It’s Tough Being a Man* / Tora-san – Our Lovable Tramp / Otoko wa tsurai yo (1969)

Most Americans who become interested in Japanese movies are first attracted to the exoticism of the jidai-geki or the energy and violence of the yakuza movies, so it is easy to forget that there was a large world of movies about modern life being made at the same time. The shomin-geki did not die in …

Prison Break / Musho yaburi (1969)

While the hero does at one point break out of prison, Prison Break is something of a misleading title. We follow Furuta down the street and into a room where men are drinking together and know he is up to no good since he doesn’t even take off his sandals. He proceeds to stab the …

Diary of a Shinjuku Thief / Shinjuku dorobo nikki (1969)

Ah, the Sixties! Oshima had been the fount of the Japanese “New Wave,” often developing his techniques before the French, and in Diary of a Shinjuku Thief, he out-Godards Godard. The movie is a mix of Godard’s quasi-documentary approaches, most obviously the use of inter-titles to separate his sections, in this case clocks and international …

Goyokin (1969)

A lone figure walks into a deserted town, wind blowing through the torn paper screens and crows circling on the ground and in the air. Instead of Toshiro Mifune, however, the figure is a woman, and the deserted village is her home, where she has returned from five years of servitude to get married. When …

Autumn Has Already Started / Aki tachinu (1960)

It should be the last golden summer for young Hideo. He is at that age when the games of childhood have not yet faded, the hormones have not yet kicked in, and the duties and restrictions of adulthood have not yet taken over his life. Unfortunately, despite the sunshine and heat, for him it is …

Lone Wolf Isazo / Hitori okami (1968)

A wanderer named Magoshichi (the rumpled and sad-eyed Isamu Nagato) sits beside a fire and tells the story of the times he met the famous Lone Wolf Isazo, nicknamed The Ripper for the number of men he has killed. Despite his nickname, Isazo (Raizo Ichikawa) is the perfect matatabi. He never imposes on any yakuza …

Memoirs of Japanese Assassins / Nihon ansatsu hiroku (1969)

Though claiming to be a study of the role of assassination in Japanese history, Nihon ansatsu hiroku is primarily a biographical film about Sho Onuma, detailing how he came to shoot Jinnosuke Inoue, a former director of the Bank of Japan, in 1932. A poor young man, Onuma finds work with a baker whom he …

Samurai Banners / Furin kazan (1969)

In many ways, 1969 was a major turning point in Japanese movie-making, and like most turning points, no one was aware of what had happened until long afterward. Samurai Banners is one of the major markers of that turn, for it is Inagaki’s last big film and, in effect, Japan’s last big historical film for …

Blind Beast / Moju (1969)

Blind Beast is one of the least classifiable movies of its time, part thriller, part gothic horror story, part sexploitation movie, part love story, completely perverse and yet somehow very traditional. The basic story is simple: an artist and his mother kidnap a beautiful young woman and imprison her. However, she is not to be …

Blood End / Tengu-to (1969)

Set primarily in 1864, Blood End is another of the dramatized depictions of a confusing period of Japanese history, the decade before the Shogunate finally collapsed that occupied so many Japanese film-makers in the late 1960s. Here we meet the tengu-to, one of the last and most idealistic of the failed rebellions. Tatsuya Nakadai plays …