Cagey Films Blog

Discovering a Japanese master: Tai Katô

Former soldier Kawada (Noboru Andô) defies the law and his former comrades to help his community in Tai Katô’s Eighteen Years in Prison (1967)

Despite a career spanning from the 1930s to the mid-’80s, I hadn’t even heard of Tai Katô until a recent flurry of disk releases from Radiance in England and Film Movement in the States, yet he produced significant work in some of my favourite genres – particularly chambara and yakuza films, both of which are represented in these releases, with excellent editions of postwar crime stories (By a Man’s Face Shall You Know Him [1966] and Eighteen Years in Prison [1967]), police procedural noir (I, the Executioner [1968]), and period swordfighting (Tokijiro: Lone Yakuza [1966]).

Horrors old and new

Kronos (Horst Janson) uses his modified sword to deflect the vampire's hypnotic gaze in Brian Clemens' Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter (1974)

Horror is a flexible genre, capable of using science fiction, history, adventure, action and terrible real-life events to touch on existential questions as well as provide escape with a frisson of pleasurable fear. Three recent releases span a broad range of the possibilities – Roger Corman’s X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes (1963), arguably his best film; Brian Clemens’ Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter (1974), one of the best late films from Hammer Films; and Nick Kozakis’s Godless: The Eastfield Exorcism (2023), a bleak examination of the dangers of fundamentalist religious beliefs based on a tragic case which occurred in Australia in 1993.

Claude Berri’s Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources (1986): Criterion Blu-ray review

Manon (Emmanuelle Béart) watches over those who ruined her family in Claude Berri's Manon des Sources (1986)

Criterion have released an excellent two-disk edition of Claude Berri’s adaptation of Marcel Pagnol’s epic tragedy of idealism brought down by greed and petty rivalries in early 20th Century rural Provence. New 4K restorations of Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources (both 1986) are visually ravishing, while the drama is embodied in superb performances from Gérard Depardieu, Yves Montand, Daniel Auteuil, Emmanuelle Béart and an excellent supporting cast.

Blasts from the past

Aspect Rati-woes

The Criminal Acts of Tod Slaughter on Blu-ray from Indicator

Genre play in Germany

Thinking About Genre, part 1