Though remembered largely for his inventive postwar shomin-geki, Chiba specialized initially in period films before achieving commercial success with such popular romances as Hideko the Cheerleader (Hideko no ōendanchō, 1940), a vehicle for the teenage Hideko Takamine. Among his wartime films, Women’s Brick Factory (Renga jokō, 1940; released 1946), a story about female factory workers, was banned for its proletarian sentiments, while The White Mural (Shiroi hekiga, 1942), shot on location in Okinawa, was a humanist account of a doctor from the mainland treating blackwater fever among the indigenous population.
Chiba’s reputation for love stories led him to be assigned after the war to A Certain Night’s Kiss (Aru yo no seppun, 1946), in which the Japanese cinema’s much-anticipated first kissing scene was infamously obscured by an umbrella. However, Chiba’s work in the fifties displayed a new individuality, combining personal drama with social commentary. In Sunflower Girl (Himawari musume, 1953) a woman’s affection for her boss causes conflict with her more class-conscious coworkers, while in Death Fire (Onibi, 1956) a gas company employee demands sexual favors from a poor woman in lieu of payment. Chiba was also admired for his creative use of period settings: The Happy Pilgrimage (Yajikita dōchūki, 1958) was an offbeat jidai-geki about a pair of samurai who embark on a pilgrimage to Ise in order to escape their wives. More often, however, Chiba set his films in the recent past. Downtown (Shitamachi, 1957), based on a novel by Mikio Naruse’s favorite writer, Fumiko Hayashi, conveyed the despondent mentality of the Occupation era through its depiction of a doomed romance. Crazy Guy (Okashina yatsu, 1956) recounted the life story of a rakugo performer from the twenties to the Occupation, and was remarkable for its sudden shifts from comedy to tragedy; like Downtown, it ended with an unexpected fatal accident. Chiba’s most significant work is usually considered to be the Large Size (Ōban, 1957–58) series, described by Donald Richie as “a Balzac-like chronicle of [the] various falls and rises” of an ambitious young man in the early Showa period.
In the sixties, Chiba worked on such international co-productions as A Night in Hong Kong (Honkon no yoru, 1961) and A Star of Hong Kong (Honkon no hoshi, 1962), both sentimental stories of love affairs between Japanese men and Chinese women. With Different Sons (Futari no musuko, 1961) and The Daphne (Chinchōge, 1966), he directed melodramatic family sagas depicting difficult relationships between parents and children. Although several of his films secured foreign distribution at the time, Chiba is now neglected even in Japan. The breadth of his subject matter and his high reputation in his day suggest that he merits reappraisal.
(Source: A Critical Handbook of Japanese Film Directors)
