夏目漱石の三四郎 / Natsume Soseki no Sanshirō / Sanshirō (Stray Sheep) (1955)

Release date: August 31, 1955
Director: Nobuo Nakagawa
Studio: Toho
Cast: Shinji Yamada, Kaoru Yachigusa, Chishū Ryū, Yoshio Tsuchiya, Tatsuyoshi Ehara, Kaneko Iwasaki, Toki Shiozawa, Ikio Sawamura, Nobuo Kaneko, Akihiko Hirata et al.
Availability: None.

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Little bit of a self-indulgent post because I really like Nobuo Nakagawa and until recently I was unaware that Hirata had ever been involved in anything he'd directed. (This is one of two - the second is a few episodes of the mediocre 1974 Kurama Tengu TV series.)

Here are two minutes and twenty seconds of this film courtesy of your friend and mine packy1954.

I won't go into detail about the novel this film is based on, as it is fairly well-known and fully translated into English. Its Wikipedia page is sufficient for a plot summary and details on who translated it and when. What you won't see, however, is any mention of the character who Hirata plays - from what I can gather, this character, Sugimoto, was exclusive to the film and was not present in the original novel. Sugimoto is the protagonist's love interest's fiancé through arranged marriage¹ and only shows up at the end of the film.

The overall impact of this film among Sanshirō adaptations seems pretty negligible. Even in Nakagawa's oeuvre it is not well-known. There is no home media release of this, so the only way to see it is to be lucky enough to catch a screening. Fortunately, there have been a few - I enjoy tracking down screenings and broadcasts when I write posts about very obscure films such as this one, so I have a list of all the confirmed screenings I can find²:

1. June 2012, at Cinema Vera, Shibuya
2. September 2008, at Jinbōchō Theater, Chiyoda, Tokyo
3. Again at Jinbōchō in March 2017
4. Again at Jinbōchō for several weeks from October to November 2023
5. "Namikiza" at an unknown time (I'm not sure if this is referring to Dotonbori Museum Namikiza or something else, my source only says "I saw it at Namikiza")
6. March or April 2006, at Laputa Asagaya, as part of a Nakagawa retrospective
7. At least one other Laputa showing at an unknown time
8. Cine Nouveau, Osaka, in 2019, in memory of Kaoru Yachigusa
9. Broadcast on SkyPerfect TV in 2007
10. Broadcast on Nikkatsu's Channel NECO in 2006 (?)

Oh boy. A whole ten screenings in the past 20 years.

The film was featured in the early October special issue of Kinema Junpo and the late August 1955 issue. I would love to get my hands on these but they do not seem to currently be up for sale anywhere. It seems like the scenario is held in the Institute for Research in Humanities main library at Kyoto University. On the topic of universities, it would appear that stills from the film were also included in a 2008 exhibition series on literary adaptations at the National Film Center in the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo.

I guess my point in making this post is to show that this movie has surviving prints that are in good enough condition to be screened as recently as November of last year, and may even have been digitized, as it was aired on TV, so it could be released on DVD! But it isn't.

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^1 Hmm.

^{2  The source I have for three of these screenings is the same blogger, who writes that they've seen it a total of four times, so, like, shoutout to this person for never turning down any possible opportunity to watch Sanshirō.}