Hironao Takenaka
From the king of Japanese exploitation films comes a criminal drama told in a semi-documentary fashion. The murder of the chief official of Kobe city's Customs triggers an investigation of a prostitution ring called the 'Yellow Line' that sells Japanese women. A hired assasin is betrayed by his organization, and kidnaps a woman who happens to be the girlfriend of a newspaper reporter.
The most controversial film ever produced by Shintoho, Magatani Morihei’s horror thriller Bloody Sword Of The 99th Virgin (Kyujukyu-honme no Kimusume) is set in the mountains of Iwate Prefecture - a remote area that might be described as the Ozarks of Japan. The mountain folk are depicted as superstitious, blood-thirsty primitives, which struck traditionally discriminated-against locals and others in their community as discriminatory. Probably as a result, the film has been seldom screened in Japan but, contrary to some speculation, it has never been officially banned.
Italy is usually cited as the anchor of the neo-realist movement in cinema, but Mikio Naruse's Ginza Cosmetics (1951) is a reminder that Japan had its own output equally rooted in realism. Set in Tokyo's Ginza district, this low-key, lyrical unassuming account of a few days in the life of a luckless geisha (Kinuyo Tanaka), as she struggles to make a living for herself and her young son, has few dramatic highs or artificial moments, but possesses a startlingly vivid power in its slice-of-life texture.
