“The lost sword fight scene, the print was found. The director Yamanaka’s pre-war film “Sazen Tange”".
March 21, 2004 | admin | comments closedAsahi Newspaper 2004.02.28
Film director Sadao Yamanaka (1909-1938) is well known for his fresh take on the samurai genre. His best work, “Sazen Tange and the Pot Worth a Million Ryo”(1935) had a lost action scene in it and the print which has the lost scene has just been found. In the latter important part of the story, the hero Sazen, played by Denjiro Okochi, has a sword fight, which was shown in the original release, but after the war, because of the censorship regulated by GHQ, two minutes out of 94 minutes were cut and it used to be said that this scene did not exist any more. Takeo Nagano, a TV director, found a 16mm print with this lost scene among the belongings left by a deceased private film collector. The original is a talkie but this print doesn’t have a soundtrack. It seems “Toy Film”, the home use digest version produced in the pre-war period was duplicated by the collector or somebody else. The script existed and also thanks to the memory of people who saw the original release print in the theater, it was revealed that this was the lost scene. The found scene is a part of the climax where Sazen kills a bunch of yakuza and hurries on. It’s only 20 seconds but the composition, which makes good use of depth, shows the speedy sword scene and tells us the Yamanaka version of Sazen is not only one of the best comedies, as we know already, but also among the best samurai action. Sadao Yamane, a film critic, says “Amongst all 26 Yamanaka works, only three films exist now. Of these three films, Sazen is the oldest, so this discovery is quite something. There was a case where an early work by Yasujiro Ozu was found and preserved from among a private film collector’s possessions, so still there are possibilities that some works are sleeping at home somewhere unexpectedly.” The found footage is going to be included in the DVD on sale in May “A collection of Sadao Yamanaka’s Nikkatsu films”.