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After her directorial debut “Love Letter” in 1953, Kinuyo Tanaka had received some international recognition, with the feature being a contestant at Cannes Film Festival in 1954. It also marked the end of her working relationship with director Kenji Mizoguchi, with whom she had collaborated on “Oharu” and “Sansho the Bailiff”, which cemented her reputation as one of the leading ladies of Japanese cinema. However, while the famous filmmaker was against this next step in her career, the experience of her first directorial effort encouraged her to continue working behind the camera as well. Her next project would be “The Moon Has Risen”, a family drama/ light comedy, which was co-written by Yasujiro Ozu, who originally had planned to direct it himself. While Ozu’s signature themes are still quite obvious, Tanaka proved her growth as a visual storyteller, making her sophomore feature a remarkable development in her career.

“The Moon Has...

My thoughts and admiration for Mark Schilling’s work have already been shared in the review of “Art, Cult and Commerce“. In that regard, continuing with his bibliography was inevitable, and the fact that the present book deals with the oldest Japanese motion picture studio, and particularly its Action Cinema period, made its appeal even more intense. Even more so, since, during the latest years, there seems to be a renewal of interest regarding the genre, especially through the home video releases of companies like Arrow and Eureka.

The book begins with the history of Nikkatsu, focusing on the period from the late 50s until the early 60s, when the Nikkatsu Action genre started, flourished and declined. The second part deals with the main male protagonists of those movies, presenting detailed biographies of Yujiro Ishihara, Akira Kobayashi, Keiichiro Akagi and Tetsuya Watari, highlighting the concept of the...

In celebration of Japan’s oldest film studio, Nikkatsu, Arrow Video assembles its first collection of titles reflecting the late 1950s inauguration of a star system contracted for their ‘Diamond Line.’ This trio of features reflects the rising popularity of extravagant genre narratives in the evolving system, and includes obscure titles from master auteurs such as Seijun Suzuki, Toshio Masuda, and Buichi Saito (early titles from Suzuki and Masuda were also part of a notable 2009 Eclipse series set, Nikkatsu Noir).

The pearl of the collection is Suzuki’s Voice without a Shadow, a rare gem from the master director’s early period. One of four films he made in 1958 (another being the early classic Underworld Beauty), it feels rather heavily modeled after various American film noir tropes, but in true Suzuki fashion, much more complicated. If “Beauty” felt like a generous Sam Fuller riff, then “Voice” seems a recalibration of something like Sorry,...

Velvet Bullets and Steel Kisses: Celebrating the Nikkatsu Centennial was a sidebar at this year's New York Film Festival that Dan Sallitt, writing a couple of weeks ago, found "so exciting that it threatens to overshadow the main slate: a retrospective of the Japanese studio Nikkatsu, whose opportunistic shifts of focus always seemed to open doors for some of Japan's most creative filmmakers. Compare film magazine Kinema Junpo's 1999 and 2009 lists of all-time greatest Japanese films to the Lincoln Center series schedule, and count the overlaps." Last year in the Notebook, Dan reviewed one of the 37 films in the series, Tomu Uchida's Earth (1939).

"The sidebar is peppered with nearly impossible to see rediscoveries," notes Steve Dollar at GreenCine Daily: "early silent films like 1927's A Diary of Chuji's Travels and harshly realistic World War II dramas like Mud and Soldiers. Shot on location in China in 1939, the latter film blends...