"Actor: Tatsuya Mihashi"

• The Burmese Harp | Unknown | (15/09/2025) from £31.98   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

  The Burmese Harp An Imperial Japanese Army regiment surrenders to British forces in Burma at the close of World War II and finds harmony through song. A private, thought to be dead, disguises himself as a Buddhist monk and stumbles upon spiritual enlightenment. Magnificently shot in hushed black and white, Kon Ichikawa's The Burmese Harp is an eloquent meditation on beauty coexisting with death and remains one of Japanese cinema's most overwhelming antiwar sentiments, both tender and brutal in its grappling with Japan's wartime legacy. Japan 1956 116 minutes Black & White 1.37:1 Japanese, Burmese Spine #379 4K UHD + BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES: ¢ New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack ¢ One 4K UHD disc of the film and one Blu-ray with the film and special features ¢ Interviews with director Kon Ichikawa and actor Rentaro Mikuni ¢ Trailer ¢ New English subtitle translation ¢ PLUS: An essay by critic and historian Tony Rayns

• Tora! Tora! Tora! | DVD | (17/04/2019) from £7.94   |  Saving you £12.05 (151.76%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Here is just one of the many mishaps chronicled in Tora! Tora! Tora!: "Sir, there's a large formation of planes coming in from the north, 140 miles, 3 degrees east." "Yeah? Don't worry about it." The epic film shows the bombing of Pearl Harbour from both sides in the historic first American-Japanese coproduction: American director Richard Fleischer oversaw the complicated production (the Japanese sequences were directed by Toshio Masuda and Kinji Fukasaku, after Akira Kurosawa withdrew from the film), wrestling a sprawling story with dozens of characters into a manageable, fairly easy-to-follow film. The first half maps out the collapse of diplomacy between the nations and the military blunders that left naval and air forces sitting ducks for the impending attack, while the second half is an amazing re-creation of the devastating battle. While Tora! Tora! Tora! lacks the strong central characters that anchor the best war films, the real star of the film is the climactic 30-minute battle, a massive feat of cinematic engineering that expertly conveys the surprise, the chaos and the immense destruction of the only attack by a foreign power on American soil since the Revolutionary war. The special effects won a well-deserved Oscar, but the film was shut out of every other category by, ironically, the other epic war picture of the year, Patton. --Sean Axmaker, Amazon.com

• What's Up Tiger Lily? | DVD | (02/02/2004) from £23.99   |  Saving you £-21.00 (N/A%)   |  RRP £2.99

  We took a Japanese film made in Japan with Japanese actors and actresses and I took out all the soundtrack and knocked out all the voices and I wrote a comedy. The result is a movie where people are running around doing all these James Bondian things but what's coming out of their mouths is something wholly other. It was done before actually in Gone With the Wind but not many people know that. Those were Japanese people actually and we dubbed in American voices Southern voices. But that was years ago. - Woody Allen

• High And Low | DVD | (28/03/2005) from £14.49   |  Saving you £5.50 (37.96%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Kurosawa drew on the thriller 'King's Ransom' by Ed McBain (aka Evan Hunter) for this contemporary study of the inequalities and hierarchical rigidity of modern Japan. In the first half of the film set in a single room an industrialist agonises on whether to pay the huge ransom demanded by kidnappers who have mistakenly snatched his chauffeur's son instead of his own. The second half of the film shot in a frenzied restless style on sleazy urban locations concentrates on the polic

• Dolls | Blu Ray | (14/03/2016) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

  The first story concerns a young executive who left his girlfriend in pursuit of a career. Following a failed suicide attempt, he runs to his former love's side and now they roam the country together, bound by a red cord, in search of something they have lost. The second is about an ageing yazuka who also abandoned his girlfriend for the sake of success. 30 years later, he is compelled to return to the park where they used to meet. The final tale is of a former pop star who becomes a recluse following a disfiguring accident. One day, one of her greatest fans comes to prove the extent of his devotion to her

• The Bad Sleep Well | DVD | (25/07/2005) from £14.59   |  Saving you £5.40 (37.01%)   |  RRP £19.99

  A tense re-working of Hamlet (adapted from a novel by Ed McBain) is a biting expos of the corruption and politics of greed at the heart of Japanese business. Beautifully photographed in ravishing black and white Tohoscope this is original Japanese version never before released in Europe. A young man marries the boss's daughter as part of a scheme to take revenge on the influential businessman who forced his father to commit suicide. Leisurely paced bitterly ironic the film emplo

