In the sixth and final episode Rentaro Mikuni steals the show as Baiken Shishido, Musashi's nemesis. Mikuni is the nominal villain of the film, but he is a devoted husband and father as well. He tries to kill Musashi only to avenge the death of his brother-in-law. While Baiken (who wields a chain and sickle against Musashi's sword) is a very human character and the emotions that Mikuni displays in his performance are quite believable and engaging

A humble page fathers a child by the daughter of a clan official and is banished. Years later, the child, now a stable boy, is reunited with his father, but feudal codes threaten their happiness. Uchida’s poignant masterpiece condemns the inflexible class system and launches an indictment of values that favor symbolic objects over human life. The film’s focus is on character rather than swordplay, and charged performances - especially child actor Motoharu Ueki - add to the emotional power.

1960 film by Tomu Uchida

First part of the famous Dai-bosatsu toge trilogy, based on Kaizan Nakazato’s unfinished long series of novels (41 books, written from 1913 to 1941). Set in the last period of the Tokugawa Shogunate, Daibosatsu Toge tells the story of Tsuke Ryunosuke, a nihilistic swordmaster who doesnt hesitate to kill anyone, bad or good. Despite the authors explicit refusal, the series were later made into plays and movies several times.

《土》（1939年出品）是日本电影史上的不朽名作。内田吐梦为了拍摄农村由于四季变化而不同的劳动情景，在这部影片上花费了两年多的时间，在茨城县农村修建了一所真正的农舍，摄制组人员在这期间同农民一起生活，认真体验农民真正的生活感情。事实上，这部影片让观众看到了死守住的土地、咬紧牙关艰苦奋斗的贫农的精神。

内田吐夢:仇討選手

サラリーマンや学生、作業員の憩の場所「たそがれ酒場」。専属ピアニスト江藤釿也の伴奏で健一が唄っている。江藤は三十余年前歌劇界の花形だったが、愛弟子と妻が彼にそむいたので刃傷沙汰を起し、楽壇から姿を消した人だった。酒場で先生と呼ばれる梅田茂一郎はかつて戦記物で名を成した画伯だが、今はパチンコでかせいで暮している。通称小判鮫の汲島鉄夫は何時も梅田に焼酎を飲ませてもらう。競輪で穴を当てて得意になっている岐部と元隊長鬼塚大佐は、傍の卓子でサルトルを論じている大学の講師と学生達が気に入らない。地廻りの愚連隊森本は酒場に働く娘野口ユキのことで恋人鱒見とわたりをつけに来るが、鱒見にナイフで強迫されユキから手を引くと誓う。鱒見は大阪へ高飛びするからと、ユキへの伝言を梅田に頼んで立去る。鱒見の後を追おうとしたユキは、日雇い作業員をしている母親が怪我をしたと知らせに来た妹弓子を見つける。梅田はマネージャー谷口からユキの給料を前借りしてやる。新日本歌劇団の中小路竜介は健一の唄を聞き歌劇団加入を勧めるが江藤は何故か反対する。酒場随一の出し物エミー・ローザの踊りが始まると一人で飲んでいた多賀がエミーに斬りつける。多賀はエミーの元のパトロンである。梅田は毎朝新聞の山口の似顔を描いて金を借り、ユミの前借りを払う。中小路が江藤のかつての弟子と知り、健一は江藤の苦悩を思い煩悶する。ピアノを弾く江藤と唄う健一、それに聞き入る梅田の眼に涙が光っている。明日江藤は健一を新日本歌劇団につれて行くのである。

