Till We Meet Again / Mata au hi made (1950)

    The mythology surrounding Till We Meet Again has given it a reputation it doesn't deserve. In film studies, it is forever known as the movie that changed the course of film history by not being sent to the Venice Film Festival in 1950. It was replaced by Rashomon,* which made the worldwide recognition …

Singing Lovebirds / Oshidori utagassen (1939)

A local lord who wants a merchant's daughter. A father so deeply in debt that he is prepared to sell his daughter to pay off his loans. A ronin down on his luck. It's a situation we have seen hundreds of times in chanbara films. But instead of a tale of treachery and sword-play, Oshidori …

Tower of the Lilies / Himeyuri no To / Himeyuri gakuto (1953)

This is not a horror film by any stretch of the imagination, but it is one of the most horrific movies I can ever recall seeing. It is a war movie, but as it was made in 1953 and in black & white, there isn't a great deal of actual gore. What makes it horrific …

Duel at Yagyu Valley / Nihon kengo den (1945)

The primary interest of Duel at Yagyu Valley  is that it is a real chanbara film released in 1945, and few if any others of these made during the war years have survived. For the most part, it doesn't appear to have been made with any particular propaganda purpose in mind. How mainstream it might …

The Fellows Who Ate the Elephant / Zo o kutta renchu (1947)

Set as it is in 1947, I expected The Fellows Who Ate the Elephant to be a neo-realist study of people on the edge of starvation who were so desperate they raided the zoo. Instead we have a genuine comedy that on occasion gets outright laughs. The only elephant in Japan is sick. Yamashita had …

An Inn at Osaka / Osaka no yado (1954)

With An Inn at Osaka, Heinosuke Gosho has managed to make a fascinating movie in which essentially nothing happens. Before the war, Gosho was one of the leading exponents of the shomin-geki, but An Inn at Osaka has very little of the light humor of that genre and is set much lower down the social …

13 Assassins / Jusan-nin no shikaku (1963)

Like most Americans, I first heard of Eiichi Kudo’s 13 Assassins when Takashi Miike’s remake appeared in 2010. I expected a somewhat stodgy low-budget exploitation film, something like Inglorious Bastards, and looked at the DVD primarily out of curiosity. After all, not even Patrick Galloway had bothered with it in his two books,¹ and no …

Jirokichi the Rat / Oatsurae Jirokichi koshi (1931)

Based on the exploits of a real historical figure, Jirokichi the Rat shows us a brief fictionalized moment in the life of a famous thief who was regarded as sort of a Robin Hood figure because he only stole from the very richest people. In this particular movie, set specifically in 1831, he doesn't go …

Scandal (1950)

Kurosawa's Scandal provides our earliest glimpse of the Japanese celebrity press, which seems to have been dominated by what we learned to call paparazzi after La Dolce Vita.  But probably the most striking aspect of the film is its association of the motorcycle with freedom, modernity, and an anti-social outlook, long before The Wild One …

Gate of Hell / Jigokumon (1953)

As one of Japan's earliest color films, Gate of Hell has almost always attracted critics for its intense use of color. But despite its visual splendor, it is really a movie about sexual obsession and the almost sub-human status of women in medieval Japan, even or perhaps especially samurai women. Set during the Heiji rebellion …