Carmen's Innocent Love (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1952)

Cast: Hideko Takamine, Masao Wakahara, Chikage Awashima, Toshiko Kobayashi, Eiko Miyoshi, Chieko Higashiyama. Screenplay: Keisuke Kinoshita. Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda. Art direction: Tatsuo Hamada. Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara. Music: Chuji Kinoshita, Toshiro Mayuzumi.

Hideko Takamine returns as the ditsy strip tease artist, first seen in Keisuke Kinoshita's popular Carmen Comes Home (1951), who really thinks that stripping is an art. She gets involved with an avant-garde sculptor, whose mother is a fierce political activist, but the comedy is rather scattershot. The great character actress Chieko Higashiyama, for example, plays a maid who is terrified of another atomic bomb, freaking out at any loud noise. That this anxiety is played for laughs strikes us as odd, but the film is one of the first that was made after the end of the occupation in Japan, which forbade any mention of the bomb.

Carmen Comes Home (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1951)

Toshiko Kobayashi and Hideko Takamine in Carmen Comes Home

Cast: Hideko Takamine, Shuji Sano, Chishu Ryo, Toshiko Kobayashi, Kuniko Igawa, Takeshi Sakamoto, Bontaro Miake, Keiji Sada, Yuko Mochizuki. Screenplay: Keisuke Kinoshita. Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda. Production design: Motoji Kojima. Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara. Music: Chuji Kinoshita, Toshiro Mayuzumi.

Two giddy Tokyo showgirls descend upon a Japanese village, the birthplace of one of them, Kin Aoyama, whose stage name is Lily Carmen. She's played by the emerging Japanese superstar Hideko Takamine, and her friend, Maya Akemi, by Toshiko Kobayashi. Naturally, their big-city style turns the village upside down, especially when they decide to put on a show and the town learns that they're not just "dancers" but strippers. This first Japanese feature in color was a huge hit, spawning a sequel, Carmen's Innocent Love (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1952), firmly establishing Takamine's stardom, and accelerating writer-director Kinoshita's extraordinarily prolific career.

Here's to the Young Lady (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1949)

Setsuko Hara and Shuji Sano in Here's to the Young Lady

Keizo Ishizu: Shuji Sano
Yasuko Ikeda: Setsuko Hara
Sato: Takeshi Sakamoto
Goro: Keiji Sada
Yasuko's Mother: Chieko Higashiyama
Yasuko's Sister: Masami Morikawa
Yasuko's Brother-in-law: Junji Masuda
Yasuko's Father: Yasushi Nagata
Yasuko's Grandmother: Fusako Fujima
Yasuko's Grandfather: Sugisaku Aoyama
Bar Owner: Sachiko Murase

Director: Keisuke Kinoshita
Screenplay: Keisuke Kinoshita
Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda
Art direction: Motoji Kojima
Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara, Shizuko Osawa
Music: Chuji Kinoshita

Stop me if you've seen this one: A middle-aged working-class single man meets a pretty young woman from the upper classes and.... Okay, right. It's a romantic cliché, one that's so irresistible that Samuel Goldwyn once ordered a screenplay to be written on the basis of a title alone, The Cowboy and the Lady (H.C. Potter, 1938), and it's the inspiration for the teaming of Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn. But what sets Keisuke Kinoshita's Here's to the Young Lady apart is its country and time of origin: postwar Japan. In part the film is a manifestation of the occupying forces' desire to bring about a more egalitarian Japan, one in which a system of caste and class would be broken down, but it's also a reflection of economic reality in a recovering country whose male population had been decimated by the war. So Keizo Ishizu, a 34-year-old man who owns a thriving auto repair business and has dreams of getting into manufacturing, is introduced by his friend Sato to Yasuko Ikeda, from a cultured and educated family, as a potential wife. Ishizu is smitten instantly by the lovely but very shy young woman, but he also has doubts that she would ever be interested in him -- and he is sort of a schlub, whose chief recreation is drinking at his favorite bar. But then Ishizu visits Yasuko at her home and meets her family, learning that they are on the brink of financial disaster. Kinoshita starts with mostly long shots of the living room of the Ikeda home, but then switches to some shots from Ishizu's point of view that reveal the threadbare upholstery and well-worn furnishings. It turns out that Yasuko's father is in prison because after the war he was tricked into joining a company that was on the shady side. When its fraudulent practices were exposed, he honorably took the blame, even though it's suggested that he was ignorant of them. Moreover, a loan is about to come due, one that was taken out to help the family -- which includes Yasuko's mother, grandparents, sister and brother-in-law -- to survive. Ishizu has every reason to flee from this entanglement, but he's so taken with Yasuko that he agrees to court her for a while to see if their marriage would work out. She suggests that they go to the ballet, where he winds up in tears -- partly because he realizes that he can never be a match for her in culture. He takes her to a boxing match, where she winces at the violence but nevertheless winds up cheering for one of the fighters. And so on as obstacles to their marriage rise. We know how it will end, but Kinoshita makes that ending almost plausible, especially with the help of a talented cast that features the always magnificent Setsuko Hara. One blot on the film is the overbearing and sometimes inappropriate use of Chuji Kinoshita's repetitive score, augmented by the overuse of Chopin's Fantaisie-Impromptu in C# minor, the one spoiled for many of us by its use as the melody for the popular song "I'm Always Chasing Rainbows."

