Legend Of A Duel To The Death

Keisuke Kinoshita's Legend Of A Duel To The Death (1963) boasts a star-studded cast with this cautionary tale. The film opens with a color sequence showing a peaceful and glorious contemporary Hokkaido when a voice over tells the viewer that 20 years earlier an evil event took place that people do not like to talk about. The films switches to black and white when the story goes back to1945 and the last days of the war. The Sonobe family has evacuated from Tokyo to Hokkaido to avoid the bombing of the Kanto area and Hideyuki (Go Kato) has returned to convalesce from the war. He joins his mother (the legendary Kinuyo Tanaka), his sister Kieko (Shima Iwashita who would go on to marry and be a muse for New Wave director Masahiro Shinoda), as well as a younger brother and sister. Problems arise when Kieko turns down an unexpected marriage proposal from the town's mayor's son Goichi (Bunta Sugawara-who I associate with Kinji Fukasaku's Battles Without Honor or Humanity), because Hideyuki saw him commit atrocities in China. This rejection leads to the mysterious destruction of the family crop garden and a series of similar acts throughout the village. The family becomes  a scapegoat for the war and a target of mob justice. The Sonobe are befriended by a neighbor Shoichi (Yoshi Kato) and his fiery daughter (Mariko Kaga who would go on to be a New Wave director's darling-Pale Flower). It is something of a postwar analysis of how Japanese people were misled into a destructive war. Kinoshita returns to the idyllic color contemporary countryside at the end of the film. It reminds the viewer that these events may have be thought of as a myth. But these things did happen even if those who remember are too ashamed to recall them, perhaps much like the war.