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Mikio Naruse's 4 films in 1960s

Posted By: gubaidulina
Mikio Naruse's 4 films in 1960s

Mikio Naruse's 4 films in 1960s
VHSRip, TVRip | AVI | DivX, XviD | Ac3, Mp3 | 4.91 GB
Lang: Japanese | Subtitles: English, French | Genre: Classics | Director: Mikio Naruse


Mikio Naruse (成瀬巳喜男 , August 20, 1905 – July 2, 1969) was a Japanese filmmaker, screenwriter, and producer who directed some 89 films spanning the period 1930 (towards the end of the silent period in Japan) to 1967.

Naruse is known for imbuing his films with a bleak and pessimistic outlook. He made primarily shomin-geki (working-class drama) films with female protagonists, portrayed by actresses such as Hideko Takamine, Kinuyo Tanaka, and Setsuko Hara. Because of his focus on family drama and the intersection of traditional and modern Japanese culture, his films are frequently compared with the works of Yasujirō Ozu. His reputation is just behind Akira Kurosawa, Kenji Mizoguchi, and Ozu in Japan and internationally; his work remains less well known outside Japan than theirs.

Akira Kurosawa called Naruse's style of melodrama, "like a great river with a calm surface and a raging current in its depths".

Mikio Naruse was born in Tokyo in 1905. For a number of years he worked at the Shochiku film company under Shiro Kido as a property manager and later as an assistant director. He was not permitted to direct a film at Shochiku until 1930, when he made his debut film, Mr. and Mrs. Swordplay (Chanbara fūfū).
Naruse's earliest extant work is Flunky, Work Hard (Koshiben gambare, also known as Little Man Do Your Best) from 1931, where he combined melodrama with slapstick, trying to meet the demands set by Shochiku's Kamata studio, who wanted a mix of laughter and tears. In 1933, he quit Shochiku, and began working for Photo-Chemical Laboratories (later known as Toho).

His first major film was Wife! Be Like a Rose! (1935) (Tsuma yo Bara no Yo ni). It won the Kinema Junpo, and was the first Japanese film to receive theatrical release in the United States (where it was not well received). The film concerns a young woman whose father deserted his family many years before for a geisha. As so often in Naruse's films, the portrait of the "other woman" is nuanced and sympathetic: It turns out, when the daughter visits her father in a remote mountain village, that the second wife is far more suitable for him than the first. The daughter brings her father back with her in order to smooth the way for her own marriage, but the reunion with the first wife – a melancholy poetess – is disastrous: They have nothing in common, and the father returns to wife number two.

In the war years, Naruse went through a slow breakup with his wife Sachiko Chiba (who had starred in Wife! Be Like a Rose!). Naruse himself claimed to have entered a period of severe depression as a result of this. In the postwar period he collaborated with others more often, less frequently writing his own scripts. Notable successes included Mother (1952) (Okasan), a realistic look at family life in the postwar period, which received theatrical distribution in France, and 1955's Floating Clouds (Ukigumo), a doomed love story based (like many of Naruse's films) on a novel by Fumiko Hayashi.
When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (1960) (Onna ga kaidan o agaru) tells the story of an aging bar hostess trying to adapt to modern times. The film is notable for having almost no close-up shots or exterior scenes. Scattered Clouds (1967) (Miidaregumo) (a.k.a. Two in the Shadow) was his last film, and is regarded as one of his greatest works. A tale of impossible love between a widow and the driver who accidentally killed her husband, it was made two years before his death.

Naruse is known as particularly exemplifying the Japanese concept of mono no aware, the awareness of the transience of things, and a gentle sadness at their passing.

Naruse's films contain simple screenplays, with minimal dialogue, unobtrusive camera work, and low-key production design. Earlier films employ a more experimental, expressionist style, but he is best known for the style of his later work: deliberately slow and leisurely, designed to magnify the everyday drama of ordinary Japanese people’s trials and tribulations, and leaving maximum scope for his actors to portray psychological nuances in every glance, gesture, and movement.

Naruse filmed economically, using money- and time-saving techniques that other directors shunned, such as shooting each actor delivering his or her lines of dialogue separately, and then splicing them together into chronological order in post-production (this reduced the amount of film wasted with each retake, and allowed a dialogue scene to be filmed with a single camera). Perhaps unsurprisingly, money is itself a major theme in these films, possibly reflecting Naruse's own childhood experience of poverty: Naruse is an especially mordant observer of the financial struggles within the family (as in Ginza Cosmetics, 1951, where the female protagonist ends up supporting all her relatives by working in a bar, or A Wife's Heart, 1956, where a couple is swindled out of a bank loan by the in-laws).

Mikio Naruse's 4 films in 1960s

1. Yoru no nagare aka Evening Stream (1960)
TVRip | AVI | 672 x 288 | XviD @ 1097 Kbps | Mp3 @ 128 Kbps | 1:46:16 | 938 MB
Lang: Japanese | Subtitles: English, French | Genre: Classics | Director: Mikio Naruse & Yuzo Kawashima

IMDB


The story centers on an uncomfortable love triangle - mother and daughter in love with the same brooding, incomplete male - that is sprung on us nearly at the halfway point. (Isuzu Yamada gives a surprisingly gentle and vulnerable performance as the mother, in a role that could have been played for melodramatic threat.) The climactic mother-daughter confrontation is played down – or rather, its energy is transferred to the parallel plot thread with the unstable ex-husband, which culminates in what may be the most frightening scene in any Naruse film (and a hint of what Naruse might have been like as an action director). The love triangle collapses instead of detonates, as Naruse undermines the appeal of the male love object (who begins the film as a romantic figure) and embarks on a long anticlimax of uncomfortable but inevitable reconciliation and compromise. And then there’s a final dark plot twist in the last minute or two: an unusual move for Naruse, but then Yamada’s character is much less willing than most Naruse heroines to let everyday life absorb her. (from arananfms.blogspot.com)

