A handful of films based on Itami’s scripts survive, but his only directed film to survive in its entirety is Capricious Young Man, a lampoon of samurai manners set in the 1660s, based on a classic tale by Naoya Shiga (1883-1971).
In this Chiezo plays a country samurai out of place in the city. He ends up in a run-down tenement amidst commoners, in a situation reminiscent of the oft-filmed Roningai, except the ronin of Roningai can fight when it comes down to it, and Kakita is a samurai strictly by class, not skill. As a swordsman he’s not skilled, and in his life he is pretty much a failure. Breaking all the rules for expected content of tales of heroic samurai, he might as easily have been a short order cook.
His one and only friend is his cat, and no one will play shogi with him, so he sets up the chess board and plays all by himself. Yet he is to the core a decent man. Eventually happiness does find him in the form of love, an almost revolutionary outcome for a samurai film of the day, when action resolutions were de rigour.
For such work, Itami is credited, together with Sadao Yamanaka who directed Humanity & Paper Balloons (1937), with bringing a deep sensitivity to a genre that tended toward all-action. —weirdwildrealm.com
Although he was originally interested in becoming a Western-style painter, Itami was encouraged by his close home-town friend and director of progressive films, Daisuke Ito, to start to write screenplays. When Chiezo Kataoka founded an independent film production company in 1928, Itami joined on as screenplay writer and assistant director, and wrote the screenplay to the first movie directed by Hiroshi Inagaki, Tenkataiheiki. He later debuted as a director with a movie for which he provided the scenario called Adauchiruten. Itami has left behind about 35 scenarios, 22 of which he directed himself. Each of these works is a masterpiece infused with his inimitable humor and wit and full of spirit. Especially remarkable among these is 1932’s Kokushi Muso, a masterful comedy replete with biting satire and nonsense, and the 1936 talkie, Kakita Akanishi, in which humor is alternated skillfully with suspense. In 1937, Itami co-directed the Japanese-German collaboration… read more
