A work in constant progress (and occasional regress).
Release Date:
May 15, 1960
Original Title:
酒と女と槍
Alternate Titles:
A Man's Ambition
Sake to onna to yari
Genres:
Drama
Production Companies:
Toei Company
Production Countries:
Japan
Ratings / Certifications:
N/A
Runtime: 99
This subversive period film features a hotheaded young samurai, Kurodo, who threatens to commit harakiri in response to the humiliation meted out to his family by the Shogun. The film critiques the inhumanity of feudal obligations, and Uchida’s direction slyly satirizes the contemporary cinematic audience, whose taste for onscreen bloodshed is mirrored in a crowd gathering to watch the protagonist’s planned suicide. The Master Spearman is imbued with Uchida’s characteristic blend of dark humor and stylized action, and Ryutaro Otomo gives an admirable performance in the lead.
Art Direction:
Takatoshi Suzuki
Director:
Tomu Uchida
Director of Photography:
Motoya Washio
Novel:
Chogoro Kaionji
Original Music Composer:
Taichiro Kosugi
Producer:
Hiroshi Ookawa
Screenplay:
Masato Ide
Most data and links to images for the Movies section come from TheMovieDB (TMDB).
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.