Traveling Actors

Director: Mikio Naruse

1940 / 70min / 35mm

Naruse harbored a special affection for this rural farce starring the great comic actor Kamatari Fujiwara, familiar to American audiences as the cravenly cynical peasant Manzo in Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai. As written by Naruse himself, Hyoroku (Fujiwara), a lowly member of a backwoods kabuki troupe, brings buffoonish pomposity to his role as the front legs of the act’s puppet horse. When a drunken patron falls on the horse’s head, the company replaces it with the real McCoy, unceremoniously demoting Hyoroku and his sidekick Senpei to stable boys. Tinged with nostalgia for a pre-modern popular art and vanishing provincial folkways, Naruse’s film conjures a timeless aura as if to ward off the distant reality of war.