Mikio Naruse’s final silent film is a gloriously rich portrait of a waitress, Sugiko, whose life, despite a host of male admirers and even some intrigued movie talent scouts, ends up taking a suffocatingly domestic turn after a wealthy businessman accidentally hits her with his car.
"The Dancing Girl of Izu" tells of the story between a young male student who is touring the Izu Peninsula and a family of traveling dancers he meets there, including their youngest girl. The student finds the naïve girl attractive even though he eventually has to part with the family after...
The movie follows a young woman (Kinuyo Tanaka), a daughter of a high-ranking businessman and his neglected mistress, as she struggles to ease her mother's loneliness, while also having an affair with her father's subordinate.
In Depression-era Tokyo, the life of a single mother and her young son are disrupted by the return of her ex-husband, who fathered the child and walked out on her years earlier.
The sweet but naive denizens of a charming port town are hoodwinked by a couple of con men at the outset of World War II. But the hustlers’ plan backfires when they come down with severe cases of conscience. Keisuke Kinoshita’s directorial debut is a breezy, warmhearted, and often very funny...
During college military training exercises, the bond between two friends and athletic rivals is tested when one of them becomes involved with a woman who may be a prostitute.
A reformatory in the remote countryside houses 200 delinquents and problem children. The teachers and caretakers face much trouble. The school is often short on water, and one day, the well runs dry.
Uta’s mother died when she was six years old; her father she never met. She was forced to adopt a traveller’s life when her grandmother died, and now she is a dancer and part of a family of actors who travel from town to town, setting up street performances. A way of escape from this marginal...