Eiji Funakoshi

Setsuko Azabu, a senior in high school, receives a proposal of engagement from Shingo Arai, a college student she often runs into on her way to school, through her parents.Read More »

Synopsis:
A wife (Ayako Wakao) is diagnosed with an incurable disease at a young age. Her husband (Eiji Funakoshi) loves her, supports her, and tries to stay with her. However, the wife is tormented by the fact that she is ruining her husband’s future, and decides to divorce him as the only thing she can do for him.Read More »

Haruo Kuramoto works in a company where he wants to climb by marrying the director’s daughter. But he has a problem: he maintains a secret relationship with Reiko, secretary in the same company, whom he has made pregnant and who under no circumstances intends to give him up.Read More »

Story:
Though still young, Natsuko gave up the life of a geisha to become the mistress of the president of a shipbuilding company. When he is about to re-marry she insists he either wed or stop seeing her. Returning home, she again meets the man she first loved and for a time thinks of married happiness with him. When confronted by both, however, she decides to choose neither. She has been dependent for too long, she decides, and wishes to live her own life.Read More »

Two sisters, Kyoko and Hisako, run a restaurant in Kyoto. But an incident with the latter’s fiancé puts their relationship, and the future of their cuisine in jeopardy.Read More »

Another early Masumura with Wakao Ayako, based on the novel by Blue Sky Maiden’s (青空娘) Genji Keita. This time we have Wakao as the third daughter of the Nonomiya family, whose two elder sisters have married the two elder sons of the Mihara family. While Kawaguchi Hiroshi plays the third, unmarried son… so you can imagine the ensuing events. Maybe not as much fun as Ichikawa Kon’s Goodbye, Hello (あなたと私の合言葉　さようなら、今日は), also made at Daiei around the same time with the same leads and a similar story, but Masumura can do no wrong either.Read More »

Yoshimura’s 48th film is the contemporary story of a well-to-do family showing the frailties and failings of the class, the egotism, and the complete lack of consideration under polite and superficially perfect manners.Read More »

Quote:
Basically the plot revolves around an endebted entreprenor who sell his fields to a business-man who plan to build an car-factory. Instead of this factory, the fields will prove to be used for the Shinkansen line. Then, the endebted entreprenor will seek back the business-man for get much more money he deserved in this real trade.

Another not-so subtle critic of capitalism, but some good dark thriller moments and a great&painful strangulation sequence!Read More »

Eccentric film about female reporter fired for writing about police corruption. To make money she hides while a weekly magazine offers a prize for her discovery. A bank embezzler and his underlings take advantage of her disappearance to pin the theft on her, as well as the murder of the weak link in their gang. Meanwhile, the cop she got fired is now a private detective and he gets involved in the investigation. Another example of Ichikawa’s mixing of farcical genre filmmaking with perspicacious visual design. Comic highlights include an intentions of murder scene in which each shot reveals the gap in knowledge between potential perpetrator and victim, and the role of unseen objects in accidentally protecting the latter from the former. Another cynical film that finds in cinema a model for the superficial image society of 1950s Japan.Read More »