日活は松竹よりも古くから映画を製作していたがそのほとんどは旧劇であり新劇でも女形を使っていた。しかし松竹蒲田の現代劇が出てくると徐々に新派に向かい、新派の女形だった衣笠貞之助らが日活向島で監督として20年にデビュー、松竹の村田実が移ってきたこともあって現代劇が増え始める。1923年の関東大震災以後は関西の大将軍が中心となった。1920年代後半〜30年代初頭にかけてはいわゆる「傾向映画」の時代でもあった。左翼的な思想を盛り込んだ傾向映画はまず時代劇において現われた。伊藤大輔の作品に顕著なように、それは封建的な権力者に立ち上がる農民一揆や浪人達の反乱となって表現された。また現代劇においては資本家に対立する労働者階級の闘争や搾取され転落するヒロインをセンセーショナルに描いたりすることによって映画作家たちは社会に眼を向けた。このような時期に内田吐夢は先陣を切って傾向映画の代表作『生ける人形』（1929）を、そして続いて本作『喜劇・汗』を発表したのである。搾取する側のブルジョワをアイロニカルに喜劇的に描くことを意図して製作された『汗』は、享楽的な生活に退屈した金持ちのドラ息子がある偶然からルンペンに服を取り替えられ、労働者となって汗を流して何かを得るというストーリーである。政治的な主題を持った映画だが、その表現の細部をとってみると喜劇映画作家としての才知に溢れている。

