Director Kon Ichikawa’s 1963 masterpiece from Japan is a truly sublime piece of cinema; eccentric, and wildly expressive, it offers up a co-mingling of styles and dramatic registers deriving from the traditions of kabuki, cartoons, and silent cinema. But perhaps that’s beside the point. What gives An Actor’s Revenge its drive and force is that it is one ripping yarn.
The plot is a web of deceit. One evening during a Kabuki performance, Yukinojo (legendary Japanese star Kazuo Hasegawa), a female impersonator, spies a family of nobles in the box seat. By-passing any attempts at realism immediately, Ichikawa takes us right inside the mind of Yukinojo via bubbles that pop up on the screen, and a narration that tells us that this family in some way sealed the fate of the actor. Apparently it was the pitiless nobles who drove Yukinojo’s parents to suicide. With the help of an old thief, Yamitaro (also Hasegawa), Yukinojo plots a complex revenge involving romance and political intrigue.
According to some accounts, Ichikawa was given this studio assignment to direct because he was considered a bad risk at the box office since he’d recently made two flops. Not only was An Actor’s Revenge a remake of a Japanese melodrama called The Revenge of Yukinojo, but it was to have Hasegawa, aged 52, who had been only 27 when he played in the original, reprise his dual role as actor/thief.
What’s really great about the film is that it is arguably pure cinema; forget the tired categories of realism or modernism or whatever. It is very much its own unique object, but one that could only be expressed through the movie screen.
