嵐の中の男 / Arashi no naka no otoko / A Man in the Storm (1957)

Release date: February 5, 1957
Director: Senkichi Taniguchi
Studio: Toho
Cast: Toshirō Mifune, Kyoko Kagawa, Akio Kobori, Akemi Negishi, Jun Tazaki, Midori Isomura, Akihiko Hirata, Yoshio Kosugi, Ikio Sawamura, Makoto Satō, Yoshifumi Tajima
Availability: No DVD or streaming release. Occasional theater screenings and broadcasts on SkyPerfect and possibly other television networks as recently as last year.

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Consider this a sequel to my post about Rainy Night Duel - another entry in the "Toshirō Mifune Does Judo" Cinematic Universe, if you will. The two films are unrelated but highly similar and were both directed by Senkichi Taniguchi with Kihachi Okamoto as AD, so I will skip the production background, for the most part. Several years ago I was searching for this movie and became very excited when I thought I found it, but I had in fact found the Nikkatsu film Man Who Brings a Storm (Arashi wo yobu otoko)... and I watched it anyway, it was really good.

Much of my information and stills come from this person's blog post. They seem to have mistaken someone else for Yasuhiko Saijō in one photo. Saijō was acting in 1957 (just barely) but I don't believe he was in this film.

And here's something very interesting: a (closed) auction listing for an album of behind-the-scenes photos from the time of the film's production. I'm not sure what the story behind this is. I suppose it must have belonged to someone who worked on the film.

This film isn't that obscure - it's still being seen in Japan, with theater screenings in 2023 and television broadcasts in 2024. However, at least one reviewer has mentioned that the print being shown at Cinema Vera in 2023 was degraded, which is very concerning. At least there is a digitized version.

As for further crew: prolific screenwriter Kenrō Matsuura (who also went by Takeo) co-wrote the script with Taniguchi and Tomoyuki Tanaka produced the film. Urato Watanabe, a classical composer who didn't work too much in the film industry but did a lot of school songs, handled the score. The cinematographer was Kazuo Yamada who I note here because he was apparently the person who hired Toshirō Mifune on at Toho - not as an actor, initially, but as a strapping young lad to carry photography equipment. This would then lead to Mifune entering Toho's New Face program.

I can't see how Mifune's role here is much different from his role in Rainy Night Duel. However, the film is set during the Russo-Japanese war, so it has some political turmoil going on in the background. Akihiko Hirata doesn't play a rival judoka like he did in Rainy Night Duel but is instead the leader of a group called Sekishinsha. This group did actually exist in the Meiji era; they were Christian colonists aiming to settle in the north of Japan in the 1880s. Hirata also doesn't have long hair in this one like in the previous film, but he does have a mustache. (Jun Tazaki gets to wear the bad wig this time, and according to reviewers he was not good at judo.)

That print really is looking yucky.

As early as 1959, the film had been dubbed into English and was being promoted for international release by Toho (a subbed version was produced at some point as well). The film was also included in Toho's 1962 catalogue of international releases. Despite these, I can't verify any screenings that happened stateside prior to its 1969 release.

The film would also be released in Mexico in 1962 and Argentina in 1963. To me this seems like a bit of an odd choice for an export, considering the political backdrop of the film. I would think Rainy Night Duel would be less complicated to translate. The American release was handled by Toho International and doesn't seem to have been edited for export, since the running time is the same as the original.

I did some Google scouring and I came across one of those things that I feel like I might be the only person to have looked at in many years. A 700-page, Spanish-language volume - fully scanned, and god bless the people who did it - on every film exhibited in Mexico from 1960 to 1969.

So we know that it played on February 22nd, and we know where. Here is the Polanco Theater and... maybe the Coliseo, I can't figure out if the theater in the picture is the specific Coliseo referred to in the book.

Information on the 1969 U.S.American run of the film is hard to find. I had a hunch it probably played at Toho La Brea, given that none of Toho's other U.S. theaters were operational at that point, and it turns out that it did. I'm not paying through the nose for a newspapers.com subscription to see the full issue, but, I mean, I don't really need to. It's right there.

The Toho La Brea was opened in 1926 as Chotiner's La Brea and then renamed to Fox La Brea; no photos seem to exist from the specific time period during which it was operated by Toho. It is currently a church, but as it was a theater, in some way, it was always a church.

I had quite a difficult time finding information about the Argentinian run of the film, and was about to give up, but after some more scouring, I found out that it played at the Cine Hindu in Buenos Aires, which has been demolished and is now department stores. The film was still playing on September 25th, but I don't believe that was the opening date. While the Mexican market titled the film either "El Hombre de la Tormenta" or "El Judoka", I believe Argentina used "El Judoka/Yudoka" exclusively.

violence, suspense and action - oh boy!

credit to @buenosairesperdida on insta

So that's that. I can't go back in time, but I have the internet, which is, like, the same thing. 

I don't know if this is interesting to anybody else, but it is to me. I don't know how to explain why it feels important to remember that there was an era where the only way you could see a movie was to physically go to a theater. All of the theaters I mention in this post are beautiful buildings, and none of them now exist in the form they did when people were sitting down to watch A Man in the Storm. I was not able to do the same deep dive into international releases for Rainy Night Duel since it doesn't appear to have been exported, although according to Stuart Galbraith it did receive an English subtitled version.