Tateshi Danpei

Utaemon Ichikawa is trying to move the theater in the direction of a new, more realistic sort of drama. However, his fight choreographer, Ryûnosuke Tsukigata, is used to staging fights in the style of kabuki. In fact, he sees the theater as an excuse for staging that sort of stylized battle., and quarrels constantly over even staging a play without such a battle. Without those battles, he isn't even paid, and between his drinking and the illness of his wife, Isuzu Yamada, he's finding it tougher and tougher. One day he snaps and quits. Then he is told his wife is dead. Five years later....

Director Masahiro Makino was among the most prolific of directors in Japan, as had been his father, Shôzô Makino. They directed a lot of samurai movies, and so were very much in tune with Ichikawa's character here. Although Akira Kurosawa's script has a number of comic bits early on, it turns into a straight-out tragedy of the fading of the old ways of doing things in Japan in the new, post-Shogunate world.