The Living Magaroku (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1943)

Toshio Hosokawa and Ken Uehara in The Living Magoroku

Sagara Kiyomatsu: Ken Uehara
Sakabe Katsusuke: Toshio Hosokawa
Yoshihiro Onagi: Yasumi Hara
Makoto Onagi: Kurumi Yamabato
Mrs. Onagi: Mitsuko Yoshikawa

Director: Keisuke Kinoshita
Screenplay: Keisuke Kinoshita
Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda
Art direction: Osamu Motoki

There must have been Japanese movies of the 1940s that were as vicious about the American enemy as our war movies were about the Japanese, that had lines as callous as "Fried Jap coming down!" when a fighter pilot gets shot down in Howard Hawks's Air Force (1943), but we don't see them today. Instead we see the wartime work of directors like Keisuke Kinoshita and Akira Kurosawa, whose films seem surprisingly softcore in comparison with America's wartime movies. Sometimes in The Living Magoroku I think that Kinoshita is pulling a fast one on the military censors. This is a movie designed to support the war effort by encouraging people to forsake tradition and do things previously taboo like plant crops on sacred ground, but that's the least interesting plot thread. Instead, Kinoshita is always directing our attention elsewhere: to the psychosomatic illness of Yoshihiro, or to the young couple whose plans to marry are thwarted by convention, or even to the mystique of ancient swords. Granted, that last plot element has propaganda purposes -- Sagara wants his sword to kill 20 or 30 "American weaklings" -- but its the craftsmanship of swordmaking that gets most of the attention. The result is a war movie that's less bloodthirsty than heartwarming, as Yoshihiro finds his manhood, the couple gets the go-ahead to marry, and Sakabe not only gets a sword that will restore his honor after he carelessly sold the family heirloom but also gets the hand in marriage of Makoto. The ending, with the farmers breaking ground in the previously hallowed Onagi fields, is more like a Soviet propaganda movie about collective farming than like a war-effort flag-waver. Even Kurosawa's The Most Beautiful (1944) was about building war machinery, not about planting crops to feed people.

Jubilation Street (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1944)

Mitsuko Mito, Chiyo Nobu, and Eijiro Tono in Jubilation Street 

Shingo Furukawa: Ken Uehara
Takako: Mitsuko Mito
Kiyo Furukawa: Chiyo Nobu
Shingo's Father: Eijiro Tono
Bathhouse Owner: Makoto Kobori
Bathhouse Owner's Wife: Choko Iida

Director: Keisuke Kinoshita
Screenplay: Kaoru Morimoto
Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda

There's a kind of quiet desperation in the patriotism on display in Keisuke Kinoshita's Jubilation Street. Kinoshita could not have ignored the censors' demands for the flag-waving ending and the vows to revenge the death of one of the central characters, but maybe it's only postwar hindsight that makes me feel that his heart wasn't in it. Or maybe he was more interested in his characters than in manipulating them to serve the war effort. The titular street is condemned to be torn up by the military for unspecified wartime purposes, but the longtime residents are at first not thrilled by being dislocated to serve their country. The film depicts their struggle to hold on as long as they can, some out of stubbornness, like the bathhouse owner who doesn't want to leave a place where he has run his business for so long -- though he has to admit, when someone reminds him, that he won't have any customers after all the other neighbors leave. And some, like Kiyo Furukawa, want to remain for more deeply personal reasons: She's afraid that if the husband who left her and their son, Shingo, so many years ago suddenly decides to return he won't be able to find them. Shingo is already doing his part in the war as a test pilot, but he has also fallen in love with the pretty Takako, whose family wants her to enter into an arranged marriage. They are afraid that separation will prove fatal to their love. The plot then takes a predictable turn: Shingo's father returns, though Kiyo has misgivings about resuming their marriage when she learns how many varied jobs he has held over the years, an indicator that the instability that caused him to leave is still a problem. But then an event -- one that most filmgoers will have predicted on their own -- alters everything. Good performances aren't enough to lift this early Kinoshita film above routine, but the director's characteristic humanity (and equally characteristic sentimentality) gives it a warmth that even the ham-fisted propaganda can't quite obliterate.

Phoenix (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1947)

Kinuyo Tanaka in Phoenix

Sayoko Aihara: Kinuyo Tanaka
Shinichi Yasaka: Keiji Sada
Naoya Yasaka: Isamu Kosugi
Moto Yasaka: Toyo Takahashi
Yuji Yasaka: Akira Yamanouchi
Hiroshi Aihara: Tamotsu Kawasaki
Housekeeper: Eiko Takamatsu

Director: Keisuke Kinoshita
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 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.

