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Hishakaku and Kiratsune: A Tale of Two Yakuza (1968)
Hishakaku and Kiratsune: A Tale of Two Yakuza (1968)
$15.00With his penultimate film, Uchida revisited one of his popular prewar titles, 1936’s Theatre of Life, an adaptation of Shiro Ozaki’s eponymous novel. Three-time Seijun Suzuki collaborator Goro Tanada wrote a gangsterized adaptation of Ozaki’s story for Uchida at a time when the yakuza had eclipsed the samurai genre as Toei’s main cash crop. Protagonist Hishakaku murders a man in a quarrel over a barmaid and goes to jail. In his temporary absence, his girlfriend Otoyo, a former geisha, falls for Hishakaku’s brother, inciting a dangerous love triangle that, in typical yakuza fashion, ends tragically.
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Earth (1939)
$25.00Kanji is a poor peasant widower who struggles to earn a living for his daughter and himself and to pay off his father-in-law’s debts.
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A Bloody Spear on Mount Fuji (1955)
$25.00A young samurai, Shojuro Sako, travels on the Tokaido to Edo with his two servants, Genta and Gonpachi. Gonpachi has been told by Shojuro’s mother to prevent his Master from drinking… The road is not safe. On the way, they meet young orphan boy, Jiro, and many other travellers: A team of great directors, including Yasujrio Ozu, Hirochi Shimizu and Daisuko Ito, assisted Uchida with his remarkable post-war comeback film. It’s an affable samurai road movie with a focus on unglamorus characters, as a dim-witted samurai and his servants traverse the Tokaido highway. Much of the film is played as comedy, making the brilliantly staged violent climax all the more shocking.
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Hero of the Red Light District (1960)
$25.00A successful textile industrialist from the provinces, who is beloved by his employees for his kindness, cannot find a wife because of a disfiguring birthmark on his face. Even the courtesans in Yoshiwara refuse to entertain him, until an indentured peasant prostitute, Tamarazu, takes the unsavoury assignment and treats him with brash tenderness.
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Miyamoto Musashi (1961)
$25.00In this first episode, we are introduced to Takezo, what Musashi used to be before he became the man of legend. His beginning are not exactly auspicious. He sides with the Toyotomi at Sekigahara, and as a result finds himself on the losing side of the historic battle. He and his friend Matahachi manage to escape the slaughter although the latter is wounded in his leg. They stumble across the young Akemi who makes her living with her mother Oko by robbing corpses of their armor and anything else they can sell. Oko takes it into her head to seduce Matahachi, which she does first by skillfully sucking the gangrene from his blood, and then just by sucking.
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The Mad Fox (1962)
$25.00Uchida’s strangest and most stylized film is a visual feast, adapted by Yoshikata Yoda from a traditional puppet play. Dispensing with naturalism, Uchida uses expressionist sets and color schemes to convey the shifting states of mind of a protagonist driven mad by grief after his lover is killed. Some scenes are shot against theatrical backdrops inspired by kabuki theater and traditional dance; others unfold on elaborately colored sets reminiscent of traditional screen paintings. The Mad Fox’s audacious artifice makes Masaki Kobayashi’s Kwaidan (1964) pale in comparison.
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A Fugitive from the Past (1965)
$25.00Three robbers escape with loot from a heist before one of them shoots them; their corpses wash up near the aftermath of a maritime calamity, provoking a policeman’s interest.
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Miyamoto Musashi VI (1971)
$25.00In the sixth and final episode Rentaro Mikuni steals the show as Baiken Shishido, Musashi’s nemesis. Mikuni is the nominal villain of the film, but he is a devoted husband and father as well. He tries to kill Musashi only to avenge the death of his brother-in-law. While Baiken (who wields a chain and sickle against Musashi’s sword) is a very human character and the emotions that Mikuni displays in his performance are quite believable and engaging
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