A young couple spends a Sunday on the streets of Tokyo, looking for ways not to spend what little money they have, in this effortless city-film inspired by Capra, Griffith, Murnau, and the boundless energy of a Tokyo just emerging from the war. Shooting directly on location, Kurosawa used the film's vagabond plot as an excuse to showcase as much of the city as possible, including its baseball games, cabarets, zoos, and new housing complexes; as a result, One Wonderful Sunday is as much a fascinating document of postwar Japan as it is a fictional work. A sunnier, romantic flip side to the much harsher Stray Dog (also filmed on location, two years later), this breezy tribute to a new generation still doesn't pull its punches, making sure that the couple's Sunday, filled with things they can't afford and blowhards anxious to remind them of it, is “wonderful” mainly due to their optimism about the future, as opposed to the sorrows of the present.