Apostasy (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1948)

Ryo Ikebe in Apostasy

Segawa: Ryo Ikebe
Oshiho: Yoko Katsuragi
Tatsutaro Inoko: Osamu Takizawa
Ginnosuke Tuchiya: Jukichi Uno
Takayanagi: Eitaro Ozawa
Inoko's Wife: Sachiko Murase
Segawa's Father: Kenji Susukida
Keinosuke Kazama: Ichiro Sugai
Bunpei Katsuno: Akira Yamauchi

Director: Keisuke Kinoshita
Screenplay: Eijiro Hisaita
Based on a novel by Toson Shimazaki
Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda
Art direction: Isamu Motoki
Film editing: Hisashi Sagara
Music: Chuji Kinoshita

The title of Keisuke Kinoshita's film Apostasy is generally acknowledged to be a bad mistranslation of the original, Hakai, which has a variety of meanings, including "destruction." The film is not about someone abandoning his religion, which is what the English "apostasy" means, but instead it's about the discrimination against Japan's feudal pariah class, the burakumin, literally, "people who live in villages." Which is again misleading if we think of villages as small communities of farmers, artisans, and merchants, all of whom had acceptable roles in feudal society. The burakumin were considered untouchable because their work associated them with death: butchers, tanners, undertakers, executioners, and so on, who, unable to associate with the "respectable" classes, formed communities and villages of their own. The taint of their work extended to their children's children -- even to those who managed to improve themselves with education and work in other fields, like the protagonist of Kinoshita's film, Segawa, who loses his job as a schoolteacher because he has hidden the fact that he's a "villager," as the English subtitles somewhat misleadingly call him. His secret is exposed when he goes home to his village, remote in the mountains near Nagano, for his father's death. The action of the film takes place in 1901, well after American influence had caused the Japanese government to lift the legal restrictions placed on the burakumin, though without erasing the deep-seated prejudice against them. But Kinoshita has a more contemporary purpose for his film: After World War II, Japan was adopting a new, and of course again heavily American-influenced, constitution, guaranteeing civil rights to all Japanese citizens. So Apostasy is a heavily didactic film about tolerance -- not unlike some of the preachier American films that promoted better race relations in the aftermath of the war. Its bigots are despicable and its heroes -- including a descendant of the burakumin who has become a lawyer and a crusader for equality -- are noble. There's a love threatened by prejudice that triumphs, and a tear-filled ending in which the children Segawa has taught come out to wave goodbye as he departs the town that scorned him. In short, it's Kinoshita at his most sentimental.

Woman (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1948)

Mitsuko Mito and Eitaro Ozawa in Woman

Toshiko: Mitsuko Mito
Tadashi: Eitaro Ozawa

Director: Keisuke Kinoshita
Screenplay: Keisuke Kinoshita
Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda
Art direction: Kazue Hirataka
Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara
Music: Chuji Kinoshita

Keisuke Kinoshita can often be accused of trying too much or of not trying enough. Both faults are on display in his Woman, a noirish story of a thief and his mistress. Kinoshita's love for trying out effects that don't quite work is on display in the artily tilted camerawork that adds an expressionist note to scenes that don't really demand it. It's the sort of thing that a film student might attempt for a class, not something you expect from a director who had been working for five years and already had eight features to his credit, including the well-received Morning for the Osone Family (1946). Still, the scenes are shot well by Kinoshita's regular cinematographer, Hiroshi Kusuda. Where Kinoshita gets sloppy is more troubling: The dialogue is badly post-synched, especially noticeable in the extreme closeups that dominate the film toward the end. And once again, Kinoshita lets his brother Chuji's score meander around behind scenes where it feels awkwardly matched to the mood. But Woman is also one of Kinoshita's better films, overcoming its weaknesses with a fine economy of story. It's only a little over an hour long, but it packs a lot of intensity of feeling into that run time. Eitaro Ozawa plays Tadashi, a crook who has just made a big score with a home invasion and persuades his mistress, Toshiko, played by Mitsuko Mito, to go on the run with him to a seaside resort where he will meet up with his accomplices and settle up the proceeds of the theft. She has a steady gig as a dancer in the chorus of a musical revue that she's reluctant to ditch, but he's persuasive in his own brutally infatuated way. The bulk of the film deals with their on-again, off-again relationship: Will she stay or will she go? Ozawa is the more expressive of the two actors, which is fine because he has the more volatile role, switching in an instant from anger at her reluctance to pleading for her submission to menacing her with a knife. Mito's face can be inexpressive at key moments, making Toshiko a rather enigmatic character, but she manages to suggest the deep conflict at work within: Having risen from bar hostess (a step up from prostitution) to chorus girl, she seems to think her life has taken an upward turn that staying with Tadashi might reverse, even though he promises her a life of riches. The denouement comes when Tadashi asks her to sell a piece of the stolen goods for him. She refuses, but just at that moment there's a shout of "Fire!" and people start running to see the burning building. The keeper of the shop where Tadashi plans to sell the loot steps out to join the rubberneckers, pulling the door shut behind him but not locking it, and to Toshiko's horror, Tadashi takes the opportunity to slip into the store and filch some more goodies. She decides enough is enough and tries to run away, with Tadashi in pursuit through a gathering crowd. Kinoshita stages the fire and the melee around it very well, giving some needed action to what has been a rather talky film. In the end, Tadashi is caught and Toshiko returns to the chorus line, a somewhat flat and anticlimactic ending to a film that has generated some real tension.

