10 great Japanese films of the 1950s

In 1951, Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon took the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, almost a year to the day after its Japanese release. Seven months later, the film was honoured at the Academy Awards, picking up the Oscar for best foreign language film. Japan had been making films since the late 1890s, but it took the arrival of the 1950s golden age for Japanese cinema to make its mark on the international stage.

Two years later, the second Kurosawa film to reach western shores premiered at the Berlin Film Festival. While Rashomon had ventured a thousand years into Japan’s feudal past, Ikiru (1952) gave audiences a glimpse into the nation’s post-war present. One of the great filmmaker’s most beloved works, Ikiru – which is newly released on BFI Blu-ray – marries Charles Dickens to Frank Capra in a tale of never-too-late altruism. Takashi Shimura, an icon of Japanese golden-age cinema, is the feeble civil servant whose cancer diagnosis engenders a Scrooge-like awakening. Determined to build a children’s playground in the little time he has left, Shimura’s salaryman sets out to wage a war against petty bureaucracy and his own insignificance.

It would take until 1960 for Ikiru to reach British cinemas, when Shimura received a BAFTA nomination for best actor. But there was clearly an appetite for Japanese films, as more and more of the nation’s golden-age wonders made their way to Europe and beyond. Of the eight Japanese masterworks which appeared in the top 100 of the 2022 decennial Sight and Sound poll, five were made in the 1950s – a sixth, Yasujiro Ozu’s Late Spring (1949), was just four months shy of being a 1950 picture too. 

France may have had the 1930s or the 1960s, America the 1970s, but there’s a strong case to be made for Japan’s 1950s being the single greatest decade for a national cinema. Chosen from a staggering abundance of riches, and avoiding such often celebrated classics as Tokyo Story (1953), Ugetsu Monogatari (1953) and Seven Samurai (1954), here are 10 of the finest Japanese films from that golden decade.

Director: Akira Kurosawa

In the early 1990s, Akira Kurosawa was back at Shochiku studios after a 40-year absence. He was there to shoot Rhapsody in August (1991) with Richard Gere, but something else was playing on his mind. Back in 1951, a single screening of his 265-minute cut of The Idiot had resulted in the studio taking the movie away from him. Shochiku were unyielding – the film, to their eyes, was just too long. Pruned to 166 minutes, the studio cut of The Idiot was a commercial disaster. All those years later, Kurosawa had hoped to find a copy of his original version in the studio archives, but it was lost to history.

Even in its extant mutilated form, The Idiot is one of Kurosawa’s finest works. Transposing the Dostoyevsky novel to Japan’s snow-blasted northernmost island of Hokkaido, it’s a relatively straightforward adaptation charting “the destruction,” per the opening title cards, “of a pure soul by a faithless world”. Masayuki Mori plays the Myshkin proxy Kameda, the very embodiment of unalloyed empathy and a mirror to the self-centred recriminations which swirl around him. It’s an austere psychodrama despite its epic proportions, with an against-type performance by Setsuko Hara as the kept woman whose viperish exterior is but a brittle front for a wounded soul.

Director: Mikio Naruse

The second of six films Mikio Naruse would adapt from the novels of Fumiko Hayashi (Repast, Floating Clouds), Lightning consolidated one of the major director-actor partnerships in 20th-century cinema. Calling back to their first collaboration – the remarkable Hideko, the Bus Conductor (1941) – superstar Hideko Takamine plays tour guide Kiyoko, the youngest of four siblings in a fatherless family. As ever in Naruse’s cinema, economic anxieties are front and centre, as resentments over a purported inheritance and an unsolicited arranged marriage serve to drive Kiyoko out of the dysfunctional family home.

Naruse elucidates the cramped urban environment of post-war Tokyo, as well as the minutiae of each character’s financial struggles. The tension between city girl Kiyoko and her crude, squabbling clan comes to a head with her move to the suburbs, where the film climaxes with one of Naruse’s most affecting endings. Weather events often serve a symbolic function for Naruse, and here, when her mother comes to visit, a bolt of lightning crystallises the rupture between Kiyoko and her family. Reconciliation ensues, but so does uncertainty, as Takamine’s gaze seems to query the equation of middle-class modernity with emotional fulfilment.

