Yuriko Hamada

The first of three consecutive films (the others are Miss Oyu and The Lady of Musashino) Mizoguchi made about women of the privileged classes.

Sudo and Mori are two university students who make money by picking up rich girls in dance clubs and conning them into giving them cash. Mori is the brains of the operation, and Sudo is the suave dancer who picks up the girls. Over the course of the film, Sudo becomes involved with three different girls and is drawn into the gangster milieu, which he seems unable to resist even though he is responsible for his mother, grandmother, and sister, Masako. (Catherine Russell)

The facts surrounding the vendetta have been warped through the telling, and the villain Jinza was actually a noble man and the close friend of Mataemon Araki. And Mataemon only killed two men in the incident, not 36. The narrator tells us the actual events were far more interesting than the glamorized legend: "If one compares cutting down 36 straw figures to killing two full-fledged men, it will be obvious to see which is more difficult." And with that, we are launched into the true story. (lardbiscuit.com)

Omnibus of love stories from 1947 directed by famous directors, featuring big stars. (The Movie Database)

Two youths - the serious son of a Buddhist abbot and his rakish pal - quarrel over a restaurant keeper's daughter. When one of the youths die the other boy and the girl find they cannot forget him. (The Movie Database)

During his summer holiday, Kawasaki Ryuichi (Ryuzaki Ichiro), a handsome engineer in his late twenties, visits his teacher and mentor, Professor Inagaki (Sugai Ichiro), at his seaside home. There he meets the professor's lovely young wife, Sachiko (Hamada Yuriko), and is unsettled by the striking resemblance she bears to his wife, who died three years earlier.

In a village subsisting on it herring fishery, a one-eyed criminal named Jakoman terrorizes the inhabitants. One of them, the son of the head of one of the fish companies by the name of Tetsu, decides to overthrow Jakoman and his cohorts. (imdb)

Director Hiroshi Inagaki’s early version of the life and death of famed swordsman Sasaki Kojiro.

The Blue Pearl depicts the melodramatic, but keenly-observed interplay between a young man from Tokyo and two ama (pearl divers; literally "women of the sea") in a superstitious coastal town. Though raised within the same tradition-bound crucible, the two women - Noe and Riu - are portrayed as diametric opposites; the former meek but affectionate, the latter strong-willed but jaded by a tryst with metropolitan life.