One of Daiei’s most flamboyant directors of chanbara, Ikehiro served as assistant to such luminaries as Kōzaburō Yoshimura, Kenji Mizoguchi, Kon Ichikawa, and Kaneto Shindō before making his debut with TheRoseDaimyo (Baradaimyō, 1960). His third film, the Shin Hasegawa adaptation TokijiroofKu­tsukake (KutsukakeTokijirō, 1961), initiated a fruitful collaboration with actor Raizō Ichikawa. Ichikawa also starred in SevenMilestoNakayama (Nakayamashichiri, 1962), the story of a wandering gambler who rescues a woman resembling his murdered wife; this was thought to bring a freshness of touch to the matatabi (wandering yakuza) genre, as Ikehiro sought to stress the melancholy and solitude of the hero. The revenge drama LoneWolf (Hitoriōkami, 1968), another matatabi-eiga, also has a high reputation among devotees of the genre.

Ikehiro’s own reputation may have suffered because many of his films were contributions to long-running series, in which installments were shared between various studio artisans. Zatoichi and the Chest of Gold (Zatōichi senryō kubi, 1964), the first of his three entries in the sequence of films starring Shintarō Katsu as the blind swordsman, was less interesting than the episodes by Kenji Misumi and Issei Mori. However, Kyoshiro Nemuri: Sword of Seduction (Ne­muri Kyōshirō: Joyōken, 1964), the fourth in an eccentric series, generally known in English as Sleepy Eyes of Death, with Raizō Ichikawa as the warrior son of a corrupted foreign missionary and a Japanese Christian, was a remarkable film which drew out the tortured psychology of the anti-hero through its bold use of color, expressionist camera angles, and overt symbolism. The stylized plot allowed Ikehiro’s imagination free rein, and he later contributed two further installments, apparently even more outlandish.

In terms of sheer visual invention, Ikehiro may have been the most brilliant of Daiei’s sixties contract directors, but this brilliance tended to be relatively shallow: thus, his version of the much-retold legend of folk hero Yasubei, Broken Swords (Hiken yaburi, 1969) was more stylish, but less psychologically perceptive and less harrowing, than Issei Mori’s 1959 version Samurai Vendetta (Hakuōki). In his last years at Daiei, Ikehiro helmed the three Trail of Blood (Mushukunin Mikogamino Jōkichi) films, another sequence of movies about a lone avenger. By now his style had become a little coarse, and the physical violence was unnecessarily emphatic. After Daiei’s collapse, he went into television where, with the exception of one Shochiku-produced theatrical feature, Make-Up (Keshō, 1984), he was to spend the rest of his career.

(Source: A Critical Handbook of Japanese Film Directors)