Dank desperation permeates every setting and every character in Masaki Kobayashi’s Kuroi kawa (US: Black River), a noir-infused drama about a love triangle between a pretty waitress, a university student, and a young gangster amidst the hopelessness of postwar Japan. Like many Japanese films of the period, such as Kurosawa’s Stray Dog (1949) and Imamura’s Pigs and Battleships (1961), Japan is presented as a postwar wasteland where crime is omnipresent, morality is entirely relative, and the American occupying forces have brought just as much pain as peace (Kobayashi brilliantly depicts the idea of American occupation as the murderer of one of the main characters). The young, studious tenant Nishida (Fumio Watanabe) loves Shizuko (Ineko Arima), but Shizuko is reluctantly but uncontrollably attracted to Jo (Tatsuya Nakadai), a good-looking yakuza who rapes and manipulates her (“When I’m in love, I’m cruel to my girl. Bad upbringing, I guess”). The setting is a dilapidated shantytown, where residents lack running water, use human feces as garden fertilizer, and can’t make their rent payments without relying on prostitution; in fact, the bucktoothed landlady is pursuing corrupt means of converting the building into a brothel so she can earn a greater profit. With the possible exception of Nishida, no character is blameless, and most are disturbingly selfish: one tenant is dying of tuberculosis, and everyone, including his own wife, refuses to donate the blood he needs. Expressionist lighting and an American jazz score amp up the noir credentials.