“The Love Suicides at Sonezaki” is a joruri play by the Japanese playwright Chikamatsu Monzaemon. The double suicides that occurred on May 22, 1703 inspired Chikamatsu to write this play which made its debut performance on June 20, 1703. Chikamatsu added new scenes in the 1717 revival including the villain's punishment. The reception was rather positive and helped springboard Chikamatsu's future success as a playwright. In the first year alone since the play's premiere, no less than seventeen couples committed double suicide, leading the government to ban it in 1722. The film has been adapted many times on the big screen but Masumura's version is considered the best. For Meiko Kaji, who took the role with no guarantee of payment, this is considered her best performance, netting her awards from Blue Ribbon, Kinema Junpo, Mainichi and Hochi, and a nomination from the Japanese Academy.
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- 8/30/2023
- by Panos Kotzathanasis
- AsianMoviePulse
While budgets were far more compromised in the 1970s, there would be a rise in more bold and unorthodox cinema coming from the Japanese film industry. Norms were challenged before in the previous decades, but it was more rampant at this point than before, so much that there was an increase in projects that tread the line of exploitation. There was a surge in pessimistic samurai movies, and yakuza features practically became a recurring norm in entertainment. By this point, versatile filmmaker Kon Ichikawa had already challenged audiences with many of his pictures. He would do that again in his surreal jidaigeki work “The Wanderers,” also known as “Matatabi.”
Even for an Art Theatre Guild project, “The Wanderers” is made on compromised funding. Kon Ichikawa and his team filmed entirely on location in Nagano Prefecture and even utilized abandoned houses for some of the set pieces in the narrative. For the director,...
Even for an Art Theatre Guild project, “The Wanderers” is made on compromised funding. Kon Ichikawa and his team filmed entirely on location in Nagano Prefecture and even utilized abandoned houses for some of the set pieces in the narrative. For the director,...
- 8/9/2022
- by Sean Barry
- AsianMoviePulse
Yasuzo Masumura’s searing outrage didn’t abate in the 1960s; this unflinching view of the WW2 Japanese counterpart of a ‘M.A.S.H.’ unit cuts straight to the ugly truth of war, as the unending destruction of human bodies and minds. The horrors of ad hoc amputations match the behaviors of the demoralized patients. Masumura’s top muse Ayako Wakao is the traumatized battlefield nurse who becomes intimate with a surgeon who can only cope with his work by becoming a morphine addict. Excellent analysis by Rony Rayns and David Desser brings us closer to the director’s obsession with disturbing truths.
Red Angel
Blu-ray
Arrow Video
1966 / B&w / 2:35 widescreen / 95 min. / Akai tenshi / Street Date January 18, 2022 / Available from / 39.95
Starring: Ayako Wakao, Shinsuke Ashida, Yusuke Kawazu, Ranko Akagi, Daihachi Kita, Takashi Nakamura.
Cinematography: Setsuo Kobayashi
Production Designer: Shigeo Mano
Art Director: Tomoo Shimogawara
Film Editor: Tatsuji Nakashizu
Original...
Red Angel
Blu-ray
Arrow Video
1966 / B&w / 2:35 widescreen / 95 min. / Akai tenshi / Street Date January 18, 2022 / Available from / 39.95
Starring: Ayako Wakao, Shinsuke Ashida, Yusuke Kawazu, Ranko Akagi, Daihachi Kita, Takashi Nakamura.
Cinematography: Setsuo Kobayashi
Production Designer: Shigeo Mano
Art Director: Tomoo Shimogawara
Film Editor: Tatsuji Nakashizu
Original...
- 1/8/2022
- by Glenn Erickson
- Trailers from Hell
The Japanese wartime drama Red Angel (1966) will be available on Blu-ray January 18th from Arrow Video
Directed by Yasuzo Masumura, Red Angel takes an unflinching look at the horror and futility of war through the eyes of a dedicated and selfless young military nurse.
When Sakura Nishi is dispatched in 1939 to a ramshackle field hospital in Tientsin, the frontline of Japan’s war with China, she and her colleagues find themselves fighting a losing battle tending to the war-wounded and emotionally shellshocked soldiers while assisting head surgeon Dr Okabe conduct an unending series of amputations. As the Chinese troops close in, she finds herself increasingly drawn to Okabe who, impotent to stall the mounting piles of cadavers, has retreated into his own private hell of morphine addiction.
Adapted from the novel by Yorichika Arima, Masumura’s harrowing portrait of women and war is considered the finest of his collaborations with...
Directed by Yasuzo Masumura, Red Angel takes an unflinching look at the horror and futility of war through the eyes of a dedicated and selfless young military nurse.
When Sakura Nishi is dispatched in 1939 to a ramshackle field hospital in Tientsin, the frontline of Japan’s war with China, she and her colleagues find themselves fighting a losing battle tending to the war-wounded and emotionally shellshocked soldiers while assisting head surgeon Dr Okabe conduct an unending series of amputations. As the Chinese troops close in, she finds herself increasingly drawn to Okabe who, impotent to stall the mounting piles of cadavers, has retreated into his own private hell of morphine addiction.
Adapted from the novel by Yorichika Arima, Masumura’s harrowing portrait of women and war is considered the finest of his collaborations with...
