
01 Mar 1963

High and Low
A Yokohama shoe executive faces a wrenching choice when kidnappers mistakenly seize his chauffeur’s son but demand the ransom anyway.

High-end cabaret hostess Masuko discovers her long-term lover is actually married. Determined to secure her future, she aggressively manipulates him into divorcing his wife, only for their new marriage to be destabilized by the arrival of her young niece.

Masuko

Asai

Eiko

Yukiko

Aoyagi

Yoshiko

Tatsuo

Ryuko

Goro

Michiyo

Muro

Komiya

Kojima

Midori

Yanagiko's mother
Sakie

Sakie's husband
Chizuruko


01 Mar 1963

A Yokohama shoe executive faces a wrenching choice when kidnappers mistakenly seize his chauffeur’s son but demand the ransom anyway.

01 Nov 1961

After a successful robbery the culprits, from very different backgrounds, at once turn on each other.

19 Sep 1960

In this loose adaptation of "Hamlet," illegitimate son Kôichi Nishi climbs to a high position within a Japanese corporation and marries the crippled daughter of company vice president Iwabuchi. At the reception, the wedding cake is a replica of their corporate headquarters, but an aspect of the design reminds the party of the hushed-up death of Nishi's father. It is then that Nishi unleashes his plan to avenge his father's death.

04 Feb 1967

A gang lord hires Kamimura, a hit man, to take out a rival boss who's gotten greedy.

18 Nov 1958

Set in post-war Japan, a group of five, four men and one woman, gathers in the basement of a butcher shop to dig up a cache of morphine buried during the war. A grimly humorous tale of twisted relationships as one by one each of the group is eliminated.

31 Mar 1963

A noir action whodunit with Kobayashi his usual jaunty self as the smart aleck private eye whose missing person search soon becomes a murder case. Nightclub-managing, drug-dealing gangster Uchida is the prime suspect in the case until he commits suicide. Kobayashi then discovers evidence that points to the doctor sibling of an innocent girl. The climax in a rural snowy locale is suspenseful and well-staged.

09 Jun 1959

A promising post-graduate literature student is transformed into a psychotic killer following the suicide of his father and a sleazy affair by his mother with a younger man.

15 Jan 1966

Before leaving prison, Oida uncomfortably enters into an agreement with his cell mate: in exchange for a half-share of 30,000,000 yen, he is to assassinate three strangers given to him on a list. However, upon meeting his first potential victim, Oida has second thoughts. Yet, even as he tries to back out, the body count starts climbing. Oida must now try to alert the people on his list of their impending danger, and find out why they are being targeted in the first place.

22 Oct 1957

A former boxer gets involved with a club hostess trying to escape the clutches of her gangster employer.

03 Sep 1960

A juvenile delinquent gets out of the pen and immediately embarks on a rampage of untethered anger, most of it directed at the girlfriend of the journalist who helped send him up.

05 Jul 1960

Yoshida's first feature follows the lives of young students against a background of jazz, emptiness and boredom. The plot is fairly simple: a "good-for-nothing" from a poor background falls in love with the young secretary of his rich friend's father. The woman senses good in him and tries to lead him on the right path.

08 Oct 1960

A youth drama set in a Japanese university which is home to a group of active, leftist students.

18 Apr 1964

A noir drama depicting the downfall of a veteran detective who hates evil and falls into its depths. Ace detective Sugai pursues Chiyo, the mistress of a man who was arrested for extortion, and takes advantage of her weakness. However, as his colleague Tokumochi and others regard him with suspicion, he is tormented by remorse.

03 May 1961

Kaze is a philandering TV producer. His wife and nine of his mistresses conspire to kill him. However each woman would rather keep him alive, as long as she was the only woman in his life.

24 May 1961

Two young crooks who scam betters in the race track are employed by a yakuza gang called the Shigemori Syndicate to steal a shipment of handguns from a rival gang. Somewhere in the process they find themselves on the run from their own gang and one of them becomes himself romantically entangled with the boss's girlfriend. An ambitious underboss of the gang offers them a way out if they murder the previous boss but things don't turn out as planned (for everyone).

23 Mar 1960

Koreyoshi Kurahara's ingeniously plotted, pocket-size noir concerns the intertwined fates of a desperate bank manager, blackmailed for book-cooking, and his resentful but timid underling, passed over for a promotion. The marvelously moody Intimidation is an elegantly stripped-down and carefully paced crime drama.

28 Jul 1959

No overview found

13 Jun 1970

When a married man begins an affair with a woman from his past, he comes to suspect her young son intends to murder him.

04 Apr 1970

A top police-guard, charged with protecting a visiting politician and ruthless dictator, contends with an assassin set to kill the man.

24 May 2008

Betrayed and disgraced, big-city reporter Kazuya Mizuno is banished to a desk at Kaname's boring little town newspaper. But Kaname isn't as boring as it seems on the surface. Not with characters around like Shimeko, a girl genius with a childlike lack of propriety, and her ace fisherman/folk-singer dad. Or the overbearing and unpleasant local Shinto priest, a former Christian cultist. Or Endo, Kazuya's new colleague, a bitter drunk after his son's suicide. Or Kin, a former terrorist, now a hermit on his boat engaging in secret "research." Or perhaps most importantly Teruko, the hypnotically beautiful bar owner, the focus of all manner of innuendo and intrigue. Something mysterious, even mystical, is going on Kaname, and hapless Kazuya is about to be thrown into the middle of it.