An Actor's Revenge


An Actor's Revenge, also known as Revenge of a Kabuki Actor, is a 1963 film directed by Kon Ichikawa. It was produced in Eastmancolor and Daieiscope for Daiei Film.
An Actor's Revenge is a remake of the 1935 film of the same title, which also starred Kazuo Hasegawa. The 1963 remake was Hasegawa's 300th role as a film actor. The screenplay, written by Ichikawa's wife, Natto Wada, was based on the adaptation by Daisuke Itō and Teinosuke Kinugasa of a newspaper serial originally written by Otokichi Mikami that was used for the 1935 version. There is an opera, An Actor's Revenge, with music by Minoru Miki and libretto by James Kirkup and a 2008 NHK production of the same story, with Yukinojō and Yamitaro played by Hideaki Takizawa.

Plot

Three men — Sansai Dobe, Kawaguchiya and Hiromiya — are responsible for the suicide of seven-year-old Yukitarō’s mother and father. Yukitarō is adopted and brought up by Kikunojō Nakamura, the actor-manager of an Osaka kabuki troupe.
The adult Yukitarō becomes an onnagata, a male actor who plays female roles, taking the stage name Yukinojō. Like many of the great onnagata, particularly of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, he wears women’s clothes and uses the language and mannerisms of a woman offstage as well as on. Twenty years later, in the mid 1830s, the troupe pays a visit to Edo, where the men responsible for his parents’ deaths now live. Yukinojō brings about their deaths, then, having achieved his goal, and apparently overcome by the death of an innocent woman who was part of his schemes but whom he became fond of, retires from the stage and disappears.
The events are coolly observed and sardonically commented on by the Robin-Hood-like thief Yamitarō, also played by Hasegawa.

Title

The Japanese title is Yukinojō henge. Yukinojō is the stage-name of the central character, who is an onnagata or oyama — a male kabuki actor who plays women’s roles. Among the senses of henge are ghost, spectre and apparition. The title is sometimes rendered The Avenging Ghost of Yukinojō. Yukinojō uses his stage-craft to terrify one of his enemies by creating the illusion of a ghost, but there is no supernatural element in the film.
In the kabuki theatre the word henge has the technical sense of costume change. The type of play called a henge-mono is a quick-change piece in which the leading actor plays a number of roles and undergoes many on-stage changes of costume. The title thus has as one of its senses The Many Guises of Yukinojō. The usual English title is from a line of dialogue when the character Yamitarō, having learned that Yukinojō proposes to take revenge on his enemies by elaborate plots rather than killing them at the first opportunity, says to himself "As you might expect of an actor’s revenge, it’s going to be a flamboyant performance".

Cast

The voice-over narration is provided by Tokugawa Musei, the most famous benshi of the silent era.