It is truly sad that we shall most likely never get to see Kurosawa's complete two-part, nearly five hour adaptation of Dostoevsky's novel The Idiot. While there are flashes of genius in this heavily truncated version, it is heavy-going and often dull, the continuity wrecked by the studio's insistence that the film be so drastically cut.

And one wonders about just how wonderful this could have been. St. Petersburg in summer is now Hokkaido in a very snowy winter, but certain themes and scenes from the book are immediately recognisable. The snowy scenes are quite beautiful at times, but it is all in the service of very little. One of Kurosawa's weakest films - but with tantalising hints here and there that it could have been one of his greatest.