Cinema
A Diary of Chuji's Travels
忠次旅日記
Daisuke Ito · 1927
Synopsis
Kunisada Chūji, a gambler and gang leader on the run from the law, takes care of Kantarō, the son of a dead friend, then entrusts him to an honourable village headman. Learning that his own men are stealing in his name, he takes to the road again and hides under a false name in a sake brewery, where the brewer's daughter, Okume, falls in love with him. The University of California, Los Angeles archive shows him defying the rules of his time and fighting to save a geisha.
Context
The three parts were released in 1927 by Nikkatsu, with Ōkōchi Denjirō in the title role, and together ran for more than four hours. Kinema Junpō ranked the second first and the third fourth of the year. The whole was held to be lost until 1991, when a nitrate print came out of the storeroom of a private house in Hiroshima, according to the national film archives: part of the second part and the third. The missing intertitles were reconstructed from the reviews of the time and the records of the benshi narrators, and a digital restoration followed in 2010 or 2011.
Who it is for
A silent film of a little under two hours, reconstructed from two of its three parts, and shown with a live narrator. No release in France.
Prizes and reception
Voted the best Japanese film of all time in 1959 by the magazine Kinema Junpō, and regarded by the British Film Institute as the best of 1927.