The Portrait (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1948)

Chieko Higashiyama, Kuniko Miyake, and Ichiro Sugai in The Portrait

Midori: Kuniko Igawa
Kaneko: Eitaro Ozawa
Tamai: Kamatari Fujiwara
Nomura, the Artist: Ichiro Sugai
The Artist's Wife: Chieko Higashiyama
Kumiko, the Daughter-in-Law: Kuniko Miyake
Yoko, the Artist's Daughter: Yoko Katsuragi
Midori's Friend: Mitsuko Miura
Nakajima, Yoko's Boyfriend: Keiji Sada
Ichiro, the Artist's Son: Toru Abe

Director: Keisuke Kinoshita
Screenplay: Akira Kurosawa
Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda
Production design: Motoji Kojima
Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara
Music: Chuji Kinoshita

Keisuke Kinoshita's The Portrait deserves to be a little better known, if only because its screenplay is by Akira Kurosawa. Not that it's a masterpiece, or even a particularly felicitous example of Kurosawa's screenwriting, but it's one of the better films of the enormously prolific and sometimes misguided Kinoshita. IMDb, oddly, gives only the names of the cast members, not indicating what roles they play, which can be something of a challenge to those of us who aren't completely familiar with Japanese actors. Fortunately, I was able to track down a cast list and a useful summary on French Wikipedia. At the core of the film is an old trope: the portrait that reveals the truth. In this case, it reminds Midori, the mistress of real-estate hustler Kaneko, of her innocent past, causing her to break off their relationship. Kaneko has entered into partnership with Tamai to buy a rather rundown and ill-planned house, make some renovations, and flip it for double the price. The problem is the tenants, an artist named Nomura and his family. Kaneko is reluctant to evict them outright -- this guy is in real estate? -- so he concocts a plan: He will move Midori, who has somewhat of a temper, into the upstairs room of the house, and she'll prove such a torment to Nomura and his family that they'll be glad to leave. But things start to go awry almost immediately: The family think that Midori is Kuneko's daughter instead of his mistress. Naturally, she's somewhat flattered by this misconception. She softens even more when Nomura wants to paint her portrait, and falls completely when the family downstairs prove to be kind and affectionate people. Watching Yoko, the daughter, dance with her boyfriend under a full moon, and then be joined by Nomura and his wife, Midori starts to turn against Kaneko. But then even Kaneko is softened by the tenants and abandons his scheme. This is typical movie sentimentality, a fault Kinoshita (and sometimes Kurosawa) was often guilty of, but there is a bittersweet touch to the ending when Midori, having seen her portrait on display at a museum, walks away into an unknown future.

Wedding Ring (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1950)

Toshiro Mifune and Kinuyo Tanaka in Wedding Ring

Noriko Kuki: Kinuyo Tanaka
Takeshi Ema: Toshiro Mifune
Michio Kuki: Jukichi Uno
Tetsuya Kuki: Kenji Susukida

Director: Keisuke Kinoshita
Screenplay: Keisuke Kinoshita
Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda
Art direction: Mikio Mori
Music: Chuji Kinoshita

Keisuke Kinoshita's Wedding Ring could easily have been made by MGM in the 1930s with Clark Gable, Norma Shearer, and Franchot Tone, and audiences would have lapped it up while critics dismissed it as old-hat. What Kinoshita's movie has going for it is the great actress Kinuyo Tanaka and the young and hunky Toshiro Mifune. In truth, Tanaka, whose own production company was responsible for Wedding Ring, is a little old for her role -- she was 10 years older than Mifune -- and not particularly suited for the film's frequent celebrations of her beauty. Kinoshita seems more fascinated with Mifune's virile presence, giving him multiple opportunities to appear shirtless, and even providing a scene in which Tanaka's Noriko cuddles the sweat-soaked jacket Mifune's Takeshi Ema has just removed. The plot is familiar stuff: Noriko's husband, Michio, whom she married just before he went to war, has come home with tuberculosis, and Ema is the doctor who visits him to supervise his recovery. Noriko spends much of her time running the family business, a Tokyo jewelry store, and she and Ema frequently encounter each other on their commutes to the seaside resort where Michio is recovering. One thing leads to another, of course. But Ema is made of sterner moral stuff than Noriko, and when Michio, becoming aware of his wife's attraction to the doctor, makes an attempt to kill himself by going swimming, something Ema has demonstrated his proficiency at, the doctor remembers the Hippocratic Oath and determines to break it off. Duty conquers love, and so on. The film is nobody's finest hour, but it's fun to watch Mifune when he was not being directed by Akira Kurosawa -- their Rashomon was released the same year, making Mifune an international star. As for Tanaka, she gave what is perhaps her greatest performance two years later for Kenji Mizoguchi in The Life of Oharu.

