A documentary in its insistence upon showing only what actually existed, it very carefully chronicled the seasons and used only the slightest of stories: a farmer loses his inherited money and is forced into poverty; driven to despair, he yet manages to find new faith. The film scrupulously avoided defining the new faith but neither sentimentalized nor patronized the farmers. —Donald Richie
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
It's not often that I cry during a film, but this one did it for me, even in it's incomplete 90-minute obtrusive cut.
How did you get to see it I've been searching up and down for some Tomu Uchida ohh The Mad Fox...
On Earth (1939), Tomu Uchida’s must-see quasi-documentary “official classic.”