Director: Ishiro Honda

On 27 October 1954, a 50-metre metaphor emerged from Tokyo Bay, intent on destruction. Spawned by the H-bomb tests that had been secretly conducted by the US military at Bikini Atoll, Godzilla was the very manifestation of unchecked American might. No Japanese film – of this or any other decade – can boast an equivalent cultural impact to the king of the monsters. Ishiro Honda’s marauding masterpiece would spawn dozens of sequels and reboots, becoming the longest-running franchise in cinema history.

In the 1950s, Japanese filmmakers had begun to assess the devastation wrought on Hiroshima and Nagasaki with films like Hideo Sekigawa’s Hiroshima (1953) and Kurosawa’s I Live in Fear (1955). Through the character of Serizawa (Hirata Akihiko), a doctor who has inadvertently developed a powerful new weapon, Honda’s film would explicitly address a nation’s atomic anxieties, while delivering all the noir-inflected pleasures of the film’s final-act kaiju carnage. Godzilla turns 70 this year, and his allegorical rampage shows little sign of abating. But none of the pretenders to his throne match Honda’s ur-text for its pointed, steadfast humanism.

Director: Kenji Mizoguchi

In 1954 alone, Kenji Mizoguchi directed three pictures, two of which are among the finest in the history of cinema. Sansho Dayu is perhaps the better known film, but Chikamatsu Monogatari – a ravishing tale of star-crossed lovers – is every bit its equal. Adapted from the 18th-century puppet plays of Chikamatsu Monzaemon, this period tragedy is set at a time when the punishment for adultery was crucifixion – at least for those without the privilege of wealth and status. A misunderstanding sees a well-heeled scroll-maker’s wife falsely charged with having an affair with one of the couple’s apprentices. Fearing their inevitable capital punishment, the accused pair flee together, falling in love as the authorities take pursuit.

The film gains an inexorable forward momentum once its soon-to-be-lovers go on the lam, but its psychological precision is established immediately, as Mizoguchi delineates the social hierarchies and courtly façades of feudal Kyoto through an exactitude of space and gesture. A film about perceived duty and conflicting standards, Chikamatsu Monogatari is rich in poetic ironies, with Mizoguchi’s cursive long takes and sweeping crane shots lending it a palpable romantic force.

Director: Tomu Uchida

With a title like Bloody Spear at Mount Fuji, you’d be forgiven for expecting an exploitation movie, or at least a straightforward chanbara, heavy on the bloodshed. Tomu Uchida’s masterpiece is certainly a samurai film, but it’s one that holds violence at bay… until it doesn’t. John Ford’s western Stagecoach (1939) is the model, as a ragtag bunch of travellers make their way towards Edo, the historic name for Tokyo. Among them: a father intending to sell his daughter into prostitution, a thief in disguise, a travelling singer and her young daughter. Leading the pack is the samurai Konjuro, a drunkard accompanied by two bodyguards.

The tone is light and comic, the structure charmingly episodic. Uchida forges, if not quite a community, then a rich panorama of the lower-class social environment, as the witless but essentially noble Konjuro begins to question his position at the top of the hierarchical food chain. But then, out of nowhere, a petty argument leads to an eruption of bloodshed. Bodies fall in the mud of a courtyard sodden with spilled booze. What was built on the road is wiped out in seconds at its destination.

Director: Kon Ichikawa

With the nation’s loss in the Second World War still very much a recent memory, Japanese cinema of the 1950s took to asking questions of the reality of defeat. The versatile and prolific Kon Ichikawa – who made 34 films in the 1950s alone – tackled this question head-on with The Burmese Harp, a film often considered a humanist masterwork. When his platoon surrenders to the British in Burma, Private Mizushima is sent to persuade another battalion to do the same. While the former went quietly, this hemmed-in battalion see no honour in giving up without a fight. Mizushima escapes, donning the robes of a Buddhist monk, and begins an epic journey towards spiritual enlightenment across a war-beaten landscape.

Ichikawa positions Mizushima between these two competing impulses: the acceptance and rejection of defeat. His is a journey of reconciliation – informed by Buddhist philosophy, haunted by the fallen soldiers strewn across his path, and contrasted by Ichikawa with the pictorial beauty of the landscape. If The Burmese Harp’s spiritual quest ends with martyrdom and transcendence, Ichikawa would go on to complicate its message later in the decade with the nihilistic one-two punch of his Yukio Mishima adaptation Conflagration (1958) and the unrelenting wartime ordeal of Fires on the Plain (1959).