Fireworks Over the Sea (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1951)

Tarobei Kamiya: Chishu Ryu
Mie Kamiya: Michiyo Kogure
Miwa Kamiya: Yoko Katsuragi
Sami: Teruko Kishi
Kaoru Uozumi: Isuzu Yamada
Mitsu: Chieko Higashiyama
Shogo: Takashi Miki
Yukiko Nomura: Keiko Tsushima
Tsuyoshi Yabuki: Rentaro Mikuni
Kono Kujirai: Haruko Sugimura
Tamihiko Kujirai: Keiji Sada
Ippei Nagisa: Akira Ishihama

Director: Keisuke Kinoshita
Screenplay: Keisuke Kinoshita
Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda
Art direction: Tatsuo Hamada
Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara
Music: Chuji Kinoshita

Fireworks Over the Sea is an overlong (a little over two hours) and overplotted film about the tribulations of a family-owned fishing company. The always-welcome Chishu Ryu plays the head of the Kamiya family who has to struggle with not only keeping his business literally afloat but also the romantic entanglements of his daughters. There are love scenes and fist fights, as well as a dark family secret, but not much of an attempt on writer-director Keisuke Kinoshita's part to give it all coherent dramatic shape. The music track by Chuji Kioshita, the director's brother, doesn't help much by muttering about behind the scenes, sometimes inappropriately.

The Good Fairy (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1951)

Chikage Awashima and Rentaro Mikuni in The Good Fairy

Yoshio Nakanuma: Masayuki Mori
Itsuko Kitaura: Chikage Awashima
Rentaro Mikuni: Rentaro Mikuni
Mikako Toba: Yoko Katsuragi
Ryoen Toba: Chishu Ryu
Tsuyoki Kitaura: Koreya Senda
Suzue: Toshiko Kobayashi

Director: Keisuke Kinoshita
Screenplay: Keisuke Kinoshita, Kogo Noda
Based on a novel by Kunio Kishida
Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda
Art direction: Tatsuo Hamada
Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara
Music: Chuji Kinoshita

The Good Fairy is a shamelessly tearjerking snarl of plot threads, any one of which might have made a coherent movie, but together make for a complete mess. Nor would any of them justify the oddness of the title. (The original is Zen-ma, but Google Translate failed me.) It begins when Yoshio Nakanuma, a newspaper assigning editor, sends a young reporter, Rentaro Mikuni,* to track down Itsuko Kitaura, the runaway wife of a wealthy businessman. Naturally, there are complications: Nakanuma was once in love with Itsuko, who has a younger sister, Mikako, with whom Rentaro falls in love. She's dying, however, and by the film's end Rentaro is so devoted to her that he persuades her father, a former Buddhist priest, to let him marry Mikako on her deathbed. But Rentaro wants Nakanuma to witness the marriage, and by the time he gets there, Mikako is dead. Meanwhile, Rentaro has witnessed Nakanuma's cruelty to his longtime mistress, Suzue, whom he dismisses coldly now that he has reunited with his old love, Itsuko. Angered by his boss's treatment of Suzue, Rentaro sends Nakanuma away, then marries the dead Mikako. No, really. The thing is, this incredible nonsense seems to have been plausible to director and cast, all of whom do their best to make it work. At least the glimpses inside a Japanese newspaper office are interesting, but there are no fairies to be seen in the film, good or otherwise, unless it's Chishu Ryu's gentle, infinitely understanding ex-priest.

*Rentaro Mikuni is both the character and the screen name of the actor, born Masao Sato, who, like the American actors Gig Young and Anne Shirley, took his screen name from a role, in his case the first of a long career.

Tragedy of Japan (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1953)

Keiji Sada and Yuko Mochizuki in Tragedy of Japan

Haruko Inoue: Yuko Mochizuki
Utako, Haruko's Daughter: Yoko Katsuragi
Seiichi, Haruko's Son: Masami Taura
Sato: Teiji Takahasi
Tatsuya, a Street Musician: Keiji Sada
Masayuki Akazawa: Ken Uehara
Mrs. Akazawa: Sanae Takasugi
Wakamaru: Keiko Awaji

Director: Keisuke Kinoshita
Screenplay: Keisuke Kinoshita
Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda
Art direction: Kimihiko Nakamura
Music: Chuji Kinoshita

