In a slum in Edo Japan, a ronin hopes that his deceased father's former master will hire him while a disgraced hairdresser attempts to regain his pride by kidnapping the daughter of a wealthy pawnbroker, who is set to be married.
This film is based on a real Meiji era performer -- and tells of Tochuken's partnership with his wife (played by Chikako Hosokawa) who played shamisen for his songs/recitations), his affair with a geisha (Sachiko Chiba), and the deterioration of his partnership and marriage.
Japanese domestic drama.
As suggested by the title, this film takes up the theme of the city, beginning with a series of traveling shots from Chiyo's point of view on a bus leaving the countryside and entering the metropolitan cityscape. After some fruitless job hunting in downtown Tokyo, Chiyo accepts a job as a bar hostess in Shiba ward. Well away from glamorous Asakusa and Ginza, this is a neighborhood bar where the women are dirt poor, each having only one kimono to their name....
The main focus is on the 5 member band of a small circus as it runs into problems while touring rural Japan. It also pays lots of attention to the two daughters of the aging and irascible ringmaster-circus owner. The high points are the sound (and score) and cinematography featuring a lot of vertiginous panning (appropriate - as high wire trapeze artists are also an important element in the film). A fascinating side-light on 30s Japan.
Story of a bandit king.
1936 P.C.L. adaptation of Natsume's novel.
The story picks up from Part 1 as Enoken's young scion forsakes his wealth and takes a department store job – in drag and sometimes blackface – to prove to the girl of his dreams that he be a hard-working, serious man.
Among the tight-knit neighbours are a poet, his actress wife, a bachelor budding author, a tobacco shop owner-cum-landlady, an insurance salesman and his nosy and greedy wife. Enter a young and seemingly high-class couple who just so happens is open to purchasing life insurance from their swift neighbour. In the meantime, life is imitating art across the street, which may end up providing for either a happy ending or a rude split - eventually that is.
Adaptation of Fumiko Hayashi's novel.
1930s Japanese comedy.
A comedic tale told in four parts, this film follows the antics of the pickpocket Kinta as he is pursued by a low ranking deputy named Kurakichi. The two get into all manner of peccadilloes and encounter a range of peculiar characters as their game of cat and mouse moves across the countryside in the last days of the Tokugawa Shogunate.
Kimiko, a Tokyo white-collar working girl, lives with her serious, intellectual, haiku-writing mother. Kimiko seeks to marry her boyfriend but needs her absent father to act as the go-between and negotiate the marriage. Kimiko travels and finds her father living with a second family.
The film generally regarded as Japan’s first true musical was also the first film made entirely in-house by the pioneering studio P.C.L., a company founded specifically to take advantage of emergent sound technology. P.C.L. worked in collaboration with a brewer’s firm, Dai Nihon Biru, who met the production costs of the film in full, and whose products are featured in the film in an example of the sophisticated and modern merchandising typical of the studio’s early work. The film is partially set in a beer hall, and its story concerns a beer seller at a train station and her relationship with a music student trying to create a hit song. Director Sotoji Kimura was to become a company stalwart, making such films as Ino and Mon, while actress Sachiko Chiba would emerge the studio’s first real star, appearing in such films as Wife Be Like a Rose.
The study of a one-year marriage that begins to crumble. A married man is torn between the love of his wife, and the attraction to a cousin of his wife.
Hide-chan (Hideko Takamine) and her family are on a trip to Tokyo. While visiting a fairground, a pickpocket (Kamatari Furukawa) steals the father's wallet. While everyone is trying to hunt down the thief, Hide-chan decides to make the most of it and enjoy her stay, while the thief and his main pursuer (Akira Kishii) play hide-and-seek among the funfair's spectacles and freakshows
Three sisters earn money for their bossy mother by being samisen street musicians. This means mainly playing a banjo type instrument for tips in bars...
