Other Titles: The Thousand-ryō Lion (literal English title)

Production Company	Toei Kyoto
Scenarist	Kessoku Shinji
Source	Yamate Kiichirō (“Edo Guntoki”: serialized story)
Planning	Sakamaki Tatsuo
Production Manager	Tokuda Yoneo
Cinematographer	Itō Takeo
Art Direction	Suzuki Takatoshi
Music	Yamada Eiichi
Sound Recording	Sasaki Toshirō
Editing	Miyamoto Shintarō
Performers	Ichikawa Utaemon (Tsurutarō / Aoi Tarō); Chihara Shinobu (Tsubame, a tightrope walker);  Ōkawa Keiko (Yuki-hime [“snow princess”]); Shindō Eitarō (Ginbei); Kataoka Eijirō (Tokugawa Ienari, the shōgun); Yamagata Isao (Kai-no-kami, an official); Mishima Masao (Kazuma); Kazami Akiko (Fujishiro); Denjirō Ōkōchi (Echizen’nokami); Nishikawa Tatsuo (Senta); Watanabe Atsushi (Kansuke)1
Status	Extant
Photography	Black-and-white2
English Subtitles	No
Original Release Date	February 12, 1958
Length	91 minutes
Festival/Retrospective Screenings	None on record

Plot Summary

Google translation of Japanese plot summary at https://eiga.com/movie/37549, lightly edited:

In Edo under the rule of shōgun Tokugawa Ienari, a mysterious thief wearing a hollyhock-crested kimono and calling himself Aoi Tarō, an illegitimate son of the shōgun, appears. He is in league with powerful vassals of the shōgunate and steals the treasure of merchants who are indulging in personal gain. Minamimachi magistrate Torii Kai no Kami suspects Matsudaira Tsurutarō, a 3,000-koku vassal of the shōgunate of being Aoi Tarō. This is because Tsurutarō was one of the illegitimate sons of the shōgun and looks exactly like Aoi Tarō.

Tsurutarō by chance meets Senta, a boy pickpocket, and the acrobat Tsubame from Asakusa, and sets out to find Aoi Tarō on his own. Iida Ginbei, a bill-setter from Kuramae, is about to assault Yukihime [“The Snow Princess”], the daughter of Shinano no Kami, who was lending him money, but Tsurutarō appears and saves her.

At that moment, Aoi Tarō also appears and agrees to steal Yukihime from Tsurutarō in exchange for 100,000 ryō. On the appointed day, Aoi Tarō fails to capture Yukihime because Tsurutarō prevents him from doing so, but he manages to get the 100,000 ryō anyway.

Kai no Kami is allied with Ginbei to enrich himself. Aoi Tarō announces that he will attack Ginbei again. Kai no Kami captures Tsurutarō, disguised as Aoi Tarō, and his mother Matsuno. Matsuno had originally been the wife of the samurai Saemonnosuke Shinjo, and after the birth of their only child, Miyotarō, she had become the mistress of the previous shōgun. Saemonnosuke committed seppuku in resentment against the government, and Miyotarō went missing. Matsuno went to work at the inn after giving birth to the shōgun’s child, Tsurutarō. When Miyotarō grew up, he became Aoi Tarō, a demon of revenge.

After hearing the details from Matsuno, Tsurutarō decides to accept execution for his half-brother’s sake. Aoi Tarō then appears in front of Torii and Ginbei, who are escorting Tsurutarō. He had only intended to deliver Princess Yuki to Ginbei, but when he hears Tsurutarō and his mother calling out to him, his human heart is revived. He immediately kills Ginbei, handing Princess Yuki over to Tsurutarō, and disappears with his mother. He leaves Japan, all his obsession for revenge now gone, and sets sail for the South Seas.

Note: I saw this film without English subtitles and thus understood little of the dialogue. I apologize to the viewer if I happened to miss any significant details of the film’s plot or themes due to this drawback.

