Woman Gambler / Showa onna bakuto (1972)

One of the most popular of all the many film series of the sixties was Kyoko Enami’s Woman Gambler, reaching 16 features at Daei. After Raizo Ichikawa’s death and Shintaro Katsu’s move to independent production, the Woman Gambler was practically Daiei’s only dependable money maker, but it was not enough to keep the studio out …

Jongara / Tsugaru jongarabushi (1973)

In a tiny fishing village in the middle of nowhere a man and a woman appear. From her elegant red coat and his tie-less three-piece suit, it’s obvious to the locals they are from Tokyo. They are lovers, despite their age difference, and at first it looks like she has brought him to visit her …

Bullet Aesthetics / Teppodama no bigaku (1973)

Like Throw Away Your Books, Bullet Aesthetics is an intensely rock ‘n’ roll movie without ever showing us a band, using several tracks from the pre-punk band Brain Police as commentary on its action. The main theme, used several times throughout is “Don’t F*** Around With Me," which becomes ironic commentary on our hero Koike, …

Himiko (1974)

Himiko was or was not an early third century Japanese queen whose story is known only from brief references in a Chinese source from the late third century. From these, Yasahiro Shinoda and his writing collaborator Taeko Tomioka have fashioned a strange movie describing the earliest unification of the Japanese nation and the founding of …

Coup d’etat / Martial Law / Kaigenrei (1973)

The coup of 1936 has been the subject of several significant movies. The most straight-forward presentation can be found in Memoirs of Japanese Assassins, with the same coup reflected in the romance of Utage and the teen-age bullies of Fighting Elegy. Yoshida’s Coup d’etat looks at this failed coup through the life of Ikki Kita, …

Last Samurai / Okami yo rakujitsu o kire (1974)

Because The Last Samurai was the last movie directed by Kenji Misumi before his early death from liver failure and the only one of his many features to credit him as a screenwriter, it is tempting to see this as a summation of a long and successful chanbara career. To some extent, this is true, …

Petrified Forest / Kaseki no mori (1973)

An old woman takes a train from a town in the pristine sunshine of the countryside and eventually comes out of a tunnel into a smog-shrouded Tokyo, which will turn out to be a world of secrets, failures, and serious crime. For a long time, we do not see her again, turning instead to a …

Lady Snowblood / Shurayukihime (1973)

In spite of his tremendous artistic achievements, it may be that Kurosawa’s greatest contribution to Japanese cinema was the blood spurt introduced in Sanjuro. That reaches some kind of apotheosis in Lady Snowblood, which gives us not just puddles but lakes, even oceans, of blood spurting out of bodies to unimaginable distances, in quantities not …

Home from the Sea / Hometown / Furusato (1972)

Home from the Sea ends with a family leaving their home village to seek a new life, exactly the moment when Where Spring Comes Late begins. It is easy to think of this as a prequel, for it has the same husband (Hisashi Igawa), the same wife (Chieko Baisho), two young children, the same Grandpa …

Wanderers / Matatabi (1973)

If there was any romance or glory left in the matatabi genre of yakuza films, Kon Ichikawa’s Wanderers drove a stake through its heart and exposed it to the dawn. Three young men leave their farms to be matatabi, here called toseinin in the film’s narration. And they are very young, teenagers in appearance (think …