Kurosawa's second film is a documentary-like fictional treatment of women working in a wartime lens factory. Grinding and polishing lenses for gunsights, they are under extraordinary pressure not to make a single mistake nor waste a bit of glass. Illness and other symptoms of distress begin to take over their lives. The Most Beautiful was both a “national policy” assignment and Kurosawa's own original story, which accounts for its balance between the notion of subordinating the personal to the national goal, and Kurosawa's own characteristic belief in the individual. As Donald Richie wrote, “The plot line is manipulated to a degree, but oddly, the characters are not. In this context of preserved actuality, of beautifully captured wartime stringency (the very conditions of which-not enough film, not enough lights, not enough sets-might account for the extreme economy and directness of the picture) the performances ring with a kind of truth that one finds only in real documentaries.”