The brief but prodigious career of Japanese director Sadao Yamanaka resulted in a catalogue of work characterised by an elegant and unforced visual style, fluid editing, and a beautiful attention to naturalistic performances. Although he made 22 films over a six-year period (before dying of dysentery in a Japanese Imperial Army outpost in Manchuria at the age of 28), only three of them survive, collected here for the first time in the West. Tange Sazen: The Million Ry Pot is a gloriously comic adventure yarn as the titular one-eyed, one-armed swordsman becomes embroiled... in the hunt for a missing pot that points the way to hidden treasure. In Kchiyama Sshun, a subversively humanistic adaptation of a classic kabuki play, a small but invaluable knife stolen from a samurai leads to a chain of an increasingly complex and troublesome set of circumstances. His last film, Humanity and Paper Balloons, is an unsparing ensemble drama set among the lowest rungs of Japanese society in the 18th century. The Masters of Cinema Series is delighted to present these treasures of world cinema in a long-awaited two-disc DVD set, including rarely-seen fragments of two other lost Yamanaka films. Special Features: New digital transfer of all three films New English subtitle translations Rare fragments of other lost Yamanaka films A lengthy booklet, including Yamanaka's will, excerpts from his diaries, essays by Tony Rayns, Shinji Aoyama, Kimitoshi Sat, and more. [show more]
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Collection of three films directed by Sadao Yamanaka. In 'Tange Sazen: The Million Ryô Pot' (1935), oblivious to the true value of the family heirloom he has inherited, the leader of the Yagyu clan gives an old pot to his younger brother Genzaburo (Kunitaro Sawamura). Also ignorant of its worth, Genzaburo orders his wife sell it to a local junk dealer and the pot ends up in the hands of a young boy who is being cared for by the one-eyed and one-armed samurai Tange Sazen (Denjirô Ôkôchi). When Genzaburo finds out that the pot holds a map to a huge fortune, he sets off on a mission to reclaim it, but his laziness and gambling proves too powerful a distraction. In 'Kôchiyama Sôshun' (1936), when a priceless knife is stolen from a samurai, it sparks a chain of events leading to a lot of bloodshed and misunderstanding as the knife is tracked down by its rightful owner. In 'Humanity and Paper Balloons' (1937), local samurai Matajuro (Chôjûrô Kawarasaki) seeks the help of Mori, a leading political figure in the community to help him secure work but thanks to the difficult relationship Mori had with Matajuro's father it proves more problematic than initially expected.
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