The Cinematheque

“A director who had a big impact on Japanese and Hong Kong pop cinema … Inoue’s mix of music, action, and hot young talent became a template for a new genre, called Nikkatsu Action.”

Mark Schilling, Variety

Although the prolific Japanese filmmaker Inoue Umetsugu made movies in a number of genres, he may be best known as a specialist in musicals. He began making youth-oriented musicals in the 1950s at Nikkatsu, the influential Japanese genre-cinema studio that launched the career of cult favourite Suzuki Seijun. (Suzuki was the subject of a Cinematheque retrospective in 2016; Nikkatsu productions were themselves the subject of a Cinematheque exhibition in 2008). Inoue eventually caught the eye of the famed Shaw Brothers, who hired him to apply his magic touch to Hong Kong movies in the late ​’60s. This mini-retrospective, offering just a handful of the more than one hundred movies Inoue directed in his career, features four shot-in-colour gems: three newly-subtitled classics starring acting-and-singing heartthrob Ishihara Yujiro—“Japan’s Elvis and James Dean rolled into one” (Mark Schilling)—and a restored 35mm print of a film Inoue made using the rare Konicolor process.