Kinuyo Tanaka in Phoenix (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1947)
Cast: Kinuyo Tanaka, Keiji Sada, Isamu Kosugi, Toyo Takahashi, Akira Yamanouchi, Tamotsu Kawasaki, Eiko Takamatsu. Screenplay: Keisuke Kinoshita, Yoshiro Kawazu. Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda. Production design: Motoji Kojima. Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara. Music: Chuji Kinoshita.
Keisuke Kinoshita's Phoenix probably had much more resonance for the Japanese audiences who saw it in 1947 than it does for us today, when it can easily be dismissed as a tearjerking love story. For those first audiences, the heroine, Sayoko, a war widow with a three-year-old child, could easily be seen as emblematic of the hopes of the Japanese people -- hence the film's title. We see much of Sayoko's story in flashback: her first encounter with Shinichi, the man with whom she falls in love; her rejection by his stern, conservative father; her own family's attempt to force her into an arranged marriage that would cement a business deal with a weapons manufacturer; her lonely life with her brother, who is dying of tuberculosis; the capitulation of Shinichi's father, who agrees to let them be married during Shinichi's brief furlough before he returns to the war in which he's killed. After all this, Sayoko lives with her late husband's family, essentially as a factotum, tasked with keeping the large Yasaka family on point and occasionally getting scolded by her father-in-law. But she tells her brother-in-law that she's happy, pinning her hopes on her small child and on her plans one day to open a shop as a seamstress. Kinoshita is often a shameless sentimentalist, but here he has first-rate actors, Kinuyo Tanaka and Keiji Sada, as the ill-fated couple. They have real chemistry together, even though Tanaka was 16 years older than Sada.
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Zoku ueru tamashii, 1956 (dir. Yûzô Kawashima)
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東京行進曲 (1929) · Kenji Mizoguchi
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I Am Waiting (Review)
I Am Waiting (Review)
I Am Waiting
aka 俺は待ってるぜ aka Ore wa matteru ze
1957
Written by Shintaro Ishihara
Directed by Koreyoshi Kurahara
Japan’s cinematic output in the 50s and 60s was astounding, and the quality of films from that period form a reputation that is hard to match. It is no wonder that huge swaths of them got festival coverage over the years, and many get released in the US under premium labels. Nikkatsu…
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