7/10
2nd of the 3 Nikkatsu movies I'll be making it out to was Shohei Imamura's 3-hour epic. It's about an incestuous family who live on an island they founded, and their (and the villagers') turmoil when an engineer from a sugar plant in Tokyo comes to the island to supervise construction of a new mill. It obviously is a commentary of Japan at the time (it was released in 1968) and focuses heavily on technology vs. tradition, but I don't know enough about Japan of the time to make a lot of the connections. The film looks gorgeous, shot in lurid color and restored masterfully, but it's a marathon at 3 hours and sometimes it's a struggle to figure out who's doing what and why. Interesting and crazy as any Nikkatsu noir I've seen, in any event.
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