I've heard some Japanese silents had a narrator live in the cinema to detail what was happening. But without it, and without intertitles, this film is nigh on unwatchable. The story is impossible to follow. As it stands, it feels not like a story, but a visual art project, in the vain of 'Un Chien Andalou'. To that extent there are a few striking images, with the noir lighting being a highlight, but it is very repetitious. All we see are the same images of women in cells going crazy, and a calm man gazing between the bars. I've read the director had little money while making the film, and it shows, for the same sets are repeated over and over. There really isn't enough material here to warrant a feature length film, and the true madness of the film is that they tried to stretch it so long. 10 or 20 minutes would have been far more suitable.

Kurutta ippêji (1926) *** (out of 4) Bizarre Japanese horror film has a man taking a janitor job at an asylum so that he can be closer to his wife who was committed after trying to kill their child. Had Luis Bunuel been bore in Japan and started making movies in 1926 then I'm guessing the final product would have came out looking like this thing. Lost for decades, it's easy to see why this film was never discovered but now that it's making its way around, it seems like this is destined to become something of a cult favorite to silent and horror fans. There's no straight story being told here, instead it's more avant-garde as we get all sorts of surreal images. We get the basic story but everything else is either told in flashback or through extra fast editing that helps build up the insanity of the lead character. Director Teinosuke Kinugasa really wants to get inside the mind of the insane and I think he does a pretty good job with it. At just 59-minutes the film moves at a pretty fast rate and a lot of this can be credited to the editing. I thought that the editing was the real star of the movie as it's done in such a fashion that you often see something but then you question what it was that you actually saw. You also have to try and keep up with what's going on and everything is happening so fast that you can see that the director was trying to use this to make the viewer feel what the characters were feeling being the asylum walls. There aren't any intertitles, which just adds to the visual image and the music score (done in the 70s) fits the film very well.

THis movie shows us once again, how genius the Japanese directors are and were. This movie could be seen as a sort of a "Silent - Movie Tetsuo". Well Eisenstein...:)

Hard to find, I saw this in the 1960's in Berkeley, California and even then it seemed dated and yet the Japanese style and film touches that later influenced Kurosawa & Ozu were unmistakable. This is surely the first important Japanese film and the one that influenced the later masters. Simple in story-telling and rich in characterization, even if the acting seems a bit overwrought. Try to find it.