Background
Heinosuke Gosho was born on 24 january 1902 in Tokyo. The son of a rich father and a geisha.
五所平之助
Heinosuke Gosho was born on 24 january 1902 in Tokyo. The son of a rich father and a geisha.
He went to Keio University and became one of the most successful and hardworking directors in the Japanese film industry.
Madamu to Byobo was the first lull sound-on-film movie made in Japan. An immense, popular success, it launched Gosho on carefully acted film adaptations of plays and novels. Very little of his work is known in the West, and we must be content with the standard two- or three-line reference to a director in the school of, if rather less than, Mizoguchi.
But Gosho made ninety-nine films, and lie could be several degrees inferior to Mizoguchi yet still a thoroughly worthwhile director. The film enthusiast still lives in a vaguely charted world - Gosho is proof of the current reliance on “Here be dragons” terminology.
After war made Ima Hitotabino (To Be Once Again With You). Osaka-no-Yado (The Inn of Osaka), Entotsuno Miern Baho (The Spot Where You Can See Those Chimneys), a prize-winning picture at the 1953 Berlin Film Festival.
The sympathy for the unhappy, sensitiveness for the trend of the times and other features that marked his early films have continued to form the keynote of his later productions.