Rikie Sanjō

何をやっても面白くない。退屈な日々を過ごす洋酒メーカー勤務のサラリーマン江分利満は、酒の席で編集者と意気投合し、雑誌に小説を書くことになった。編集者は彼のくだ巻きの見事さに感心したのだった。満は自分の人生を振り返り、自分をモデルとした小説を書いて雑誌に発表。「江分利満氏の優雅な生活」と題された作品は評判を呼び、ついには直木賞を受賞。祝いの席上で、満はまたまたくだを巻いてしまう。

A woman and her daughter are in love with the same man, a chef at the restaurant that the mother manages. He is slightly crippled from frostbite in his years in Siberian labor camps and considers himself "already dead."

The story of a couple, a spoiled son and a down-to-earth girl, in Osaka in the early Showa era. The film won the prestigious Blue Ribbon awards for best director, best actor (Morishige) and best actress (Awashima), and the Mainichi Concours award for best actor and best screenplay (Yasumi Toshio). It ranked second (after Naruse Mikio’s Ukigumo) on the Kinema Junpō top ten films for the year.

A married couple looking for an apartment move in with the husband's co-worker, a widower. The husband becomes jealous of the widower and his wife.

Jidai-geki starring Kanjuro Arashi

Obscure Japanese movie by director Kyotaro Namiki

Thriller drama by Kon Ichikawa

A luckless geisha struggles to make a living for herself and her young son.

A bad day gets worse for young detective Murakami when a pickpocket steals his gun on a hot, crowded bus. Desperate to right the wrong, he goes undercover, scavenging Tokyo’s sweltering streets for the stray dog whose desperation has led him to a life of crime. With each step, cop and criminal’s lives become more intertwined and the investigation becomes an examination of Murakami’s own dark side.

Kôfuku eno shôtai - Invitation to happiness

A small community in wartime Japan learn how to make do with less.

Adaptation of a novel by Nobuko Yoshiya that was serialized in "Shufu no tomo" between 1939 and 1940.

Japanese war-era film

9th directorial work by Yamamoto Satsuo.

Wartime propaganda filmed by the Japanese in occupied China, Shirley Yamaguchi portrays an orphan rescued from the streets by a kindly Japanese merchant marine officer. Part spy thriller and part Shanghai travelogue, it was part of a popular series known as "Chinese Continental Friendship" made by the occupying Japanese in China.

Song of the White Orchid was a co-production of Toho and Mantetsu, the railway that served the colonial region of Manchuria, and the first film in the Kazuo Hasegawa/Shirley Yamaguchi (Ri Koran) “Continental Trilogy.” Handsome Hasegawa (representing Japan) runs up against an impertinent Yamaguchi (representing the continent); not surprisingly, in the course of the film the woman comes around and realizes the benevolent intentions of the Japanese. In Song of the White Orchid Yamaguchi leaves Hasegawa, who plays an expatriate working for the railway, because of a misunderstanding. She joins a communist guerilla group plotting to blow up the Manchurian railway. Learning of the subterfuge that led to the misunderstanding, she renews her faith in Hasegawa—and by extension Japan—and tries to undermine the plot.

Set against the backdrop of an imperial victory in the civil war leading up to the Meiji Restoration, Fallen Blossoms tells the story of the sorrows of women in a geisha house in Kyoto by recounting the relationships of its inhabitants.

Part 1 of a 2-part romance based on a story by noted author Kikuchi Kan. The central character here is Toyomi (played by Takako IRIE, star of Mizoguchi’s "Water Magician), a rich young woman in love with Shintaro (Minoru TAKADA), a rich young man. Unfortunately, Shintaro’s father is in the process of arranging a marriage for him with Yurie (Chieko TAKEHISA), the scion of an even wealthier family. In order to avoid this, the two young lovers flee to Tokyo to live together. When Shintaro comes back to proclaim his intent to marry Toyomi, his father browbeats him into attending the long-arranged marriage meeting with Yurie. While Shintaro is back home, Toyomi goes on a vacation trip with her closest chum, Michiko (Yumeko AIZOME). At a class reunion, Toyomi is to distressed (at not having heard from Shintaro for so long), she doesn’t go out on the town with her classmates. Michiko, however, runs into Shintaro and Yurie (also out on the town), and pulling him aside, demands an explanation.