A Fugitive from the Past

Kiga kaikyô

Japan

1965

183 Min

Black and White

Japanese

Currently 4.3/5 Stars.
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CAST Rentarô Mikuni, Sachiko Hidari, Kôji Mitsui, Yoshi Katô, Susumu Fujita

A Fugitive from the Past is a modernist detective story in which the past pays an unwelcome visit as surely as it does in any film noir. In the pulse-pounding opening, set during a typhoon in 1947, a pawnbroker’s family is murdered, robbed, and their house burned down. A decade later, the person responsible, now a successful businessman living under an assumed name, has a surprise call from a prostitute who encountered him on that fateful day and became obsessed with him, even retaining his nail clipping as a memento. In its use of the investigative crime genre to inspect a society, the film looks forward to many European films of the subsequent decade, but few can match Fugitive’s technical virtuosity. The film’s rough, grainy textures exaggerate its elemental bleakness (especially the blustery ocean) and its brooding sense of survival at any cost, and of the impossibility of salvation in postwar Japan. —James Quandt

Director

Tomu Uchida

Born in 1898, Uchida joined a theater troupe in his youth, perfecting a sense of stagecraft and theatrical aesthetics that would become the backbone of his films. He turned to directing in the late 1920s; comedies and police actioners dominated his early production, but Uchida also developed a fledgling realist aesthetic rare in the industry at the time. In 1945, he fled Tokyo and joined the leftist Manchuria Film Association, spending ten years there. His return to Japan heralded a new outburst of creativity, as he applied his talents to everything from social critiques to theater adaptations, samurai movies to gritty noir. His late-fifties output in particular could serve as a sampling of nearly every genre and pleasure that Japanese cinema can offer, and also as a snapshot of the country’s postwar aesthetics, concerns, and imaginings. “Uchida crystallized the social, political and artistic passions of an epoch crucial to modern Japan,” critic Max Tessier wrote, “and did so with a… read more