Saw this today in the Globe and Mail and thought it might be of interest to some of you here.
VANCOUVER In the age of YouTube, downloads and wide selections of foreign films at the local video store, it's unusual to come across a genre of film that is virtually unknown in North America. But even many hard-core film mavens in the West - including experts in Japanese cinema - are being exposed for the first time to what's known as Nikkatsu Action Cinema.
The films, made by the Nikkatsu studio in Japan from the mid-1950s to the early seventies, were hybrids that borrowed heavily from Hollywood and European films. And while they were called "action films" (transliterated into Japanese as akushon), they incorporated several genres popular in the West: film noir, melodrama, gangster films and westerns.
Read the rest at
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080730.wnikkatsu30/BNStory/Entertainment/
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