Went to see an old Japanese film called The Million Ryo Pot (1935), part of a Japanese film festival.
Nice film that stands up well. It's on YouTube if anyone wants to check it out, a bit in the style of some Kurosawa's early films. I only learn after the story about the director (below, it's wild), could have been seen today as another Kurosawa:
"Yamanaka’s films were considered fairly subversive for the extremely imperialistic and politically conservative Japanese. So, in 1937 when Yamanaka’s film Humanity and Paper Balloons opened in theaters, Yamanaka was drafted into the army and sent into Manchukuo, which was a Japanese ruled outpost in modern day Manchuria. While there he died of dysentery. He was twenty eight years old.
Meanwhile, the Japanese government burned many of his more provocative films and then years later Douglas MacArthur, after basically installing himself as the president of Japan, destroyed any films which he felt went against a democratic world-view. Thus, many of Sadao Yamanaka’s films were converted to ash. Today only three of his films survive in full: The Million Ryo Pot (1935), The Priest of Darkness (1936), and Humanity and Paper Balloons (1937)."
