A skilled and versatile filmmaker best known for his jidai-geki, Inagaki worked as an actor before directing. In the silent era, he narrated traditional stories with visual flair and melodramatic intensity: his extant second film, Vagabond Gambler (Hōrō zanmai, 1928), reveals his instinctive talent for choreographing action. Long-Sought Mother (Mabuta no haha, 1931), his best-known early work, told the story of a ronin’s search for and rejection by his long-lost mother; also preserved today, it remains an outstanding example of the lyrical pessimism of the silent period film. After the coming of sound he continued to handle jidai-geki adeptly and achieved a major critical and commercial success with a multi-part version of the much-filmed Daibosatsu Pass (Daibosatsu tōge, 1935–36), about a sadistic samurai.
Inagaki’s liberal attitudes also led him to produce some unusual films during the thirties and forties: A Thousand and One Nights on the Road (Matatabi sen’ichiya, 1936) transposed Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night (1934) to Japan and apparently supported the common man against the authorities, while The Sea-Crossing Festival (Umi o wataru sairei, 1941), an allegory about the infiltration of a port town by a group of sinister horsemen, has been described by Motohiko Fujita as “the last representative of the liberal spirit in Japanese film until the end of the war.” Even as late as 1943, The Life of Matsu the Untamed (Muhō Matsu no isshō), scripted by fellow liberal, Mansaku Itami, eschewed propagandistic elements in favor of subtle personal drama. In this story of a rickshaw driver’s relations with a widow and her young son, Inagaki elicited a marvelously detailed performance from Tsumasaburō Bandō, and created a delicate balance between humor and poignancy. The result was one of the finest and most moving films produced during the war years.
After the war, Inagaki won international acclaim, including an Academy Award, for his Musashi Miyamoto trilogy (Miyamoto Musashi, 1954–56), distributed in the West as Samurai. This was a well-made but academic remake, starring Toshirō Mifune, of his 1940s film sequence of the same name. His 1958 version of The Life of Matsu the Untamed, again with Mifune, also earned foreign distribution as The Rickshaw Man; though virtually a shot-for-shot remake, it lacked the power and humanity of the original. With Life of a Swordsman (Aru kengō no shōgai, 1959), Inagaki transposed the Cyrano de Bergerac story to the beginning of the Tokugawa era, but in fact some of his most interesting postwar films were set in more recent times. Children Hand in Hand (Te o tsunagu kora, 1948), based, like The Life of Matsu the Untamed, on a Mansaku Itami script, was a compassionate and engaging account of the experiences at school of a child with learning difficulties, a subject that might have appealed to Hiroshi Shimizu. Storm (Arashi, 1956), based on a novel by Tōson Shimazaki, was a delicate and beautifully acted Taisho-era story about a widower bringing up his young sons. Geisha in the Old City (“Kottai-san”yori:Nyotaiwakanashiku, 1957) was a complex account of the relationships within a Kyoto geisha house, shot in exquisite color. In its perceptive use of social changes in the old capital as a microcosm of Japan’s postwar evolution, it resembled Kōzaburō Yoshimura’s postwar work, which it almost rivaled for quality.
In the last years of his career, Inagaki continued to produce expertly crafted films in a traditional idiom. Among these, his version of the much-filmed Chūshingura story (1962) was rather pedestrian; but his last big-budget film, Samurai Banners (Fūrin kazan, 1969), a heroic epic chronicling the unification of Japan into a nation state, was given a certain poignancy by the performance of Toshiko Sakuma as the princess whose happiness is sacrificed on the altar of national unity. By the seventies, Inagaki was judged old-fashioned and found himself unemployed. It was an ironic fate, since the last film he directed, Ambush (Machibuse, 1970), had a distinctly modern tone of absurdism, reminiscent of a spaghetti Western: the hero protects the inhabitants of a besieged teahouse before learning that he was hired to fight for the other side. However, Inagaki’s last contribution to the cinema was nostalgic: in 1978, in collaboration with silent film enthusiast Shunsei Matsuda, he served as producer of a modern silent chanbara, The Worms of Hell (Jigoku no mushi). In recalling the tone of his earliest work, this emphasized the classical consistency of his approach to filmmaking.
(Source: A Critical Handbook of Japanese Film Directors)
