Akira Kurosawa (“Rashomon”/”Drunken Angel”) hadn’t made a film in over two years and a few months after his failed suicide attempt over his undiagnosed medical illness and declining film career, he journeyed to Russia to do a film for Mosfilm in Russian. It was drawn from the memoirs of Vladimir Arsenyev, a military explorer at the turn of the century in the wilds of eastern Siberia. It tells of Captain Arsenyev (Yuri Solomin) and his team of four other soldiers and their association with noble savage Dersu Uzala (Maksim Munzuk, a Soviet Asian), an elderly widowed Goldi hunter who is taken on as their guide. He proves to be invaluable in saving their neck from a storm in Lake Khanka by showing them how to build a shelter and throughout imparts his homespun country wisdom on survival. Dersa is an excellent tracker and chastises the Russians for their senseless slaughter of animals, as he hunts only for food. As expected, a sincere friendship develops between the civilized city-dwellers and the primitive natural Oriental man as they go on three arduous survey missions. It’s sweetly told and heartwarming, much like a Disney film, but not demanding much of the viewer. Though it has some beautiful scenic moments of the unexplored forests and Taiga land, it’s more in the line of a crude and lumbering state-sponsored Russian heroic film of that period than one of the more imaginative works the Japanese filmmaker has become known for.