One of the major joys of writing about Japanese movies is that whenever you begin to get that tired, jaded feeling that you think you’ve seen it all and that there’s nothing left that’s ever going to set your pulse racing, you stumble across a whole previously hidden seam of movies that completely revolutionises any ideas of what Japanese cinema is. I remember getting this feeling watching the works of Hiroshi Shimizu at the 2003 Tokyo FILMeX, and I got it again at the same festival exactly one year later, during a 13-film retrospective of Tomu Uchida, which travelled to the Rotterdam Film Festival in a slimmed-down version a couple of months later.
In English-language film circles, not much is really generally known about Japanese cinema prior to the 1960s. Anderson and Richie’s The Japanese Film: Art and Industry is still the bible for those who want to find out more, but more recent non-academic publications are limited by the films that are available for viewing. It’s a catch-22 situation, which DVD is slowly overcoming. Yet still, outside of the work of a few major directors like Kurosawa and Ozu, recent releases have tended to stick with products from more recent years, more often than not focused around the twin poles of art and exploitation.
It is therefore really difficult to get any broader picture of what the industry was doing before the days of yakuza movies and Roman Porno. Yet the 1950s were the decade when the Japanese cinema had reached full maturity and cinema attendances were at a peak, the so-called Golden Age when the major companies were between them turning out around 500 films a year, all made by directors with several decades of experience behind them, at long-established studios with a large highly-trained professional team of technicians. Far from being the bastion of conservativeness that Oshima and the New Wave directors labelled it to be, I am coming to look at the decade as a vast lucky dip with some fabulous treasures still waiting to be found – such as The Outsiders, for example, an epic outdoor adventure in which an embittered Ken Takakura fights for the rights of Hokkaido’s oppressed Ainu population.
Tomu Uchida was one of those names I’d heard bandied about a lot, most often in conjunction with the film Earth (Tsuchi) made in 1939. A seminal piece of social-realism made by a director noted for his leftist inclinations, Earth focused on the harsh lives of a community of farmers at a time when rapid urbanisation was bleeding the countryside dry. It was a political film in that it confronted the swelling ranks of the emergent urban middle classes who made up the large bulk of cinema audiences with the plight of the rural poor, paralleling the release of John Ford’s adaptation of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath in America around the same time in 1940.
Remember, long before the days of television, cinema was the only way of seeing how the other half lived, and in today’s image-saturated mass-media culture it is easy to overlook the power and immediacy of what people saw on the big screen. Uchida’s film was all the more political because it was made at the time when the lion’s share of agricultural production was being put towards Japan’s wartime expansion. Needless to say, it went bang in the face of the type of films the government was promoting at the time.
Earth was filmed over the course of a year with a documentarist’s attention to detail, taking in each of the seasons and focusing very much on man’s relationship with the soil. This approach of drawing out the realism and charting the passage of time through the use of the four seasons much later became a staple of the documentary films made by the collective centred around Shinsuke Ogawa, such as Magino Village – A Tale (Sennen Kizami no Hidokei: Magino-Mura Monogatari, 1987), or more recently in the documentary-styled fictional work of Naomi Kawase, specifically the films Suzaku and Hotaru.
Uchida’s film, by the way, is not to be confused with the German-Japanese co-production, The New Earth (Atarashii Tsuchi), directed by Mansaku Itami, the father of Tampopo director Juzo Itami. This film, released in 1941, was a nationalist propaganda work made under the instigation of Dr Arnold Fanck, the German director who sparked off the peculiar genre of the “Mountain Film” as typified by The Holy Mountain (Der Heilige Berg, recently released on DVD in the UK by Eureka). As written by Fanck, its goal was to portray “unity of the Nazi group-spirit and the racial spirit of the Japanese as opposed to the weak spirit of the democracies”, but there was conflict between the Japanese and the German creative elements throughout the production due to the way in which Fanck constantly misrepresented elements of Japanese culture in service of the film’s higher propagandist purpose (The Last Samurai, anyone?). Released overseas at the time as The Daughter of the Samurai, one of the first co-productions Japan ever made with the West thus ended up a classic textbook example of orientalist filmmaking.
Much of what has been written about Uchida’s career in the English language – basically in Anderson and Richie’s book – has focused on his pre-war career. But as the FILMeX retrospective clearly demonstrated, this was only half of the story. In 1945, the left-leaning director travelled to the formerly Japanese-occupied area of Manchuria in China to join the Manchuria Film Association, or Man’ei, and was not to come back until 1953. Upon his return he continued for almost two decades to produce a wide range of films that fit into every genre conceivable, from traditional kabuki adaptations to melodrama and yakuza movies.
The diversity of his oeuvre therefore means that getting a grip on what elements typify an Uchida picture is a difficult task, but on the evidence of The Outsiders, one of the original program that tellingly did not go over to the Rotterdam festival, perhaps it is fruitful to turn once again to the parallel with John Ford. The film’s mixture of heroic action, making full use of one of the top macho icons of its day, an expansive sense of location, masterful use of colour and composition and a focus on social injustice meted out on large sectors of the nation’s indigenous people had me thinking in terms of The Searchers. In what seems like another unlikely case of synchronicity, Ford’s film was released just two years previously in 1956.
The Outsiders is something of a revelation. It certainly looks nothing like what you’d expect from a Japanese movie made around the mid-50s, which is perhaps the reason why it is completely unknown outside of Japan. Opening with a lengthy pan across the barren mountaintops of Hokkaido, Uchida’s third film in colour, after the two parts of the jidai-geki Daibosatsu Pass (Daibosatsutoge, 1957/58) is an undeniably exhilarating visual experience, making full use of the Toeiscope widescreen format to capture Japan’s northernmost territory in all its rugged beauty. It also is of particular interest for drawing attention to the destruction of the culture and the discrimination against the indigenous Ainu people, a dwindling race faced with danger of extinction since the Japanese nation began its concerted push northwards with the government extending administration over all parts of the landmass in 1868.
Screen legend Ken Takakura is Ishitaro Kazamori, known as Byakki “the Phoenix” by the local Ainu population, as he whisks from village to village on horseback delivering supplies and educational books to the locals, an outcast Robin Hood character working for the future of his people. But Byakki’s rough methods aren’t to everyone’s tastes. Money has been going missing from the funds raised by the chairman of the Ainu Society, Dr. Ike (Kitazawa), a well-meaning “shamo” (non-Ainu) who has dedicated much of his life to researching the history and culture of Japan’s aboriginal people.
When Dr Ike brings a young landscape painter Yoshiko Saeki (Kagawa) from Tokyo with him on his field trips to sketch the local landscapes, there is initially resentment of another outsider treating the local populations as her own pet project. But Yoshiko soon befriends Mitsu (Fujisato), an Ainu girl who was jilted years ago on the eve of the holy Bekanbe Festival by her “shamo” lover who couldn’t go through with the stigma of marrying into this ostracised class. Mitsu may also hold the key to Byakki’s whereabouts.
Meanwhile, as the next Bekanbe Festival approaches, tension is growing between the Ainu and the Japanese settlers in the coastal town of Nanbetsu due to Byakki’s increasingly unruly antics. One local who steadfastly refuses to pitch in to Dr. Ike’s project is Oiwa (Mikuni), who runs the local fishery with his old father (Susukida), and runs a strict policy of not hiring any Ainu workers. Oiwa bears Byakki a particular enmity, because Byakki knows that Oiwa is living in denial, masquerading as a “shamo” and keeping his real Ainu ancestry well hidden. But Oiwa also knows a few secrets about Byakki.
Hokkaido is in many ways Japan’s northernmost frontier, its own equivalent to the Wild West, and The Outsiders, though based on the novel Mori to Mizuumi no Matsuri by Taijun Takeda, most clearly resembles an American western, a gripping action film letting forth a righteous cry against social injustice against the indigenous population and unfolding against an epic landscape. Such genre appropriations can’t be coincidental. As could be seen as early back as Uchida’s own 1933 silent, The Police Officer (Keisatsukan), which also played at FILMeX, Japanese filmmakers were certainly not above borrowing heavily from typically American staples such as the cops-and-robbers film. I can’t say whether Uchida consciously modelled his film on the western, but the crucial fact about The Outsiders is that the story makes sense and works in its own right, rather than just being noteworthy as a cross-cultural hybrid curio.
The main drawing point is of course Hokkaido itself, shot beautifully by cinematographer Shoe Nishikawa, picking out the autumnal russet-tinged hues of the majestic countryside of lakes, plains and woods, as the camera glides and tracks through a series of mainly exterior locations. But aside from this vibrant use of colour, also used to great effect in the matsuri (festival) scenes and the coloured fabrics of the traditional costumes, The Outsiders is also unique for revealing a facet of Japanese culture almost completely disregarded in its cinema. Bold, beautiful, and packing a powerful dramatic punch, there is little else quite like it. We can only hope that some adventurous DVD company will pick it up soon, because this is a film that could change people’s perceptions and prejudices about Japanese film for good. from midnighteye

