The wild culminating work of the black comedy trilogy. Taking madness as a metaphor for the turmoil of postwar Japan, Ichikawa devises increasingly surreal compositions and situations to satirize the stress, inefficiency, and corruption of the corporate culture that was emerging from the Japanese "economic miracle." A young university graduate is given a job at a brewery, where he is taught to do nothing, but never look idle. (The visual treatment of his workplace and living quarters anticipates Jacques Tati in its strange exaggerations.) When he learns that his mother has gone insane, and that he has to send money for medical research into her affliction, he is caught in a series of mishaps that turn his hair white and leave him "at the bottom of the heap" in the booming economy. Vicious fun, A Full-Up Train was an obvious influence on its assistant director, Yasuzo Masumura, whose own corporate comedies (Giants and Toys, The Black Test Car) owe much to its acid-splashed satire.-James Quandt