Kanto Wanderer / Kanto mushuku (1963)

This may well be the first contemporary dress yakuza movie. Such questions are almost impossible to resolve, depending on definitions, but I haven't come across an earlier movie with yakuza characters in a world where outsiders wear sixties clothes. However, the yakuza themselves still wear traditional Japanese dress, and seem to be firmly in the …

The Only Son / Hitori musuko (1937)

In Ozu's first sound film, we dive once again into the world of the Japanese family. The Only Son is a-typical  for Ozu in that it involves a mother and her son, but the story is still set in the poor working-class world of the father films in his late silents. Mother (Choko Iida) works …

11 Samurai (1967)

Like Eichii Kudo's two other great jidai-geki, 11 Samurai turns upon an assassination. In the 1830s, the Shogunate had become sclerotic and kleptocratic (or more so than usual). The youngest brother of the current Shogun is the epitome of the spoiled brat, believing that since he is Tokugawa he can do anything. Crossing into another …

Lightning / Inazuma (1952)

The last time we saw Hideko Takamine in a Naruse movie, she was  a bus conductor trying to be a tour guide, so it is something of a surprise when Inazuma opens with Takamine guiding a tour bus, pointing out the sights of the new Tokyo. However, after this little in-joke, we quickly move into …

Heitai Gokudo (1968)

As the yakuza craze took hold in the sixties, Toei studios in particular went into the genre as heavily as Nikkatsu had gone into its borderless action films a few years earlier. Flooding the market with repetitious yakuza stories, they also produced several series of "comedy" yakuza films. The Gokudo films, featuring Tomisaburo Wakayama as …

A Woman’s Sorrows / Nyonin aishu (1937)

Somewhat unexpectedly, A Woman's Sorrows is not a typical josei-eiga about tragedies in a woman's life, such as the loss of a child or spouse or a broken romance. Rather, it provides a look at a young wife who most women of her time would see as having things going quite well, all in all, …

Dispersed Clouds / Wakaregumo (1951)

Gosho's Wakaregumo is one of those subtle Japanese movies in which you think you understand what is happening and yet you get to the end and find you didn't quite understand at all. The story is relatively simple, basically little more than a character study of a young woman. On a break from college, Masako …

Trapped: The Crimson Bat* / Blind Oichi: Hell Flesh / Mekura no Oichi monogatari: jigoku hada (1969)

Every success will have its imitators, but it is something of a surprise how long it took to turn out B-movie imitations of the super-successful series of Zatoichi films. The most obvious of such rip-offs is the four film Crimson Bat series, which ups the ante by turning the blind swordsman into the blind swordswoman …

Hunting Rifle / Ryoju (1961)

In its plot, Ryoju is something out of the Douglas Sirk/Lana Turner mold from the fifties -- a passionate love affair full of secrets that destroys marriages, ruins lives, and even leads to suicides. But it is a Japanese movie, and that means it has all of these things except the outward show of passion. …

Express Train / Kigeki kyuko ressha (1967)

One of the relatively unique genres of Japanese movies is what I've elsewhere called the slice-of-life comedy. When dealing with the salaryman world, this is usually called the shomin-geki, but Americans can occasionally find DVDs of these kinds of comedies that lie slightly outside the shomin-geki world, of which Express Train is a thoroughly entertaining …