Hero of the Red Light District

Yoto monogatari: Hana no Yoshiwara hyaku-nin giri

Japan

1960

109 Min

Color

2.35:1

Japanese

Currently 4.3/5 Stars.
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CAST Isao Kimura, Minoru Chiaki, Shinobu Chihara, Kogiku Hanayagi, Kensaku Hara, Chiezo Kataoka, Eijirô Kataoka, Masao Mishima, Yaeko Mizutani, Akiko Santo, Sadako Sawamura, Toyo Takahashi

A glorious melodrama written by Mizoguchi collaborator Yoshikata Yoda. A successful, kindly textile industrialist cannot find a wife because of a disfiguring birthmark on his face. Even the courtesans in Yoshiwara refuse to entertain him, until an indentured peasant prostitute, Tamarazu, takes the unsavory assignment and treats him with brash tenderness. The grateful businessman falls madly in love with her, and sets out to purchase her freedom. When faced with her betrayal and his own financial ruin, he takes revenge, turning the lavish ceremony to mark Tamarazu’s ascension to courtesan into a slashing spectacle spattered with cherry blossoms and blood. The script’s taut determinism, with its interlocked rise (hers) and fall (his), and teeming social detail; the dynamism of the color cinematography; and the remarkably ambiguous characters of the besotted businessman and bluff, grasping whore—reminiscent of one of Imamura’s enterprising insect women—make Yoshiwara look like some kind of lost classic. —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