Notes on the Cast

Ichikawa Utaemon , affectionately nicknamed “Uta-san,” is often referred to as one of the “Six Great Period Drama Stars” (jidai geki roku dai sutā) of Japanese Cinema, along with Bandō Tsumasaburō, Ōkōchi Denjirō, Arashi Kanjūrō, Hasegawa Kazuo and his Toei colleague (and fellow executive) Kataoka Chiezō. At the age of five, he began the study of traditional Japanese dance, and in the following year he made his stage debut. After having achieved success in leading roles on the Kabuki stage, but lacking the family background necessary for further advancement, in 1925 he switched his focus to film by joining Makino Shōzō’s Makino Productions. He was an immediate success, which led to his founding of his own film production company, Uta Pro, in 1927 at the age of 20. In 1930, he portrayed for the first time his signature role: the “bored” samurai Saotome Suisuke, invented by novelist Sasaki Mitsuzo, in the first of a popular series of thirty hatamoto taikutsu otoko (“bored man Hatamoto”) comical adventure films. In the postwar era, Ichikawa became a major star for Toei from its founding, and served, along with his rival Kataoka Chiezō, on the company’s board of directors. In 1964, after having made over 300 films, he retired from cinema to return to his first love, the stage. (He also did some television films, but never enjoyed working in that medium.) His son was the star actor Kitaōji Kin’ya. He died in 1999 at the age of 92.

Commentary and Analysis

We’ve watched so many period films created by Uchida in which the director managed to turn what might have been a generic action movie into something unique and very special – such as A Bloody Spear at Mount Fuji, or Hero of the Red-Light District, or even the gargantuan Musashi series of the 1960s – that it is startling to see a period action film by this director that’s nothing more than… a standard Toei period action film. In fact, The Thief Is Shōgun’s Kin is essentially a rather well-made children’s movie for a rainy weekend afternoon, nothing more nor less. And though I have no idea how Japanese kids might have responded to it when it originally came out in 1957, I can say from my own experience that if an American audience of children from that same era had been exposed to this movie at a matinee, they would have been very annoyed indeed that the movie fails to end in the big action sequence it appears to promise.

“Disappointing” is thus the appropriate word for this not-unjustly neglected Uchida work, not only from the point-of-view of the “art cinema” consumer – those worshippers at the altars of Kurosawa, Ozu and Mizoguchi, like myself – but from that of the simple moviegoer searching merely for a few hours’ entertainment. In fact, we would be very depressed to be writing this review if we didn’t have two better Uchida films waiting in the wings to be reviewed.

Ichikawa Utaemon – who was Toei’s other unlikely, and similarly aging, action star, besides Kataoka Chiezō – is certainly charming enough, though in my view, based on my admittedly limited exposure to his acting – I have seen two or three other films in which he was featured, but frankly don’t recall his performances in them – he lacks either Kataoka’s gravitas or his fascinating moral ambiguity. The splitting of the protagonist into a good guy and a not-so-good guy through the use of a dual role for the star is a timeworn gimmick that could have worked, but little is done to make this character split memorable. Not only did I have difficulty distinguishing between the doubled characters, but I really didn’t much care which one was which.

Furthermore, the cast of familiar, and normally very good, character actors comes up short in this case, as they seem strangely uninspired. Even very reliable players like Shindō Eitarō and Yamagata Isao, who had done, and would do, excellent work as villains in many other films, including Uchida’s – Shindō was especially fine in The Horse Boy – seem to be phoning in their performances here.

The female characters are particularly disappointing. The snow princess, played by Ōkawa Keiko, is quite remarkably childlike in voice and behavior. (The best source I have claims that the actress was 21 years old when this film came out, though she seems years younger.) Thus, when the greedy Ginbei, played by Shindō, tries to seduce this most innocent of young women, it feels almost like pedophilia. Chihara Shinobu has some interesting moments as a tightrope walker (though it’s clearly a double who’s actually walking the rope), but her character doesn’t stand out, as did the shamisen-playing entertainer Osumi that the same actress played in Bloody Spear. Even the mother that Tsurutarō and Aoi Tarō share is poorly individuated: she’s just a generic, long-suffering “haha mono” mother without any gumption or grit.

In my view, only two scenes in the film seem to spark the director’s creative excitement: the opening credits sequence and the remarkable fireworks scene. At the beginning of those credits, as a kind of “cold open,” the character of the roguish Aoi Tarō is seen with his back to the audience, addressing some Japanese seated in front of him. Then he suddenly turns round, pistols in hand, and fires towards the camera (that is, at the audience), and the credits start. (See the Featured Image above.)

