Demons / Shura (1971)

I have occasionally compared some Japanese movies to Jacobean dramas, but watching Matsumoto’s Shura is like suddenly wandering in to Webster, Middleton, Chapman, Ford, Tourneur, and Kyd all rolled into one and simply restaged in a Japanese setting. Honor, revenge, coincidence, disguise, ghosts, mistaken motivations, sexual obsession, poison, madness, and blood swirl around in a …

Shinsengumi: Assassins of Honor / Shinsengumi (1969)

Throughout the 1960s, the decade after the Americans arrived became a popular topic in Japanese historical movies, as we have seen in numerous earlier posts on this blog. That interest came to some kind of peak in 1969, with Toshiro Mifune’s production of Shisengumi, in which he portrayed the group’s most significant and charismatic leader, …

Pleasures of the Flesh / Etsuraku (1965)

Though released when Japanese movies were starting to show more female skin and made by the same man who became world-famous for the real sex scenes of In the Realm of the Senses, this is a movie that shows very little flesh and even less pleasure in it.* It is told through the eyes and …

The Rose on His Arm / Taiyo to bara (1956)

Around 1956, as in America, England, and France, Japan began to notice The Teenager. The most obvious form of this in Japan were the members of the Sun Tribe, as depicted for example, in Crazed Fruit, but a much more vivid and probably accurate depiction of this new phenomenon was in Kinoshita's The Rose on …