Where Chimneys Are Seen – 1953, Heinosuke Gosho

by Allan Fish

(Japan 1953 108m) DVD2 (Japan only, no Eng subs)

Aka. Entotsu no mieru basho; Four Chimneys

The magic chimneys

p  Yoshishige Uchiyama  d  Heinosuke Gosho  w  Hideo Oguni  novel  Rinzo Shiina  ph  Mitsuo Miura  ed  Nobu Nahata  m  Yasushi Akutagawa

Ken Uehara (Ryukichi Ogata), Kinuyo Tanaka (Hiroko Ogata), Hideko Takamine (Senko Azuma), Hiroshi Akutagawa (Kenzo Kubo), Chieko Seki (Yukiko Ikeda), Haruo Tanaka (Chuji Tsukahara), Kumeko Urabe (Kayo Nojima), Eiko Mayoshi (Ranko), Ranko Hanai (Katsuko Ishibashi), Takeshi Sakamoto (Tokuji Kawamura),

It’s probably the film that Heinosuke Gosho is remembered for in the west, winner of a special prize at the Berlin Film Festival in 1953, and yet it’s a film that remains extremely hard to find in an English friendly print.  To many writers of the era, it was one of the most pivotal post-war Japanese films.  Yet while the works from this era of Ozu, Naruse, Mizoguchi, Kurosawa, even Kinoshita, can be tracked down quite easily, Gosho still remains in a holding cell with no sign of a parole.

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