The film stars Toshiro Mifune as a young man who gets a prominent position in a corrupt postwar Japanese company in order to expose the men responsible for his father's death.

"[6] A group of news reporters watch and gossip at an elaborate wedding reception held by the Public Development Corporation's Vice President Iwabuchi, who married his daughter Yoshiko to his secretary Koichi Nishi.

The police interrupt the wedding to arrest corporate assistant officer Wada, who is the reception's master of ceremony, on charges of bribery in a kickback scheme.

Nishi then focuses his efforts on contract officer Shirai by setting him up so that Iwabuchi and Moriyama believe him to be stealing from them, while also using Wada to drive him insane with guilt.

Retreating to the ruins of a factory he worked at during World War II, Nishi manages to abduct Moriyama and starves him into revealing the location of evidence he can use to expose the corruption and all involved to the press.

Believing that making his first independent film merely for commercial success would be insulting to the audience, Kurosawa elected to tackle a subject of social significance.

Kurosawa began writing the script with Eijirō Hisaita, whom he had collaborated with on No Regrets for Our Youth and The Idiot, both starring Setsuko Hara.

[8] Contemporary reviews were positive, with a Bosley Crowther piece in The New York Times from January 1963 calling it ”an aggressive and chilling drama of modern-day Japan” which ”gives to an ordinary tale of greedy and murderous contention a certain basic philosophical tone”.

It praises Kurosawa for staging ”what amounts to cliches in this type of strongarm fiction in a way that makes them seem fresh and as fully of sardonic humor as though we had never seen their likes before”.

Club's Keith Phipps calls it "an assured, muscular Kurosawa film [...] that it's all the more disappointing when a shapeless, anticlimactic, but probably inevitable ending does it in".