Tragedy of Japan is the Criterion Channel's title for Keisuke Kinoshita's film, but I prefer the one used on IMDb and elsewhere: A Japanese Tragedy. Not only does that title echo Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy, but it also particularizes the story better. What happens to Haruko Inoue and her children is not a microcosm of recent Japanese history but a product of it -- one among millions, including those told in Kinoshita's many films. The film also demonstrates something of Kinoshita's tendency to overreach, often with distracting innovations such as the oval masks that frame scenes in You Were Like a Wild Chrysanthemum (1955) or the color washes that creep into The River Fuefuki (1960). Here it's an unwise use of extensive documentary footage of the war and its aftermath as a frame for the fictional story. The contrast between the raw actuality of news footage and the artifice of movie storytelling works to the disadvantage of the latter. Which is unfortunate because Kinoshita has a good story to tell about Haruko's attempts to survive and to provide for her children and the unforeseen consequences of her efforts, as well as the problems faced by Seiichi in his ambitious pursuit of a medical career and Utako in her disastrous involvement with her English teacher. None of Haruko's good deeds, it seems, go unpunished, as the skirting of the law that she found necessary is held against her in more peaceful and prosperous times. Despite the mistaken attempt to fold these stories into a larger historical context, this is one of Kinoshita's better films, marked by some very good acting and genuine human dilemmas.

The Garden of Women (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1954)

Mieko Takamine and Chieko Higashiyama in The Garden of Women

Mayumi Gojo: Mieko Takamine
Yoshie Izushi: Hideko Takamine
Tomiko Takioka: Keiko Kishi
Akiko Hayashino: Yoshiko Kuga
Sankichi Shimoda: Takahiro Tamura
Yoshikazu Sagara: Masami Taura
Masao Izushi: Takashi Miki
Masao's Wife: Kuniko Igawa
Landlady: Yoko Mochizuki
Schoolmaster: Chieko Higashiyama
President: Kikue Mori

Director: Keisuke Kinoshita
Screenplay: Keisuke Kinoshita
Based on a story by Tomoji Abe
Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda
Art direction: Kimihiko Nakamura
Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara
Music: Chuji Kinoshita

Youth rebellion films became a prominent genre in Japan, but Keisuke Kinoshita's The Garden of Women is distinctive in that the rebels are all women. They have a lot to rebel against: They are students in a hidebound women's college more determined to turn them into proper young ladies than into educated women. This causes difficulties for Yoshie Izushi, who is a few years older than her fellow students. Most of them come from wealthy families, but Yoshie had to work for several years to earn enough money for the tuition. She wants an education that would make her a fitting partner for her upwardly mobile boyfriend, Sankichi. But she struggles with some subjects, especially math, and when she tries to study after hours she comes up against school rules that forbid her from studying anywhere except in her room -- which is usually filled with her roommates' friends, who are plotting against the stern headmistress, Mayumi Gojo, aka "The Shrew." Yoshie wants no part of the rebellion: She wants to graduate and marry Sankichi before her family forces her into marriage with a wealthy man of their choosing. Eventually, the student rebellion succeeds, but Yoshie gets caught in the crossfire. The Garden of Women is one of Kinoshita's more successful films, mostly because it gives us an unexplored angle on Japanese society and its tumultuous postwar society. But it's somewhat overplotted, with a few too many characters whose backstories take away from the central narrative.

You Were Like a Wild Chrysanthemum (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1955)

Masao: Chishu Ryu
Tamiko: Noriko Arita
Young Masao: Shinji Tanaka
Masao's Mother: Haruko Sugimura
Tamiko's Mother: Kazuo Motohashi
Tamiko's Father: Nobuo Tagaki
Tamiko's Sister: Keiko Yukishiro

Director: Keisuke Kinoshita
Screenplay: Keisuke Kinoshita
Based on a novel by Sachio Ito
Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda
Art direction: Kisaku Ito
Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara
Music: Chuji Kinoshita

Keisuke Kinoshita loved trying things out, and was so prolific and popular a filmmaker that his studio, Shochiku, let him get away with his innovations. For You Were Like a Wild Chrysanthemum* Kinoshita and cinematographer Hiroshi Kusuda decided to put all of the film's flashback scenes inside an oval mask, giving them the effect of vignetted images in a photo album. It's an interesting choice, but to my mind a mistake: More than half of the film consists of flashbacks, and given that almost all of the drama is contained in them, there's a loss of clarity and intimacy in the film's most important scenes. The unmasked frame story consists of the return of Masao, now a man in his 70s, to the village where he grew up. His closest friend, we learn, was his cousin Tamiko, a girl two years his senior. And this age difference -- not the blood relationship -- was considered a barrier to their engagement and marriage. As the aging Masao recalls the past, we see how Tamiko's family stymied their budding romance, sending him off to school and pressuring her into an arranged marriage. It's an affecting story, well performed by not only veterans Chishu Ryu as the old Masao and Haruko Sugimura as his mother in the flashbacks, but also the younger actors who play the young Masao and Tamiko. The cinematography is lovely, and it won awards, but I still think the masking gimmick is a distraction.

