Battle of the Sea of Japan / Nihonkai daikatsen (1969)

By the late sixties, a number of movies about WWII had appeared featuring heroic characters who had died early in the war – Yamamoto was an especially popular subject – and Toho Studio in particular was looking for ways to use its Godzilla trained special effects unit. After Storm Over the Pacific, they at last …

Red Lion / Akage (1969)

Akage is the last fabulous iteration of Toshiro Mifune in his gonzo mode of Seven Samurai. He is an illiterate peasant (as it happens, called Gonzo) who lost his farm to taxes and has ended up in an all-peasant unit of the great rebellious army marching on Edo in 1867-8. His unit precedes the main …

Silence Has No Wings / Tobenai chinmoku (1966)

Japanese film-makers in the sixties dealt with the legacy of WWII in many different ways, but the most elliptic, hypnotic, and visually fascinating attempt is certainly Kazuo Kuroki’s Silence Has No Wings. A young boy in Hokkaido captures a rare butterfly which his teachers refuse to believe he didn’t buy in a store, since it …

Twilight Story / Strange Story from East of the River / Bokuto kitan (1960)

Junpei is in an unhappy marriage. Though apparently he and his wife Mitsuko married for love, she was pregnant at the time with the child of the rich man in whose house she worked as a maid. Junpei loves the boy and says he loves her, but he simply can’t get the other man out …

Tenchu / Hitokiri (1969)

Hitokiri is a magnificent historical epic set in the 1860s and anchored by a character study featuring Shintaro Katsu in one of his finest, most complex roles, Tatsuya Nakadai as his devious master, and plenty of swordfights, blood, visual imagination, and even a strange kind of love story. However, this can be a very confusing …