Kô Nakahira

Crazed Fruit

Crazed Fruit

Two brothers compete for the amorous favors of a young woman during a seaside summer of gambling, boating, and drinking, in this seminal Sun Tribe (taiyozoku) film from director Kô Nakahira. Adapted from the controversial novel by Shintarô Ishihara, and critically savaged for its lurid portrayal of the postwar sexual revolution among Japan’s young and privileged, Crazed Fruit is an anarchic outcry against tradition and the older generation.

Film Info

  • Japan
  • 1956
  • 86 minutes
  • Black & White
  • 1.33:1
  • Japanese
  • Spine #295

Special Features

  • High-definition digital transfer
  • Audio commentary by renowned Japanese-film scholar Donald Richie
  • Theatrical trailer
  • New and improved English subtitle translation
  • Plus: new essays by critic Chuck Stephens and film scholar Michael Raine

    New cover by Christine Ditrio

Purchase Options

Special Features

  • High-definition digital transfer
  • Audio commentary by renowned Japanese-film scholar Donald Richie
  • Theatrical trailer
  • New and improved English subtitle translation
  • Plus: new essays by critic Chuck Stephens and film scholar Michael Raine

    New cover by Christine Ditrio
Crazed Fruit
Cast
Yujiro Ishihara
Natsuhisa
Masahiko Tsugawa
Haruji
Mie Kitahara
Eri
Masumi Okada
Frank
Harold Conway
Eri’s husband
Credits
Director
Kô Nakahira
Producer
Takiko Mizunoe
Screenplay and original story
Shintaro Ishihara
Cinematography
Shigeyoshi Mine
Art director
Takashi Matsuyama
Music
Masaru Sato
Music
Toru Takemitsu

Current

Peter Cowie’s Top 10
Peter Cowie’s Top 10

Peter Cowie has provided commentaries for around a dozen Criterion titles. His latest book, Louise Brooks: Lulu Forever, is available from Rizzoli.

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Toru Takemitsu

Composer

Toru Takemitsu
Toru Takemitsu

Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu, known to Western listeners predominantly as the man behind the music in such iconic movies as Woman in the Dunes and Ran, was an acclaimed classical composer and music theorist well before he became one of his country’s most reliably brilliant scorers of film. A noted musical avant-gardist in midcentury Japanese intellectual circles, as influenced by jazz as by Debussy, Takemitsu first turned to feature film composing when he was commissioned (along with Masaru Sato) to write the hip, twangy-guitar-inflected score for the Ko Nakahira youth flick Crazed Fruit (1956). It wasn’t until a few years later, though, when his friend Hiroshi Teshigahara asked him to score Teshigahara’s short debut film, José Torres (1959), that Takemitsu’s career in movies truly began. The deeply sympathetic working relationship that they discovered on that project resulted in Takemitsu’s providing the haunting, instrumentally jarring themes for virtually all of Teshigahara’s subsequent output (“He was always more than a composer,” Teshigahara would recall. “He involved himself so thoroughly in every aspect of a film—script, casting, location shooting, editing, and total sound design”). Takemitsu became a go-to guy for many other major Japanese filmmakers as well, including Masaki Kobayashi (Harakiri), Akira Kurosawa (Dodes’ka-den), and Nagisa Oshima (Empire of Passion); his themes remain some of the most beautiful, spectral music ever written for the screen.