Wakayama was Shintaro Katsu’s brother and was arguably a better actor, but he lacked the one thing Katsu had - likeability. The scene in which Oiwa realizes she has been disfigured is a 3½ minute single take.Īnother strength is the casting of Tomisaburo Wakayama as Tamiya. Kato alternates between tight closeups and Mizoguchi-like long takes, often with the camera at Ozu’s floor level. I can’t remember any movie from previous years opening this way. The movie opens without an establishing shot, with Tamiya’s head in telephoto focus, followed by a two minute scene on two persons shot in a single widescreen closeup. Kato’s camerawork and editing is of the highest quality, so you never feel like you are watching a stage play. And unlike the other two versions I’ve discussed, the movie continues beyond Iemon/Tamiya’s murder of his new wife while fighting off Oiwa’s ghost to deal with the revenge exacted by Oiwa’s sister Osode.īut it is far from a filming of the kabuki play. Also as in the original, Oiwa is not murdered by her husband but kills herself, though in a gruesomely implausible way found only in horror movies. In this version, Tai Kato, as director and screenwriter, stays closer to the kabuki original, giving the audience something resembling a Jacobean revenge tragedy.Īs in the original play, the poison provided to the faithful wife Oiwa is provided not by her husband Iemon (here called Tamiya) but by the merchant’s daughter who has fallen in love with him, to make her ugly so the girl will seem more attractive. Nakagawa in 1959 had used color and widescreen to make a traditional horror story, with most of the attention given to the shocks of the ghost’s appearances. Kinoshita in 1949 had used the material to make a character tragedy. That would have been a grave mistake, because this version is very good indeed. I have already posted about two of these versions, so I almost skipped over this one when I came upon it on YouTube. Tokkaido Yotsuya kaidan has been one of the most consistently popular of all kabuki plays, and as such it has been adapted to the screen so often that no one seems to have an accurate count.
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