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Mikio Naruse's 4 films in 1960s

Mikio Naruse's 4 films in 1960s

Mikio Naruse's 4 films in 1960s

Mikio Naruse's 4 films in 1960s

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Mikio Naruse's 4 films in 1960s

2. Tsuma to shite onna to shite aka As a Wife, As a Woman (1961)
TVRip | AVI | 632 x 300 | DivX @ 1738 Kbps | Mp3 @ 128 Kbps | 1:46:09 | 1.38 GB
Lang: Japanese | Subtitles: French | Genre: Classics | Director: Mikio Naruse

IMDB


Keijiro and Ayako Kono (Masayuki Mori and Chikage Awashima) seem like a picture-book upper middle-class family. He is a respected professor and the couple has two amiable children (a high school-aged girl and middle school-aged boy). But the Kono's domestic siutuation is more complicated than it seems on the surface. The children are actually the illegitimate children of Kono's long-time mistress, Miho (Hideko Takamine). To compensate for giving up the children, the Konos subsidize a bar which Miho operates. Ayako, interested in eliminating her husband's continuing interest in Miho, pays the bar girls to "spy" on Miho, in the hope of showing Miho is not "faithful" to her husband. Miho becomes tired of the situation, and proposes that she break off relations with Kono but be given outright owner ship of the bar. After Ayako flatly rejects this (not wanting to bear the expense), Miho's mother (played by the delightfully redoubtable Choko Iida) suggests that, for leverage, Miho demand the children back. This proposal infuriates Ayako, and she decides to sell the bar out from under Miho. Miho retaliates by telling her son (who thinks she is only a somewhat engaging but disreputable friend of her parents) about his true parentage. He comes home distraught and locks himself into his room; when his big sister persuades him to let her in, he tells her the truth in turn. The two children angrily reject all three "parents". Afterwards, Miho and her mother are seen packing up their belongings, in preparation for a move to more humble quarters and a new job as operators of a street vendor stall. Miho's mother nonetheless sings cheerfully as she packs. To Miho's complaint that singing is out of place under the circumstances, her mother replies that she likes to sing – and things can't be helped by not singing. As the final scene, we see the two children in different school uniforms at a new school, it appears that they demanded to be sent away to boarding school – so as to avoid having to deal (at least for a while) with the problematic adults in their lives. The color cinemascope photography here ( by Jun Yasumoto, who shot Yamanaka's wonderful "Million Ryo Pot" in the 30s and films by Naruse, Inagaki, Toyoda and Ichikawa therafter) is superb. The initial frosty civility and subsequent savage hostility between Ayako and Miho is masterfully handled by Takamine and Awashima. And the mother-daughter interactions between Choko Iida and Takamine are quite delightful (including a number of impromptu "duets"). A Naruse masterpiece that clearly deserves to be better known. (from imdb user comment)

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Mikio Naruse's 4 films in 1960s

Mikio Naruse's 4 films in 1960s

Mikio Naruse's 4 films in 1960s

Mikio Naruse's 4 films in 1960s

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Mikio Naruse's 4 films in 1960s

3. Onna no rekishi aka A Woman's Life (1963)
TVRip | AVI | 672 x 288 | XviD @ 1198 Kbps | Mp3 @ 128 Kbps | 2:00:51 | 1.12 GB
Lang: Japanese | Subtitles: French | Genre: Classics | Director: Mikio Naruse

IMDB


Yet another Naruse family drama starring Hideko Takamine. Here Takamine is a war widow, living with her grown son (Tsutomo Yamikazi) and mother-in-law (Natsulo Kahara) – and supporting the family by running a beauty parlor. Hardworking Takamine is reasonably content – until her son announces he wants to marry a dancing girl from a cabaret (Yuriko Hoshi) – at which point, familial strife ensues. Along the way, the film dips into the past, as Takamine recalls her courtship, early days of marriage, the war years (etc.). By and large a very interesting, black and white Tohoscope format film. Other than being a bit more diffuse than the average Naruse film, the only real flaw is a score that occasionally includes cheesy synthesized-sounding music. (from arananfms.blogspot.com)

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Mikio Naruse's 4 films in 1960s

Mikio Naruse's 4 films in 1960s

Mikio Naruse's 4 films in 1960s

Mikio Naruse's 4 films in 1960s

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Mikio Naruse's 4 films in 1960s

4. Hikinige aka Hit and Run (1966)
VHSRip | AVI | 670 x 270 | XviD @ 2064 Kbps | Mp3 @ 160 Kbps | 1:34:31 | 1.47 GB
Lang: Japanese | Subtitles: English | Genre: Classics | Director: Mikio Naruse

IMDB


In Naruse's next to last film, he returned to cinemascope format, but stayed with black and white film. This is once again, in terms of plot, a bit of a shocker. Soon after we meet Kuniko (a young widow, played by Hideko Takamine) and her much-beloved young only son, the boy is run over by Kinuko (played by Yoko Tsukasa the rich spoiled wife of an automobile executive). Kinuko, it turns out, was distracted at the time of the accident because her companion in the car, a hunkish younger man who is her lover, had just told her of his plan to soon begin a far-away job. Kinuko tells her husband of the accident (but not the precipitating cause), and he orders the corporate chauffeur (Yutaka Sada, who was also the unfortunate chauffeur in "High and Low"). Luckily for him, he gets off with a small fine and a suspended sentence. (from arananfms.blogspot.com)

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Mikio Naruse's 4 films in 1960s

Mikio Naruse's 4 films in 1960s

Mikio Naruse's 4 films in 1960s

Mikio Naruse's 4 films in 1960s

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Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16