The genesis of this film was the idea that the star Kazuo Hasegawa would recreate the two roles he had played 30 years earlier in a 1935 film of Yukinojo Henge (Yukinojo the Phantom). The original story, a melodramatic tale about a Kabuki female impersonator, was written as a newspaper serial. Ichikawa chose to accentuate the dated quality of this material with its pulp-fiction implausibility. He used the visual and dramatic devices of silent cinema ingeniously combined with Kabuki stagecraft rethought in terms of the ‘scope frame and sudden stylistic jumps from romanticism to realism to stylised action backed by traditional Japanese music and Western strings and jazz. Also available on VHS.
Credits: Producer, Masaichi Nagata ; director, Kon Ichikawa ; writers, Daisuke Ito, Teinosuke Kinusaga, Natto Wada ; photography, Setsuo Kobayashi ; editor, Shigeo Nishida ; music, Yasushi Akutagawa.
Cast: Kazuo Hasegawa, Fujiko Yamamoto, Ayako Wakao.
Content notification
Our collection comprises over 40,000 moving image works, acquired and catalogued between the 1940s and early 2000s. As a result, some items may reflect outdated, offensive and possibly harmful views and opinions. ACMI is working to identify and redress such usages.
Learn more about our collection and our collection policy here. If you come across harmful content on our website that you would like to report, let us know.
How to watch
Collection
In ACMI's collection
Credits
Collection metadata
ACMI Identifier
F000070
Languages
English
Japanese
Subject category
Foreign language films
Sound/audio
Sound
Colour
Colour
Holdings
35mm film; Limited Access Print (Section 2)