The Inheritance

“For his follow-up to The Human Condition, Kobayashi turned to an intimate, character-driven story. As superficially different as the family-scandal melodrama The Inheritance may be from that nine-and-a-half-hour epic, it shares its moral sensibility. Shot mostly in interiors, the film charts the quiet chaos that erupts after a dying businessman (So Yamamura) announces that the lion’s share of his fortune is to be divided among his illegitimate children, with only a small portion going to his much younger spouse (Misako Watanabe). . . . This is Kobayashi’s first drama set in an exclusively bourgeois milieu, and its visual condemnation of materialism is especially pronounced.”