Night Drum /Yoru no tsuzumi (1958)

A multi-layered study of both marital fidelity and samurai codes of honor, The Night Drum is another remarkable work from a remarkable pair of film makers. Adapted by Kaneto Shindo from one of the less famous Chikamatsu plays and directed by Tadashi Imai, it can stand with the finest movies of the fifties. Hikokuro is …

Japanese Girls at the Harbor (1933)

For those familiar with Shimizu's subtle road films or his later studies of children, this foray into traditional melodrama will be something of a surprise. Here, the emotions lie right on the surface. Two BFF schoolgirls, Dora and Sunako, do everything together, including falling in love with the same young man (Henry), who gets their …

Street of Ronin / Ronin Gai (1957)

The Street of Ronin here is really a small neighborhood which includes a market area and many regular citizens of Edo in the Tokugawa era, but mixed among them are a number of ronin who have gravitated to the big city for various reasons. There they eke out a precarious living, "protecting" the market or …

I Am Waiting / Ore wa matteru ze (1957)

I Am Waiting is arguably the most "French" film of the Japanese fifties. Set primarily in a cafe by the foggy docks, it practically screams for Jean Gabin as the Man with a Past who in the fog runs into a beautiful woman with a similarly lost soul. In this case, Mie Kitahara is the …

Sound of the Mountain / Yama no oto (1954)

A quiet and subtle movie about family life adapted from a novel by Kawabata, Sound of the Mountain at first seems interesting primarily in the way it differs from an American approach to a similar subject. Once again, we find Setsuko Hara playing the apparently perfect wife of Ken Uehara, who has had numerous short …

The Heart / Kokoro (1955)

Like rather a large number of  Japanese movies, Kokoro is a movie in which we see and are told everything, and yet we end up fully understanding nothing. Fortunately this is not Last Year at Marienbad. Rather it is a movie about personal secrets and the damage they do to both one's self and to …

Lucky Dragon #5 / Daigo Fukuryu-Maru (1959)

When the US tested the first hydrogen bomb at Bikini Atoll in 1954, the crew of a small Japanese fishing boat, the Lucky Dragon #5, became accidental witnesses, and victims, of the blast. The incident seared itself into Japan's national consciousness, leading to a reinvigoration of Japan's anti-nuclear stance and to public activity that would …

Pale Flower / Kawaita hana (1963/4)

Pale Flower offers so many attractions that it is difficult to know where to even begin. There really is no other movie I can recall that is quite like it -- try to imagine a gangster movie directed by Ingmar Bergman and you might be close, but still not be ready for the experience. In …

A Note on Ozu (II)

In an earlier post I commented on a cultural practice I had remembered seeing only in Ozu films, namely the man who simply drops his clothes on the floor in front of his waiting wife when he returns home. I have now found another example, so far from Ozu that it is no wonder I …

Devotion to the Railway / Oinaru bakushin (1960)

By pretty much any standard, Oinaru bakushin is a fairly ordinary movie, neither good nor bad, the kind of movie you might enjoy and then forget before you saw your next movie, maybe even before you got home. What makes it of interest here is what is not there. The plot is based around Yajima, a …