopsis on Rotten Tomatoes adds that Osugi takes revenge on Sutekichi by revealing the infidelity to her jealous husband, drawing the boardinghouse residents into a love triangle that turns violent.[5](https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/lower_depths) The film ends with a festive song-and-dance of the surviving tenants and a devastating aside from the Gambler, following a shocking final reversal that interrupts the drunken number.[6](https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2004/cteq/donzoko/) • [5](https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/lower_depths)
## Adaptation of Gorky
Gorky's play, his second, premiered in 1902 and won him international renown; he had been urged to write for the stage by Chekhov.[3](https://kawasaki-ac.jp/donzoko/) The play depicts human flotsam in a Moscow dosshouse living on illusions, and Kurosawa's film remains faithful to the text while transplanting it to Edo.[7](https://www.acmi.net.au/works/115702--donzoko-the-lower-depths/) Kurosawa follows Gorky almost scene for scene, keeping most of the character types intact and adapting specific lines of dialogue, and he holds true to the downer ending.[8](https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/332-jean-renoir-s-the-lower-depths) • [9](https://archive.thedigitalbits.com/reviews3/kurosawa05.html)
The Edo setting is deliberately ironic, because the period is one that is usually romanticized in Japan.[7](https://www.acmi.net.au/works/115702--donzoko-the-lower-depths/) Kurosawa also consciously brings out humor not normally associated with the play, humor inherent in the gap between illusion and reality at its center.[7](https://www.acmi.net.au/works/115702--donzoko-the-lower-depths/) The film was the second Kurosawa film in a row based on a well-known Western play, coming immediately after [Throne of Blood](https://www.edgepedia.org/throne-of-blood), his adaptation of Macbeth; where Throne of Blood is abstract and dreamlike, The Lower Depths is a fairly faithful rendering of Gorky's social realism.[10](https://akirakurosawa.info/2013/01/01/film-club-the-lower-depths-kurosawa-1957/)
## Relation to Renoir's 1936 film
[Jean Renoir](https://www.edgepedia.org/jean-renoir) had already filmed the play in 1936 as Les Bas-fonds, with [Jean Gabin](https://www.edgepedia.org/jean-gabin) as the thief Pépel.[3](https://kawasaki-ac.jp/donzoko/) Kurosawa had seen Renoir's film, and it may have been the impetus for making his own version.[8](https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/332-jean-renoir-s-the-lower-depths) The two treatments differ sharply: Renoir opened the piece outward to include more of the world and added improvised business, such as the famous snail scene, that has no counterpart in Gorky, while Kurosawa clamps down on the ghetto setting and never leaves it, filling the soundtrack with the oppressive sound of wind that keeps the residents trapped.[9](https://archive.thedigitalbits.com/reviews3/kurosawa05.html) • [11](https://www.dvdjournal.com/quickreviews/l/lowerdepths_cc.q.shtml) • [8](https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/332-jean-renoir-s-the-lower-depths)
Kurosawa greatly admired Renoir and met him once in the 1970s in Los Angeles. Renoir did not see Kurosawa's film until 1977; after watching it with great interest, he remarked, "That is a much more important film than mine."[8](https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/332-jean-renoir-s-the-lower-depths) Both versions were released together on DVD by the Criterion Collection in 2004 as Spine #239.[9](https://archive.thedigitalbits.com/reviews3/kurosawa05.html) • [12](https://www.lostincriterion.com/e/the-lower-depths/)
## Production and style
The film was made at the height of Kurosawa's powers and, unusually for him, reportedly on a short schedule and low budget.[6](https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2004/cteq/donzoko/) • [13](https://secure.eiga.com/movie/21897/) Apart from the opening shot, the action is confined to two sets, the inside and outside of the dilapidated tenement, matching the stage play's single location.[6](https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2004/cteq/donzoko/)