• Dolls | DVD | (24/11/2003) from £9.32   |  Saving you £10.67 (114.48%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Dolls is a film of extraordinary beauty and tenderness from a filmmaker chiefly associated with grave mayhem and deadpan humor. That is to say, this is not one more Takeshi Kitano movie focused on stoical cops or gangsters. The title refers most directly, but not exclusively, to the theatrical tradition of Bunraku, enacted by half-life-size dolls and their visible but shrouded onstage manipulators. Such a performance--a drama of doomed lovers--occupies the first five minutes of the film, striking a keynote that resonates as flesh-and-blood characters take up the action. The film-proper is dominated by the all-but-wordless odyssey of a susceptible yuppie and the jilted fiancée driven mad by his desertion to marry the boss's daughter. Bound by a blood-red cord, they move hypnotically through a landscape variously urban and natural, stylized only by the breathtaking purity of light, angle, color, and formal movement imposed by Kitano's compositional eye and rigorous, fragmentary editing. Along the way we also pick up the story of an elderly gangster, haunted by memories of the lover he deserted three decades earlier and generations of "brothers" for whose deaths he was, in the accepted order of things, responsible. Another strand is added to the imagistic weave via a doll-like pop singer and a groupie blinded by devotion to her. This is a film in which character, morality, metaphysics, and destiny are all expressed through visual rhyme and startling adjustments of perspective. It sounds abstract--and it is--but it's also heartbreaking and thrilling to behold. Kitano isn't in it, but as an artist he's all over it. His finest film, and for all its exoticism, his most accessible. --Richard T. Jameson

• Kokoro (The Heart) | DVD | (23/02/2009) from £23.99   |  Saving you £-4.00 (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Brimful with brooding psychological torment Kokoro is vintage Kon Ichikawa (An Actor's Revenge The Burmese Harp Tokyo Olympiad). Based on a novel by celebrated Japanese author Natsume Soseki the director foregrounds its themes of individual isolation and social estrangement most notably in a central protagonist stricken by existential demons and stranded by changing times. Why does Nobuchi (Masayuki Mori) visit the grave of his old friend Kaji (Tatsuya Mihashi)? Why is he so secretive with his wife Shizu (Michiyo Aratama)? And how does Nobuchi's friendship with the young student Hioki (Shoji Yasui) - for whom the older man acts as reluctant sensei - relate to his time with Kaji? As the Meiji Era draws to a close with the emperor's death and the suicide of General Nogi a fateful tale of tainted love failed friendship and redemptive honour unravels with tragic consequences. Though sometimes overlooked in the director's impressive oeuvre Ichikawa's profoundly beautiful rendering of Soseki's novel is a considerable work of cinema in its own right. The Masters of Cinema Series is proud to present Kokoro for home viewing in the UK for the very first time.

• What's Up Tiger Lily | DVD | (05/02/2001) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £15.99

  What better way for writer-star Woody Allen to cash in on the success of What's New Pussycat? than to write a quickie exploitation comedy that makes fun of quickie exploitation films? In What's Up Tiger Lily? his actors dub new dialogue onto a ridiculous Japanese spy extravaganza. Allen's exquisite sense of the absurd is in fine form as espionage professionals pursue a top-secret recipe for egg salad. At one point during the planning of a break-in, a spy unfolds a map of their quarry's residence, explaining that the man "lives here". "He lives on that small piece of paper?" questions one of the henchmen. It's that silly. But it's often uproarious. Louise Lasser, Allen's former wife is among the voice actors. --Jim Emerson, Amazon.com

• What's Up Tiger Lily | DVD | (07/01/2008) from £10.80   |  Saving you £2.19 (16.90%)   |  RRP £12.99

  In describing What's Up Tiger Lily? we thought it best left to Woody himself: 'We took a Japanese film made in Japan by Japanese actors and actresses and I took out all the soundtrack and knocked out all the voices and I wrote a comedy. The result is a movie where people are running around doing all those James Bondian things but what's coming out of their mouths is something wholly other. It was done before actually in Gone With The Wind but not many people know that. Those were Japanese people actually and we dubbed in American voices Southern voices. But that was years ago'. Woody Allen.