The four films playing this month in the Gene Siskel Film Center’s Umetsugu Inoue series represent only a fraction of the Japanese director’s work. Inoue, who died in 2010 at age 86, directed more than 100 theatrical features and 300 television productions. Yet the series does spotlight his prolificness—three of the four selections were made in 1957—as well as his versatility. The films include a backstage melodrama (The Stormy Man), a boxing picture (The Winner), a nautical adventure (The Eagle and the Hawk), and a family musical (The Green Music Box). These selections reveal Inoue to have been a consummate studio director: not only could he move easily from one genre to another, he also elicited charismatic performances from all his stars. For these reasons Inoue was consistently in demand in the 1950s and 60s; in fact he was one of the few directors to have worked for all six of the major Japanese movie studios.
Ishihara is even more charismatic in The Winner (which screens on Friday 6/15 and Sunday 6/17), though he isn’t the main character in that film. The hero is a boxing promoter named Eikichi, who takes on Ishihara’s character after seeing him win an amateur fight. As in The Stormy Man, the plot follows Ishihara as he buckles down and improves himself, but here his development is paralleled by that of a young ballerina in whom Eikichi also takes an interest. Inoue took inspiration for this subplot from Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Red Shoes, and like that film, The Winner features a lavish ballet sequence that incorporates dazzling special effects to render a theatrical performance cinematic. Again Inoue provides his hero with two romantic interests—in this case, the ballerina and a patient fiancee who’s waited three years for Eikichi to set a date for a wedding. The director complicates the scenario by making the boxer fall in lover with the ballerina as well, creating a polyphonic romantic melodrama. Whereas Inoue punctuated The Stormy Man with musical numbers, here he breaks up the narrative with extended fight scenes and dance routines.