In previous Uchida films, (e.g., Twilight Saloon), the credits were isolated at the beginning of the film against a neutral background, before any of the characters or the plot were introduced, as was the rule in 1940s Hollywood. This film, though, is the first Uchida work I’ve seen that emulates the credits of more recent Hollywood films, in which characters and action are introduced with the credits, or rather under them. In addition, there’s an effect that I’ve never seen in any other Uchida film, in which the credits appear as if tilted up from the ground – an optical printer effect – with images of Aoi Tarō and his gang, masked and dressed like ninjas marching through the town, as a backdrop.

The whole effect of the sequence is to create such anticipation in the viewer that the subsequent film itself ironically becomes quite a letdown. This movie, by the way, includes a very memorable image accompanying the credit line “Directed by Uchida Tomu,” in which a solitary musician is shown in silhouette, beating a drum with increasing rapidity – perhaps a sly recognition of Uchida’s increasing “celebrity director” status.

The big fireworks scene represents the climax of the film, the most dramatic confrontation between Aoi Tarō and the officials he has challenged, including Ienari, the 11^th Tokugawa shōgun – his alleged half-brother.³ During a celebration in Ienari’s honor, a stage is set for a major performance. Female dancers emerge, while overhead a large firework in the shape of the Tokugawa family crest, consisting of three “hollyhock” leaves – actually the heart-shaped leaves of the plant Asarum caulescens (futaba aoi), known as “wild ginger” in the West – inscribed in a circle, is ignited.

The dancers are soon sent scattering with the arrival of Aoi Tarō and his masked and armed gang, who crash the shōgun’s party. They demand the gold Aoi Tarō feels he is owed, and then take it and depart. Thus he spoils not only his enemies’ plans for the gold, but their evening of theater as well.

After he and his men leave, the firework depicting the Tokugawa mon literally fizzles out. The disintegrating heraldic crest serves as a powerful symbol of the transitory nature of the Tokugawa clan’s power, and perhaps, according to Uchida, of all political power.

My IMDb rating

7

Though I was tempted to give The Thief Is Shōgun’s Kin a mediocre “6” – which would thus have tied it with Uchida’s lowest-rated prewar film – Crown of Life – I could not quite bring myself to do this, as certain very interesting sequences, such as the fireworks scene described above, prove that this is a film that, after all, could only have been made by Uchida Tomu.

Links

Eiga.com summary of the film, including cast and crew and synopsis

A blogger’s very strange review of this film, in which the author somehow detects “perversity” in the “prisoner exchange,” at the film’s climax, in which the young, beautiful snow princess is traded for the elderly mother of both heroes. The author also accuses Uchida, based on other, unspecified films of his he has seen, of being some kind of fraud (“bluffing” is the word he uses), though he won’t explain why he thinks so, or even which Uchida films he’s talking about. Talk about perversity!

1. This peculiar-looking character actor, typecast in slapstick roles or as eccentric characters in period films, is significant in Japanese film history for two reasons: a) he played the lead role in the first successful “full talkie” in Japanese history, Gosho Heinosuke’s classic comedy The Neighbor’s Wife and Mine (1931) and b) he portrayed the cynical coffin maker in Kurosawa Akira’s Yojimbo (1961), as well as many other memorable roles for that director. But he was also present at the very beginning of Uchida Tomu’s career, having starred as a young man in the latter’s very first credited film as director, Oh, Officer Konishi (Ah, Konishi junsa, 1922, lost), co-directed with Kinugasa Teinosuke. Watanabe and Uchida also collaborated as actors on Aru shinbunkisha no shuki (Memorandum of a Newspaper Journalist), directed by Kinugasa alone and released in that same year, 1922.
2. Except for A Fugitive from the Past, this is Uchida’s only widescreen film in black-and-white
3. Ienari is played by Kataoka Eijirō, who has here been “promoted,” as it were, from his role in the earlier Uchida work, The Kuroda Affair, in which the actor was cast as a mere rebellious daimyō who defied an earlier Tokugawa shōgun.