- 12/22/2021
- by Tom Stockman
- WeAreMovieGeeks.com
Yasuzo Masumura takes horror into kinky territory in an Edogawa Ranpo shocker about obsession, namely, mixing sex and death. Michio is the tactile-fixated blind sculptor who imprisons model Aki to serve as an ultimate objectified ‘body’ — but she eventually joins him, taking the lead on a delirious suicidal journey of discovery. Probably once considered pornographic, the 1969 show is fairly tame by today’s Nc-17 standards, and not as radically violent or abhorrent as one might expect — but it’s still loaded with weird, Dangerous Ideas. The sets are not to be believed — the unhinged artist lives in a surreal workspace surrounded by hundreds of oversized sculptures of body parts.
The Blind Beast (Moju)
Blu-ray
Arrow Academy
1969 / Color / 2:35 widescreen / 84 min. / Street Date August 24, 2021 / Moju; Warehouse / 39.95
Starring: Eiji Funakoshi, Mako Midori, Noriko Sengoku.
Cinematography: Setsuo Kobayashi
Art Director: Shigeo Muno
Original Music: Hikaru Hayashi
Written by Yoshio Shirasaka from a novel...
The Blind Beast (Moju)
Blu-ray
Arrow Academy
1969 / Color / 2:35 widescreen / 84 min. / Street Date August 24, 2021 / Moju; Warehouse / 39.95
Starring: Eiji Funakoshi, Mako Midori, Noriko Sengoku.
Cinematography: Setsuo Kobayashi
Art Director: Shigeo Muno
Original Music: Hikaru Hayashi
Written by Yoshio Shirasaka from a novel...
- 8/21/2021
- by Glenn Erickson
- Trailers from Hell
An Actor’s Revenge
Blu ray
Criterion
1963 / Color / 2.39:1 / 113 Min. / Street Date February 20, 2018
Starring Kazuo Hasegawa
Cinematography by Setsuo Kobayashi
Written by Daisuke Itô, Teinosuke Kinugasa
Edited by Shigeo Nishida
Directed by Kon Ichikawa
From Twelfth Night to Homicidal, casting calls for cross-dressers are a Hollywood tradition. The stories are alike in their differences; Katherine Hepburn was dodging the cops, Jack Lemmon was fleeing the mob, Dustin Hoffman was just an actor begging for work. Yukitarō, the enigmatic hero of An Actor’s Revenge, is gainfully employed but his motives are far more complicated than Hoffman’s needy thespian.
The story of a female impersonator’s vengeful killing spree, Kon Ichikawa’s 1963 film boasts a plot line John Waters would surely appreciate. But where Waters revels in the high comedy of lowlifes, Ichakawa’s movie is a ravishing melodrama set in the elevated atmosphere of death-dealing samurai, 19th century Kabuki...
Blu ray
Criterion
1963 / Color / 2.39:1 / 113 Min. / Street Date February 20, 2018
Starring Kazuo Hasegawa
Cinematography by Setsuo Kobayashi
Written by Daisuke Itô, Teinosuke Kinugasa
Edited by Shigeo Nishida
Directed by Kon Ichikawa
From Twelfth Night to Homicidal, casting calls for cross-dressers are a Hollywood tradition. The stories are alike in their differences; Katherine Hepburn was dodging the cops, Jack Lemmon was fleeing the mob, Dustin Hoffman was just an actor begging for work. Yukitarō, the enigmatic hero of An Actor’s Revenge, is gainfully employed but his motives are far more complicated than Hoffman’s needy thespian.
The story of a female impersonator’s vengeful killing spree, Kon Ichikawa’s 1963 film boasts a plot line John Waters would surely appreciate. But where Waters revels in the high comedy of lowlifes, Ichakawa’s movie is a ravishing melodrama set in the elevated atmosphere of death-dealing samurai, 19th century Kabuki...
- 3/27/2018
- by Charlie Largent
- Trailers from Hell
Conceived by Daiei as a tribute to the 300th screen appearance of veteran actor Kazuo Hasegawa, “An Actor’s Revenge” is a remake of the homonymous, 1935 film, which also starred Hasegawa. The screenplay, written by Ichikawa’s wife, Natto Wada, was based on the adaptation by Daisuke Ito and Teinosuke Kinugasa of a newspaper serial originally written by Otokichi Mikami, which was used for the 1935 version.
Yukitaro is a famous onnagata, a male actor who plays female roles in the kabuki theatre, whose Osaka-based troupe, headed by Kikunojo Nakamura, is making its first appearances in Kyoto. Yukitaro however, has his eyes set on revenge upon three men: Sansai Dobe, Kawaguchiya, and Hiromiya, who plotted and eventually led his father to death and his mother to suicide when he was just seven years old. In order to achieve his goal, Yukitaro, whose stage name is Yukinojo, uses his handsomeness,...
Yukitaro is a famous onnagata, a male actor who plays female roles in the kabuki theatre, whose Osaka-based troupe, headed by Kikunojo Nakamura, is making its first appearances in Kyoto. Yukitaro however, has his eyes set on revenge upon three men: Sansai Dobe, Kawaguchiya, and Hiromiya, who plotted and eventually led his father to death and his mother to suicide when he was just seven years old. In order to achieve his goal, Yukitaro, whose stage name is Yukinojo, uses his handsomeness,...
- 3/7/2018
- by Panos Kotzathanasis
- AsianMoviePulse
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