Japanese master Masaki Kobayashi had a similar career arc as his more famous peer, Akira Kurosawa, as both preceded their later historical and epic masterpieces with an earlier phase working successfully in the style of film noir: Kurosawa gave us Drunken Angel (1948) and Stray Dog (1949) while Kobayashi made Black River (1957) and The Inheritance, a stylish noir drama about human vultures circling a dying, wealthy man with a fortune to leave behind. Call it not a whodunit, but a whogetsit. Keiko Kishi stars as Yasuko, the mild-mannered secretary to the dying Senzô (Sō Yamamura), whose much younger wife Rie (Misako Watanabe) expects to inherit the entirety of her childless husband’s fortune. When Senzô assembles his key advisors, including Yasuko, Rie, and attorney Yoshida (Seiji Miyaguchi), he shocks them all by announcing he has three children somewhere out there (“I don’t have any legally recognized children, but I do have three children”) and wants to find them to assess whether one or more of them should share in the inheritance. Thus commences a game of searching, alliances, fraud, blackmail, prostitution, and sororicide, each advisor concocting plots to eliminate or disqualify the heirs. Even the soft-spoken Keiko’s intentions are unclear: is she a loyal servant dedicated to granting Senzô’s final wish or a femme fatale creating a brilliant, strategic trap to gain the entire fortune for herself? Takemitsu’s dissonant score of long, low-register notes adds to the distrust and uncertainty while Kawamata’s camera captures stunning nighttime exteriors (a dazed walk along the trolley track, a search down city streets with cars and neon lights whirring behind). Kobayashi’s exceptional confidence in direction boosts the impact of sequences like Keiko’s accommodation at Senzô’s house during a typhoon, or when one woman dictates a fake suicide note to another.