
Kiga kaikyo (Straits of Hunger aka A Fugitive from the Past). 1964. Japan. Directed by Tomu Uchida. Screenplay by Naoyuki Suzuki. With Rentaro Mikuni, Sachiko Hidari, Junzaburo Ban, Ken Takakura. In Japanese; English subtitles. 182 min.
Considered Uchida’s masterpiece by many, this epic thriller spans a decade and covers the length of Japan from Hokkaido to Tokyo. Filming in gritty black and white (intentionally blown up from 16mm to 35mm to achieve a grainy newsreel effect), Uchida uses a story of crime and retribution as an allegory for the ambiguous ethos of postwar Japan. Rentaro Mikuni gives a charged performance as a criminal-turned-respectable-citizen. As film scholar Donald Richie observes, Straits of Hunger demonstrates that “the judicial system of postwar Japan is no improvement, that liberal thought has not been achieved, that people die for unjust causes.”