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This is the second installment of the trilogy based on Japan’s greatest novel “The Great Bodhisattva Pass”, following the life and times of bloodthirsty samurai, Tsukue Ryunosuke. Blinded in an explosion and further injured from a fall, the master swordsman is taken in by Otoyo, a woman who falls in love with him. Under Otoyo’s dedicated care, Ryunosuke’s physical and emotional wounds seem to heal. However, deep inside, the demons that drive him to kill yearn to resurface. Meanwhile he is being pursued by Utsugi Hyoma, a young samurai seeking to avenge his brother’s death at Tsukue’s hands. Hyoma is being aided along the way by the clever thief Shichibei.
Master swordsman, Tsukue Ryunosuke is confronted by the families of his victims. Will justice be served for the lost innocent lives? The conclusion of the famed Jidaigeki series is an amazing film, with a completely different perspective on the story from the later versions. While the international audience is more familiar with the “Sword of Doom” and “Satan’s Sword” versions of Daibosatsu Toge (The Great Bodhisattva Pass), the “Souls in the Moonlight” trilogy casts an entirely different light on Ryunosuke and his motives. Can this brutal killer be brought to justice, or is living his life as a blind wanderer a more terrible fate? His sword skills have not diminished, nor has his desire to kill!
Three robbers escape with loot from a heist before one of them kills the others. Their corpses wash up near the aftermath of a maritime calamity, provoking a policeman's interest.
With his penultimate film, Uchida revisited one of his popular prewar titles, 1936’s Theatre of Life, an adaptation of Shiro Ozaki’s eponymous novel. Three-time Seijun Suzuki collaborator Goro Tanada wrote a gangsterized adaptation of Ozaki’s story for Uchida at a time when the yakuza had eclipsed the samurai genre as Toei's main cash crop. Protagonist Hishakaku murders a man in a quarrel over a barmaid and goes to jail. In his temporary absence, his girlfriend Otoyo, a former geisha, falls for Hishakaku’s brother, inciting a dangerous love triangle that, in typical yakuza fashion, ends tragically.
In this first episode, we are introduced to Takezo, what Musashi used to be before he became the man of legend. His beginning are not exactly auspicious. He sides with the Toyotomi at Sekigahara, and as a result finds himself on the losing side of the historic battle. He and his friend Matahachi manage to escape the slaughter although the latter is wounded in his leg. They stumble across the young Akemi who makes her living with her mother Oko by robbing corpses of their armor and anything else they can sell. Oko takes it into her head to seduce Matahachi, which she does first by skillfully sucking the gangrene from his blood, and then just by sucking.
The first part of a fascinating melodrama based on Victor Hugo's Les Misérables, the action of which is transferred to the era of the Meiji Revolution. The film has not survived.
A court fortune-teller loses his mind after a conspiracy leads to the death of his lover. Hope appears to be on the horizon after he becomes romantically involved with his dead lover's twin sister, but more complications arise thanks to a chance encounter with a clan of shape-shifters.
Two brothers run a factory canning crabs. The elder brother Kotaro is righteous and insists on honesty. The younger brother is fixated on money. They are polar opposites. When a boat sails out looking for crab and does not return one day the brothers begin to argue over how to run their facility. They had just received a large order from a foreign country and had obtained a loan from a lender that needed to be repaid.
A successful textile industrialist from the provinces, who is beloved by his employees for his kindness, cannot find a wife because of a disfiguring birthmark on his face. Even the courtesans in Yoshiwara refuse to entertain him, until an indentured peasant prostitute, Tamarazu, takes the unsavoury assignment and treats him with brash tenderness.
One of Uchida’s early sound films, Unending Advance is based on a curious story by Yasujiro Ozu, in which an examination of the quotidian problems of a middle-aged salaryman and his family segues into an idyllic dream of an implausible future. The surviving print, although incomplete, offers an essential glimpse into Uchida’s prewar period, when he was associated more with realist dramas than with the period films that dominated his work after the war.