炭鉱の落盤で生き埋めになった5人の抗夫の救出劇を、巨匠・内田吐夢と名脚本家・橋本忍がヒューマニズムたっぷりに描き上げた感動巨編。原作は菊島隆三。難航する救出作戦と人々の焦り、民族の壁を越えた協力劇などどたんばに追い込まれた人々を赤裸々に描く。須永が経営する東和炭鉱は落盤の危機にさらされた原始的な炭鉱だ。梅雨期のある日、立抗の木枠の樋が裂け、坑道は土砂と水で地獄と化した。落盤によって伴野ら5人の抗夫は生き埋めになる。

大正14（1925）年、侠客の飛車角（鶴田浩二）は恋人おとよ（藤純子）をめぐって人を斬り、その逃亡の途中で、老侠客・吉良常（辰巳柳太郎）と出会い、彼の勧めで自首する。しかしその投獄中、おとよは玉の井に身を売り、客の宮川（高倉健）と愛し合うようになってしまう……。
尾崎士郎の名作小説『人生劇場』の第3部『残侠篇』を名匠・内田吐夢監督のメガホンで映画化。幾度も映画化された『人生劇場』の中でも最高傑作の誉れも高い名作任侠映画である。鶴田の演じる飛車角も、任侠と愛の苦悩をにじませた優れもの。また脇に至るまでの東映オールスター・キャストがそれぞれ柄に合った好演。殺陣のすさまじさも含め、任侠映画ファンは一度は観ておくべき作品である。（増當竜也）
内容（「GAGAデータベース」より）
尾崎士郎原作による大河小説「人生劇場・残侠篇」を、巨匠・内田吐夢監督が映画化した任侠ドラマ。姿を消したおとよと飛車角を再会させた吉良常。だが、デカ虎一家から喧嘩状を受けた飛車角は、病床に臥せる吉良常をよそに単身デカ虎一家に乗り込む。

Chubei, the adopted son of an Osaka courier, falls desperately in love with the courtesan Umegawa. To prevent a wealthy client from purchasing her, he steals money from his employer to buy her freedom himself. Now hunted criminals, the lovers flee toward Yamato, pursued by the law.

