The Bedridden Script Doctor: Itami Mansaku’s Scenario Reviews

The director and scriptwriter Itami Mansaku was a major proponent of the revisionist movement in prewar Japanese period film. However, with only a handful of his screen works surviving, Itami’s reputation arises mostly from his contemporaries’ accounts and his own critical writings. Caught between the restrictions imposed by a debilitating illness and government censorship, during the war years Itami strived to stay in touch with the Japanese film world by continuing to work on scripts as well as write criticism from his sickbed. This article discusses Itami’s creative and critical efforts, which were to have a considerable impact on subsequent Japanese filmmakers. Particular attention is paid to examining Itami’s scenario reviews, serialised in the journal Japanese Cinema between 1941 and 1942, where he took an actively interventionist stance quite different from what is conventionally allowed for film criticism.