Ichikawa's formal brilliance and gift for black satire emerged with Mr. Pu, which critics have come to rank among his best films. A postwar mania for the put-upon Mr. Pu, a hapless fall-guy featured in a popular series of cartoons, led Ichikawa to make this biting comedy. Mr. Pu is a math teacher who is treated with contempt by everyone as he tries to make his way through the chaos and corruption of the postwar period. Full of breathtaking jokes about prostitution, unemployment, militarism, the black market, nuclear war, and violent crime-one of its funniest sequences features a surreal series of wounded victims stumbling out of the dark-and featuring a striptease sequence, "Nudes at Large," that has to be seen to be believed, Mr. Pu is the boldest of satirical salvoes. (Decades before Woody Allen's Zelig, for instance, Ichikawa drops Mr. Pu into documentary footage of leftist street demonstrations.) "Extremely funny but deeply nihilistic" (John Wakeman). Not to be missed.-James Quandt