Tag Archives: Yasuzô Masumura

Aozora Musume / The Blue Sky Maiden (1957) Yasuzô Masumura, Ayako Wakao, Keizô Kawasaki, Kenji Sugawara, Comedy, Drama

Aozora Musume aka The Blue Sky Maiden (1957)
Ayako Wakao plays good-natured Yuko, the illegitimate daughter of a well-off executive, raised in the country by relatives. Journeying to Tokyo she finds Father’s Western-style house to be a nest of vipers straight out of There’s Always Tomorrow, replete with Terrible Children, a housekeeper who sees all, and a dog named Cal with his own doghouse. But Yuko meets it all with aplomb; she’s interested in one thing only, finding her real, cast off mother.
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Daichi no komoriuta / Lullaby of the Earth (1976) Yasuzô Masumura, Mieko Harada, Natsuko Kahara, Meiko Kaji, Drama

daichi-no-komoriuta-aka-lullaby-of-the-earth-1976
The story of an orphan girl, brought up in naive, rustic innocence by an elderly relative, who is suddenly exposed to the brutality, greed and deceptiveness of the outside world, when her grandmother dies. Notwithstanding her healthy distrust of all strangers, which her upbringing instilled in her, it is not long before a cunning racketeer finds her weak point, that temptation which she cannot resist, that weakness, different as it may be, that each of us has, and brings her into his power.
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A Woman’s Testament / Jokyo (1960) Kon Ichikawa, Yasuzô Masumura, Ayako Wakao, Hiroshi Kawaguchi, Jirô Tamiya, Drama, Romance

A Woman's Testament (1960)
The first story concerns an attractive young woman who works in a Tokyo nightclub. Her plan for a solid financial future has a double whammy. She is investing in a company on the one hand, and on the other, taking action to snare the son of the company’s owner in matrimonial bliss. In the second story, a beautiful young woman is employed by an unscrupulous real estate agent to convince male clients to invest in worthless property. A scrub in the tub usually does the trick. The last story is about a widowed geisha who has no real financial worries and when she falls in love with a forger, she opts to wait for him after he is sent to prison, rather than follow societal or family dictates.
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Red Angel / Akai tenshi (1966) Yasuzô Masumura, Ayako Wakao, Shinsuke Ashida, Yûsuke Kawazu, Drama, Romance, War

Red Angel (1966)
In 1939, Sakura Nishi is a young army nurse who is sent to the field hospitals in China during the Sino-Japanese war. She has to assist the surgeon Dr. Okabe with an incredible number of amputations. In the crowded wards, she gives sympathy to some of the soldiers, including sexually servicing one who has lost both arms and has no hope of returning home. She falls in love with Dr. Okabe, and follows him to the front, even though he is impotent from his morphine addiction.
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Irezumi (1966) Yasuzô Masumura, Ayako Wakao, Akio Hasegawa, Gaku Yamamoto, Drama

Irezumi (1966)
In this elegant proto-feminist shocker from Yasuzo Masumuro, a woman forced into prostitution wreaks her spidery revenge. A mysterious tattoo artist puts his masterpiece, a human-faced spider, on a kidnapped woman’s back. She and her lover are then forced into a conspiracy-born nightmare, where they face the danger of becoming the very evil they seek to escape. With each new bloody incident, the spider’s face seems to redden with ever-growing hunger…
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