**Rehearsal and multi-camera shooting.** The cast rehearsed at length on the set in costume before filming began, 60 days according to Yamada, and Kurosawa then shot each scene in single takes with multiple cameras, a method he used to preserve continuity of performance and produce what critics describe as an extreme sense of immediacy and tension.[6](https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2004/cteq/donzoko/) • [4](https://www.allcinema.net/cinema/pdf/137942) • [13](https://secure.eiga.com/movie/21897/) • [7](https://www.acmi.net.au/works/115702--donzoko-the-lower-depths/)
The result is a film that is deliberately theatrical in its sound and presentational acting, yet very much a Kurosawa film in its dynamic cinematography and editing; the editing here is neither suspenseful nor bravura but brutally jagged, serving the existential melodrama.[7](https://www.acmi.net.au/works/115702--donzoko-the-lower-depths/) • [6](https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2004/cteq/donzoko/) Its long takes and deep-focus cinematography resemble Renoir's style, and Kurosawa uses them to make the [flophouse](https://www.edgepedia.org/flophouse) the locus of an entire world.[8](https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/332-jean-renoir-s-the-lower-depths)
## Reception and interpretation
On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds an 83% Tomatometer from 6 reviews and a 79% audience score.[5](https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/lower_depths) The Senses of Cinema great-directors survey calls The Lower Depths Kurosawa's most consistently underrated film and notes that some reference guides have wrongly labeled it a remake of Renoir's Les Bas-fonds rather than an independent adaptation of Gorky.[14](https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2002/great-directors/kurosawa/)
Scholarship has moved beyond the older view of the film as a merely formalist exercise in transferring a play to the screen. Olga V. Solovieva, a scholar of comparative literature at the University of Chicago, argues that by morphing the iconography of post-war misery together with the iconography of the Tokugawa period, Kurosawa's rendition countered the tendency of post-occupation Japan to avoid realistic representation of its war-inflicted destitution, and linked that destitution to its causes in the nationalist and militarist past.[15](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17564905.2013.10820071)
## References
1. [どん底 (Donzoko), Japanese Film Database (JFDB)](https://jfdb.jp/title/9694)
2. [どん底 (1957), KINENOTE](https://www.kinenote.com/main/public/cinema/detail.aspx?cinema_id=25458)
3. [映画『どん底』公式サイト (Jean Renoir retrospective), Kawasaki City Museum](https://kawasaki-ac.jp/donzoko/)
4. [どん底（1957）, allcinema](https://www.allcinema.net/cinema/pdf/137942)
5. [The Lower Depths, Rotten Tomatoes](https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/lower_depths)
6. [Donzoko (The Lower Depths), Freda Freiberg, Senses of Cinema (2004)](https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2004/cteq/donzoko/)
7. [Donzoko = The Lower Depths, ACMI collection](https://www.acmi.net.au/works/115702--donzoko-the-lower-depths/)
8. [Jean Renoir's The Lower Depths, Alexander Sesonske, The Criterion Collection](https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/332-jean-renoir-s-the-lower-depths)
9. [The Films of Akira Kurosawa DVD reviews, The Digital Bits (2005)](https://archive.thedigitalbits.com/reviews3/kurosawa05.html)
10. [Film Club: The Lower Depths (Kurosawa, 1957), akirakurosawa.info](https://akirakurosawa.info/2013/01/01/film-club-the-lower-depths-kurosawa-1957/)
11. [The DVD Journal: The Lower Depths: The Criterion Collection](https://www.dvdjournal.com/quickreviews/l/lowerdepths_cc.q.shtml)
12. [Spine 239: The Lower Depths, Lost in Criterion](https://www.lostincriterion.com/e/the-lower-depths/)
13. [どん底, eiga.com](https://secure.eiga.com/movie/21897/)
14. [Kurosawa, Akira, Senses of Cinema Great Directors survey](https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2002/great-directors/kurosawa/)
15. [Olga V. Solovieva, "Kurosawa Akira's The Lower Depths: Beggar cinema at the disjuncture of times," Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema 5 (2013)](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17564905.2013.10820071)
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*Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Films by genre, form, and subject › Adaptations of literature, stage, and other media › Films based on stage plays*
*Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 21, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026*
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