Movies: Yasuzō Masumura

The lives of five sex workers employed at a Japanese brothel while the nation is debating the passage of an anti-prostitution law....

In eighth century China, the Emperor is grieving over the death of his wife. The Yang family wants to provide the Emperor with a consort so that they may consolidate their influence over the court. General An Lushan finds a distant relative working i...

A blind sculptor kidnaps an artists' model and imprisons her in his warehouse studio – a shadowland of perverse monuments to the female form. Here a deranged passion play of sensual and sexual obsession is acted out in world where sight is replaced b...

A 16-year-old girl works in a factory to pay her late father’s debt. When she makes up her mind to become a hostess, a boy approaches her with kind and gentle manners...(Also occasionally known in English as “Play”)...

The four principals in a love affair collide when jealousy, blackmail and suicide enter the picture....

Against the backdrop of the Edo treasury devaluing currency and driving many into poverty, Hanzo Itami enforces the law without regard to status. He shows inadequate respect to the treasurer, who wants him dead....

Two car manufacturers spy on each other to try to find out details and prices of a new sports car each is about to launch....

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....

The entangled relations between the son of a seductive tea-ceremony teacher and the women in his father's life. Based on the novel by Kawabata Yasunari....

A middle-aged factory engineer trains, marries, and ultimately loses a teenage bride after she enslaves him to her whims....

Otsuya, the daughter of a rich merchant, elopes with her lover Shinsuke, an employee of her father's. During their flight, Otsuya's beauty attracts the gaze of Seikichi, a mysterious master tattooist who sees her pristine white skin as the perfect ca...

This Japanese melodrama chronicles the exploits of a geisha's beautiful daughter. The daughter is the geisha's pride and she spares nothing to insure that she has a bright future. But the hard-working young woman's dreams of becoming a dressmaker are...

Nishi is an advertising executive for a caramel company that is planning to launch a new product, in fierce competition with two other companies....

Tied to a mountain between her brutalizing spouse and her secret lover, disaster strikes; the authorities accuse her of murder and prompt a confession....

Ichikawa's 1956 adaptation of Nihonbashi was the first to take the work of Kyoka Izumi— until then regarded as a writer of common tragic melodramas—and re-evaluate it as a tanbi-ha work of decadence, aestheticism, and intrigue. Ichikawa's film prese...

A former soldier, reduced to working at a restaurant post-war, becomes a contract killer for the yakuza gangs he's in contact with....

Kyoko is the third daughter of the Nonomiya family, a very ordinary family. Momoko, the eldest daughter, is married to Ichiro, the president of Mihara Shoji, and Riko, the second daughter, is married to Jiro, the managing director, and they plot to m...

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 o...

Namiko is married, but has an infatuation with Ishizuka who runs a nightclub. The businessman is also planning on wrecking the company of Namiko's husband. As personal lives and professional careers intertwine and cross one another including a love t...

Ken Ogata plays Shiro Miyagi, a sprinter with Olympic aspirations whose dreams were shattered by WWII. A broken man, he leads the dissolute life of a gigolo until a chance meeting with a fiery young athlete named Hiroko (Michiyo Yasuda). Realizing th...