A work in constant progress (and occasional regress).
Release Date:
February 7, 1970
Original Title:
忍びの衆
Alternate Titles:
A Band of Ninja
Ninja 9: Mission Iron Castle
Shinobi no Shu
Genres:
Action | Crime | Drama | War
Production Companies:
Daiei Film
Production Countries:
Japan
Ratings / Certifications:
N/A
Runtime: 79
The Shinobi-no-Mono series was so successful that Daiei Studios dipped into the well one more time, making the best 60′s B&W ninja movie ever seen in the otherwise color-dominated year of 1970. Issei Mori directs Hiroki Matsukata as the reluctant leader of a small band of spies charged with kidnapping a noblewoman from a heavily ninja-proofed castle. The finality of the air slowly began to fill like smoke, and in all that had become dark the loyalty of the Ninja who dared to go shone like light as they entered a world shrouded in mystery. Things do not go as planned in what is possibly the darkest and most fatalistic of the already noir-ish 60′s fare. Both the decade and it’s distinctive style of shinobi cinema went out on a high note with Mission Iron Castle.
Art Direction:
Shigenori Shimoishizaka
Director:
Kazuo Mori
Director of Photography:
Fujio Morita
Editor:
Toshio Taniguchi
Lighting Director:
Reijiro Yamashita
Original Music Composer:
Hajime Kaburagi
Original Story:
Ryōtarō Shiba
Screenplay:
Yamada Takayuki
Sound:
Iwao Ōtani
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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:
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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.