Release date: July 9, 1957
Director: Ishirō Honda
Studio: Toho
Cast: Akira Takarada, Momoko Kōchi, Akemi Negishi, Ken Uehara, Mieko Takamine, Tatsuyoshi Ehara, Yoko Sugi, Yoshio Tsuchiya, Hisaya Itō, Akihiko Hirata, Shōichi "Solomon" Hirose et al
Availability: No internet streaming or physical media release. Infrequent screenings.
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Today we're going to look at Ishirō Honda's A Rainbow Stays in My Heart duology. Because I said so.
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| image not mine - wish I owned this, but I don't |
This is, depending on who you ask, either a two-part film or a film and its sequel, which are each under an hour long and were released to theaters on the same day. The cast is stacked, obviously: most of the Godzilla folks, King Ghidorah himself ("Solomon" Hirose), many other Toho regulars, and a Takamine - what more could one ask? (To actually be able to obtain this movie on home media, for one, but that's another story.)
The film's Wiki page states that it was based off of a popular NCB (Nippon Cultural Broadcasting) radio drama, and that the film/s were based on its original story by Takayuki Yamada and Seiichi Yashiro. Yamada would go on to work in jidaigeki television up until the 1990s, and Yashiro had an extensive background in writing for plays and dramas (and also had seven ribs removed, apparently). The story was adapted by Tokuhei Wakao, who I can't find much information about.
You can find a decent enough plot summary by searching this up on Kinenote. It's a melodrama: everybody is in love, various events keep them from being happy together, including many societal mores (this is Honda after all) such as one of the characters having been born from her mother's affair with another man. (Hirata plays a company president who is in love with the protagonist's sister.) The synopses that I've found specify that this is a melodrama centered around misunderstandings.
Some links to further materials:
- Here are some nice behind-the-scenes photos of Honda on set.
- Toho Kingdom has a healthy selection of screenshots from both films (part 1) (part 2). Prints of the film were obviously digitized at some point, otherwise those screenshots wouldn't have been able to be taken, but this movie has no online streaming or physical release, so I have no idea where those come from. It is possible that it was broadcast on digital TV at some point but I've found no record of it.
- Here is a blog post (in Japanese) from someone who appears to have gotten a hard copy from "a collector friend" (deeply unfair; wish I had a "collector friend"). They colorized their screenshots for some reason.
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