Director: Kozaburo Yoshimura

The incessant clacking that echoed through the Jolly Cinema in Bologna this summer was the sound of a roomful of jaws collectively hitting the floor as the new 4K restoration of Night River was unveiled by Il Cinema Ritrovato. Not just an ecstatic vision of colour, but a film about colour itself, Yoshimura Kozaburo’s masterpiece tells the story of a kimono designer’s affair with a married man. Astonishingly, this was (the colour blind) Yoshimura’s first non-black-and-white production, achieving Vertigo (1958) levels of psychological potency through the spectrum of its mise-en-scène and the anxious atonality of Sei Ikeno’s string score.

Most of Yoshimura’s best films were written by fellow filmmaker Kaneto Shindo, but Night River saw him partner with Naruse-regular Sumie Tanaka, one of the key female screenwriters of the era. As with many Japanese films of the 1950s, Night River examines the post-war tension between tradition and modernity, this time in Kyoto, where Yoshimura set much of his work. A centrepiece sequence sees the couple drinking beers in the shadows, as a confession is illuminated by the half-light of an impossibly deep orange glow. It’s a scene of heart-stopping chromatic beauty. Here’s hoping there’s not long to wait for the extraordinary new restoration to start doing the rounds.

Director: Yasujiro Ozu

When we think of late-period Ozu, we tend to think of colour: the red kettle in Equinox Flower (1958), the blue summer skies of Floating Weeds (1959), the muted seasonal tones of Late Autumn (1960). Tokyo Twilight was the master filmmaker’s final black-and-white picture, a fitting aesthetic choice for the bleakness of its subject matter. It’s one of Ozu’s most overlooked pictures, a film that challenges our notions of what is ‘Ozu-esque’.

Unlike the seasonal cusps – Late Spring (1949), Early Summer (1951), The End of Summer (1961) – so often favoured, here the trees are bare. It’s winter, but there’s no comforting blanket of snow as two sisters face up to their respective domestic agonies. The twilight of its title may suggest a transitory state, but there’s no renewal here. Twilight is followed only by darkness. Ozu, cinema’s finest chronicler of the family unit, turns his hand to its post-war breakdown, conjuring a harrowing psychological landscape of absent mothers, domestic violence, alcoholism and abortion. Ultimately, it’s a film about loneliness, and an exceptional Ozu picture in every sense of the word.

Director: Heinosuke Gosho

Dispersed Clouds (1951), Where Chimneys Are Seen (1953), An Inn at Osaka (1954), Yellow Crow (1957) – we’re spoiled for choice when it comes to picking a film from Heinosuke Gosho, a golden-age master deserving of far greater attention in the West. Renowned for his shoshimin-eiga, or common-people dramas, Gosho took to the island of Hokkaido for this rapturous tale of a doomed love triangle. If the soaring score suggests a swooning melodrama, Gosho clearly has something more nettlesome in mind for his protagonist Reiko (Yoshiko Kuga), a tomboy-ish young woman with an arthritic arm and questionable morals.

She sets her sights on doe-eyed architect Katsuragi (The Idiot’s Masayuki Mori), befriending his wife who, unbeknown to her husband, is conducting an affair of her own. Thus, the motherless Reiko takes on the twin roles of surrogate daughter and homewrecker, seducing both husband and wife as a balm for her own wracked self-image. The alienating effects of the landscape point ahead to Antonioni, while the ending – in which Reiko assumes an out-of-character domesticity – could be read as either progress or a total sublimation of self. It’s just one of this film’s myriad psychological ambiguities.

Director: Tadashi Imai

Adapted, like Chikamatsu Monogatari, from a Chikamatsu story – this time by Kaneto Shindo and Rashomon screenwriter Shinobu Hashimoto – Night Drum is occupied by the nuts and bolts of the samurai life. Hikokuro (Rentaro Mikuni) is one such swordsman, back at the family home from his rostered stint in Edo, where he learns, through a cavalcade of uncomfortable glances and whispered rumours, that his wife has had an affair.

Withering in its indictment of patriarchal feudal codes, Night Drum sees Imai elucidate not just the details of the daimyo life – such as a one year on, one year off rota – but the domestic implications for those awaiting their return. Economic considerations permeate every level of the film’s oppressive social order, from the expectations laid on Hikokuro to maintain a workforce befitting his status, to his wife’s need to earn money on the side given the paucity of her allowance. As fragmentary information is delivered through a layered series of procedural flashbacks, Imai builds relentlessly to a climax of desolating confession and honour-mandated murder.