The Bedridden Script Doctor: Itami Mansaku’s Scenario Reviews

The director and scriptwriter Itami Mansaku was a major proponent of the revisionist movement in prewar Japanese period film. However, with only a handful of his screen works surviving, Itami’s reputation arises mostly from his contemporaries’ accounts and his own critical writings. Caught between the restrictions imposed by a debilitating illness and government censorship, during the war years Itami strived to stay in touch with the Japanese film world by continuing to work on scripts as well as write criticism from his sickbed. This article discusses Itami’s creative and critical efforts, which were to have a considerable impact on subsequent Japanese filmmakers. Particular attention is paid to examining Itami’s scenario reviews, serialised in the journal Japanese Cinema between 1941 and 1942, where he took an actively interventionist stance quite different from what is conventionally allowed for film criticism

Gazing at Kaoru: star image in film adaptations of The Dancing Girl of Izu

In star vehicles, such as the serial adaptations of Kawabata Yasunari’s The Dancing Girl of Izu, it is often the image associated with the lead actors/actresses that takes the position of organizing the traits of main character(s). This article examines how and to what extent the star images of the actresses Tanaka Kinuyo and Wanibuchi Haruko have informed the ‘drift’ of alterations to the source in their respective turns of stepping into the role of the eponymous dancing girl, Kaoru. Observing how elements of the star’s real-life persona sometimes crawl into the film will help us to reconsider how the negotiation arising from the problematic fit between a star’s image and narrative character can expand rather than contain the creative possibilities of adapting literary works to the screen