A work in constant progress (and occasional regress).
Release Date:
January 13, 1960
Original Title:
黒線地帯
Alternate Titles:
Black Line Zone
The Dark Region
黑線地帶
Genres:
Crime
Production Companies:
Shintoho Company
Production Countries:
Japan
Ratings / Certifications:
N/A
Runtime: 80
Freelance reporter “Scoop” Machida is hot on the trail of a prostitution ring called the Black Line, when he is framed for the murder of a young woman. Forced to clear his own name, the handsome journalist sinks deeper into the Black Line’s rotten swamp of drugs, prostitution, and murder and finds unexpected help in Maya, a steamy female gambler familiar with the neon-lit streets, shadowy alleyways, and seedy nightclubs he must navigate. The closest film in the Line series to classic American film noir, Ishii’s Black Line is a pulpy assortment of crime film conventions including the starkly expressionistic black and white cinematography by Jûgyô Yoshida, a jazzy music score by Michiaki Watanabe, and a sleazy screenplay by Ishii and Ichirô Miyagawa.
Art Direction:
Keiji Miyazawa
Assistant Director:
Kichitarô Shibata
Director:
Teruo Ishii
Director of Photography:
Jugyo Yoshida
Editor:
Hideo Kashima
Executive Producer:
Mitsugi Okura
Lighting Technician:
Akira Yaguchi
Original Music Composer:
Chumei Watanabe
Screenplay:
Ichirō Miyagawa
Teruo Ishii
Sound Recordist:
Hisao Negishi
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Additional data for Film Titles come from The Open Movie Database (OMDb).
At least one plug-in comes from IMDb.
Data are -- hey, it's a plural -- subject to the limitations of their sources. (For example, TMDB search results currently max out at 20.) I am limiting myself to free data sources for now. (No, a "free trial" is not free.)
While much of the above data are retrieved directly from outside APIs and other such sources, data from American Film Institute (AFI) and British Film Institute (BFI) were manually entered the old fashioned way into a MySQL database. Re BFI I took the following liberties:
Regarding profile removals and data corrections:
Filtering is applied here to film projects flagged as "adult" by TheMovieDB. Pending "popular demand" I am contemplating a login and profile system with preferences (such as whether to allow adult images to appear) and permissions (such as data entry).
Whereas the overall purpose of this website is to serve as a personal demo/portfolio/workshop of web and data skills, this Movies section is not meant to compete with or substitute for far more definitive movie websites.
Whether or not he still clings to an award which he won in 1986 as a film critic for his college's newspaper, Jeffrey Hartmann is not responsible for the texts of overviews and biographies supplied by external data sources.