The Sun Legend of the End of the Tokugawa Era (1957)

xich_lo_vn · Aug 1, 2012

The Sun Legend of the End of the Tokugawa Era (1957)
Type: Comedy
Country: Japan
Language: Japanese
Director: Yuzo Kawashima
Cast: Frankie Sakai, Sachiko Hidari, Yoko Minamida
Subtitles: none

"Considered by many the best Japanese film comedy, Sun Legend of the Shogunate was voted the 5th best Japanese film of all time in a 1999 poll of 140 critics by Kinema junpô, Japan’s leading film magazine. The story is taken from rakugo (a traditional form of “sit-down” comedic narration), and focuses on the craftily versatile character of Saheiji (played by the great comedian, Frankie Sakai), a man-about-town who gets stuck at a high-class brothel when he can’t pay the bill. The ever-resourceful Saheiji makes the best of his situation by performing various tasks amidst the tumult of the end of the shogunate—but always by making sure to get a “commission” for his troubles. The women of the establishment start falling for this skilled player, but as with many Kawashima heroes, Saheiji is more intent on escape—from everything, it seems. Many Nikkatsu performers, including Ishihara Yûjirô, postwar Japan’s most popular male star, appear in the film.

Kawashima Yûzô is probably Japan’s most celebrated comedy director, even though he was adept in a variety of genres. A notoriously precocious intellectual film buff at Meiji University, Kawashima entered Shôchiku’s Ôfuna studio and worked as an assistant director to such masters as Ozu Yasujirô, Kinoshita Keisuke, and Shimazu Yasujirô, before getting an early opportunity to direct during the war, when many personnel were absent. His postwar work at Shôchiku varied from slapstick comedy to tearful melodramas, and his oeuvre as a whole shows some ups and downs, but he really came to prominence after he switched to Nikkatsu in 1955 and then Tokyo Eiga in 1958. His master works range from the melodrama Suzaki Paradise (1956) to the romantic comedy Room for Rent (Kashima ari, 1959), from the experimental black comedy Graceful Brute (Shitoyakana kedamono, 1962) to Temptation on Glamour Island (Gurama-tô no yûwaku, 1959), one of the most bizarre parodies of wartime and postwar Japan. As is probably evident from the repeated appearance of toilets in his stylish films, Kawashima’s world-view was dandyish but despairingly cynical, summed up in part by one of his favorite expressions, “Life is embarrassing.”

Kawashima walked with a limp and was troubled by a weak heart, dying in 1963 at the young age of 45. His life and films have been commemorated by at least two of his students, the director Imamura Shôhei, who was assistant director and co-writer for Sun Legend of the Shogunate, and the prize-winning novelist Fujimoto Giichi, who co-authored Room for Rent. Both have written books on the man who inspired them." (Aaron Gerow, Film Studies and East Asian Languages and Literatures, Yale University)

Screen:

Search

Search

The Sun Legend of the End of the Tokugawa Era (1957)

xich_lo_vn

Well-Known Member