*The title the Criterion Channel on FilmStruck gives it. IMDb and other sources call it She Was Like a Wild Chrysanthemum.

The Tattered Wings (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1955)

Hideko Takamine and Keiji Sada in The Tattered Wings

Fuyuko Terada: Hideko Takamine
Shunsuke: Keiji Sada
Keizo Ishizu: Takahiro Tamura
Kojiro: Teiji Takahashi
Ryo: Akira Ishihama
Tokiko: Toshiko Kobayashi
Kimiko: Kuniko Igawa
Shunsuke's Father: Eijiro Yanaki
Fuyuko's Father: Takeshi Sakamoto

Director: Keisuke Kinoshita
Screenplay: Keisuke Kinoshita, Zenzo Matsuyama
Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda
Art direction: Kazue Hirataka
Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara
Music: Chuji Kinoshita

Keisuke Kinoshita's explorations of postwar domestic dilemmas continue with The Tattered Wings, in which Fuyuko, a war widow, is torn between -- what else? -- love and duty. Before the war she was in love with Keizo Ishizu, but she was forced into a marriage with the older son of a wealthy distiller. Her husband was cruel and unfaithful, and he left her with a daughter when he was killed in the war. Meanwhile, her husband's younger brother, Shunsuke, has fallen in love with her. He's a nicer guy than his brother, but things get complicated when Keizo suddenly returns to town, paying a visit before he moves to a new job in far-off Hokkaido. Their meetings stir gossip in the town, some of it fed by Fuyuko's sister, a telephone operator with a direct line, as it were, to the latest news. Meanwhile, Shunsuke is there to remind her that her daughter needs a steady, reliable father. Will Fuyuko choose stability or an unknown, romantic future? Kinoshita works all of this out with finesse and his usual attention to environment -- the sometimes claustrophobic small town -- but lays on a bit too much of his brother Chuji Kinoshita's musical emotion-tugging.

The Thick-Walled Room (Masaki Kobayashi, 1956)

Torohiko Hamada in The Thick-Walled Room

Yokota: Ko Mishima
Yamashita: Torohiko Hamada
Yoshiko: Keiko Kishi
Yamashita's Sister: Toshiko Kobayashi
Kawanishi: Kinzo Shin
Kimura: Tsutomu Shimomoto

Director: Masaki Kobayashi
Screenplay: Kobo Abe
Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda
Art direction: Kimihiko Nakamura
Film editing: Shizuo Oosawa
Music: Chuji Kinoshita

The resonant phrase "just following orders" hovers silently throughout Masaki Kobayashi's scathing The Thick-Walled Room. It's a portrait of postwar Japan more critical of all concerned, from the militarists who caused the war to the forces that occupied the country after it, than most of the films made by Kobayashi's contemporaries, which is why it was held from release for three years after it was made in 1953. The film focuses on the class-B and -C war criminals held prisoners by the occupying Americans -- and then by the Japanese -- for crimes they were ordered by their superior officers to commit. Meanwhile, many of those superior officers have been released and have returned to civilian life and even to important positions in business and government. The prisoners are both haunted by the things they were ordered to do and resentful of the injustice of their situation. They also remain ignorant of the way the outside world has changed. Yokota, for example, dreams of his girlfriend, Yoshiko, unaware that she has become a prostitute. The screenplay by novelist Kobo Abe is psychologically rich, and Kobayashi's direction makes the most of its subtleties.

The Ballad of Narayama (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1958)

Kinuyo Tanaka in The Ballad of Narayama

Orin: Kinuyo Tanaka
Tatsuhei: Teiji Takahashi
Tama: Yuko Mochizuki
Kesakichi: Danko Ichikawa
Matsu: Keiko Ogasawara
Mata: Seiji Miyaguchi
Mata's Son: Yunosuke Ito
Teru: Ken Mitsuda

Director: Keisuke Kinoshita
Screenplay: Keisuke Kinoshita
Based on a novel by Shichiro Fukazawa
Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda
Art direction: Chiyoo Umeda
Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara
Music: Chuji Kinoshita, Matsunosuke Nozawa