洛北蓮台寺野で、名門京八流の宗家吉岡の御曹子清十郎の左肩を一撃のもとに打ち砕いた武蔵は、清十郎の弟伝七郎から仇敵とされ、吉岡道場門弟一同から居所を探られる破目となった。武蔵を探しているのは彼等ばかりではない。佐々木小次郎に追われる朱実、お杉婆ア、病床にふけるお通と、城太郎少年も武蔵の行方を追っていた。或る日、光悦にさそわれ遊廓扇屋に上る途中、伝七郎から果し状をつきつけられた。場所は蓮華王院三十三間堂、雪の中武蔵は伝七郎と相対した。青眼と青眼、二本の刀がひらめいた瞬間、武蔵は伝七郎と吉岡の門弟を薙ぎ倒していた。秘かに扇屋に戻った武蔵を吉野太夫はやさしくさとすのだった。翌朝、お通の居場所を知った武蔵は総門附近で吉岡一味にかこまれた。が突如佐々木小次郎が現われ、武蔵との決闘を決めた。明後日の朝、寅の下刻、場所は叡山道、一乗寺の麓薮之卿下り松、そして名目人は壬生源左衛門の一子源次郎を立てることに一決した。高札を見た群衆がひしめき、お杉婆アは息子又八の弔合戦といきみ合った。やがて当日、武蔵が叡山道にかかった時、病身のお通に会った。武蔵が斬り死にすれば自分も生きてはいないつもりというお通の言葉に、剣に生涯をかけた武芸者武蔵の心に、お通に対する恋慕がよぎった。一足先きに着いた武蔵は、松を中心に地形の頂点に立った。やがて吉岩方の姿が現われた。「七十三対一」瞬間、武蔵は相手方の配置を読み、地形を利用した自分の行動をきめた。「しかし勝負は何できめる、敵はおれ一人が目的、その俺の目標は、そうだ本陣だッ、総大将だッ」武蔵の見取図は源次郎少年を中心にひかれた--白鉢巻の間の手裏剣、大小の二刀流の体ごと、下り松に向い疾風逆落しと見事、剣は風を切った。

The remake of Yoshikawa's novel continues with the second installment in which Takezo, soon to be Miyamoto Musashi, emerges from the Himeji Castle after three years of intense contemplation and philosophical study and starting on his epic quest to complete his skill in the Way.

The fifth and final installment with the build up of the epic battle between Sasaki Kojiro and Miyamoto Musashi. With all the familiar characters making appearances: Otsu (Musashi's great love), Akemi, Matahachi (his former fellow soldier), old lady Osugi (still doggedly trying to defeat Musashi), and even the return of Priest Takuan (the man responsible for his journey towards enlightenment). But most of all, the boastful, long-haired and long-sworded Sasaki Kojiro.

持枪侍从权八奉命保护少东家小十郎及随从源太去江户，与他们同行的还有小百货商人传次、外出卖身的农家姑娘和老爷茂作、按摩师巡礼、卖艺的澄母女、形迹可疑的藤三郎，还有流浪儿次郎。权八看见少东家小十郎和随从都酗酒贪杯，很是不安。夜幕降临，一行人在袋井住下。传次怀疑带着很多钱的藤三郎是大盗，正欲追踪，其实住在隔壁的巡礼才是真正的大盗六卫门。当晚，权八受澄之邀出门，小十郎与源太趁机大喝起酒来，幸亏权八及时赶回才没出什么事情。第二天，六门卫偷大人的盘缠，被权太擒获。藤三郎所带的钱原来是为了赎回五年前卖出的女儿，可现在他知道女儿已死，就用这笔钱为农家姑娘赎了身。小十郎与源太又进了小酒馆，大醉后遭了武士的毒手。
影片根据日本作家井上金太郎于1927所作的《道中悲记》改编而成。这是一部历史剧，以表现“忠诚”为主线贯穿始终，充分地运用了所谓正统历史剧的表现手法，以古典的手法和游记形式拍摄，剧中出场人物各具特色。导演内田吐梦早年当演员时便已经开始了电影生涯，他在二次大战期间曾执导过很多电影，为日本有声电影的发展起到了不可忽视的历史作用。该片受到了各界瞩目，入选1959年《电影旬报》十部佳片的第八位。

1961 film by Tomu Uchida