Keisuke Kinoshita was so prolific a filmmaker, so freewheeling in his choice of subject, so willing to try something different with each film, that it's tempting to dismiss him as a kind of dilettante. And too often, his attempts at pathos come off as sentimental, even banal. But if he has a masterwork in his oeuvre, it's The Ballad of Narayama, a highly stylized account of life in a medieval Japanese village in which old people, when they reach the age of 70, are taken up the mountain and left there to die. I know nothing of kabuki, but the style of the film is often likened to that traditional Japanese theater. What I do know is that Kinoshita is one of the few directors who have managed to make film feel theatrical, to give us the intimacy of theater with the flexibility of film. The Ballad of Narayama is carefully, deliberately staged, using sets that are obviously on soundstages with trees and plants that emulate nature but are clearly artificial. I kept being reminded, oddly, of the MGM musical Brigadoon (Vincente Minnelli, 1954), which was originally planned to be filmed in Scotland, and later on the Monterey Peninsula in California, but was moved into a Culver City soundstage thanks to budget cuts. Kinoshita, who had often made spectacular use of actual Japanese locations, wasn't forced by the budget to give his film such an artificial look but rather chose it. And it works: There's a formal quality to the film that suits its story, a distancing that makes the harshness of its fable so effective. The film also benefits from the performance of the great actress Kinuyo Tanaka as Orin, whose dignified acceptance of her fate becomes heartbreaking. Her own grandson, Kesakichi, scorns her as just another mouth to feed, and mocks her with a song about a woman with demon teeth, whereupon Orin takes a rock and smashes her own teeth to demonstrate her good intentions. Tanaka makes this horrifying scene plausible, as she does the final submission to the abandonment at Narayama. She's well supported by Teiji Takahashi as her grieving, dutiful son.

The Rose on His Arm (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1956)

Yoshiko Kuga in The Rose on His Arm

Kiyoshi Akiyama: Katsuo Nakamura
Keiko Hase: Yoshiko Kuga
Kiyoshi's Mother: Sadako Sawamura
Masahiro Hase: Akira Ishihama
Kaoro Akiyama: Noriko Arita
Yoko: Hiroko Sugita
Choshichi Tsuji: Shinji Tanaka
Masahiro's Mother: Kuniyo Miyake
Masahiro's Father: Ryuji Kita

Director: Keisuke Kinoshita '
Screenplay: Keisuke Kinoshita
Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda
Art direction: Chiyoo Umeda
Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara
Music: Chuji Kinoshita

The only real distinction accruing to The Rose on His Arm is that it was cited as one of the best foreign films by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association in its Golden Globe Awards for 1956. Otherwise, it's a rather plodding entry in the "troubled youth" genre, very much outshone even in the year of its release by Ko Nakahira's Crazed Fruit, which exploited with greater finesse the audience's fascination with the postwar generation. Kiyoshi is a sullen, rather spoiled young man who resists his mother's attempts to find him gainful employment in a factory, and instead falls into the clutches of would-be yakuza Masahiro, not to mention the arms of Masahiro's pretty sister, Keiko. Keisuke Kinoshita and his usual behind-the-camera collaborators never quite lift this one out of predictability.

Farewell to Dream (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1956)

Noriko Kikuoki, Shinji Tanaka, and Yoshiko Kuga in Farewell to Dream

Yoichi Akimoto: Shinji Tanaka
Oshin, Yoichi's Mother: Yuko Mochizuki
Toyoko, Yoichi's Older Sister: Yoshiko Kuga
Genkichi, Yoichi's Father: Eijiro Tono
Kazue, Yoichi's Younger Sister: Noriko Kikuoki
Sudo: Takahiro Tamura
Seiji Harada: Ryohei Ono

Director: Keisuke Kinoshita
Screenplay: Yoshiko Kusuda
Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda
Art direction: Kazue Hirataka
Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara
Music: Chuji Kinoshita

The English title, Farewell to Dream, seems to be grammatically or idiomatically off: We would expect Farewell to a Dream or ... Dreams instead. (The Japanese title is Yûyake-gumo, which Google Translate renders as "Sunset Cloud.") But then there's something a little off about this entire short film -- only 78 minutes long. Its young narrator, Yoichi, tells us his story about how circumstances made him bid farewell to his dreams, except that he doesn't seem to have had any substantial dream other than not following in his father's footsteps as a fishmonger, a job he hates because it makes him smell of fish, causing other boys to taunt him. We can't really blame him, but the film never suggests that Yoichi had a clear plan of escape from that life. He spends a good deal of his time looking out over the rooftops of Tokyo through his binoculars, sighting a pretty young woman whom he dreams of meeting. Eventually, he and his friend Seiji make their way across the city to where they think the young woman lives, only to arrive in her neighborhood as she's getting into an automobile with the man she's engaged to marry. Yoichi's story is also mixed with that of his sisters: The elder one, Toyoko, is pretty and vain, and has a handsome boyfriend, Sudo. But when Sudo's family goes broke, she marries an older man -- and then carries on an affair with Sudo. When his father falls ill, Yoichi's parents allow a rich uncle to adopt his younger sister, Kazue, in exchange for some financial support, and we see Yoichi bid a sad farewell to the girl. I think we're meant to sympathize with Yoichi in the collapse of his family, but the irony is that after his father dies, Yoichi turns out to be a very good fishmonger, building a thriving business from his own talent as a cook by developing a sideline as a caterer and seller of prepared meals. Like it or not, Yoichi has become what many families would see as a blessing: the son who successfully keeps the family business alive. The effect is that Yoichi's lament for his lost future feels like self-pity rather than legitimate dismay at unfulfilled potential.