Rent A Fugitive from the Past (1965)
3.9 of 5 from 52 ratings
3h 3min
- General info
- Available formats
- Synopsis:
In 1947, a freak typhoon sends a passenger ferry running between Hokkaido and mainland Japan plunging to the ocean depths, with hundreds of lives lost. During the chaos, three men are witnessed fleeing a burning pawnshop in the Hokkaido port town of Iwanai. The police suspect theft and arson, and when Detective Yumisaka (Junzaburo Ban) discovers the burned remains of a boat and the corpses of two men, he sets about tracking the shadowy third figure. Meanwhile, the mysterious Takichi Inukai (Rentaro Mikuni) takes shelter with a prostitute, Yae (Sachiko Hidari), a brief encounter that will come to define both of their lives. A decade later, long after the trail has gone cold, Yumisaka is called back by his successor Detective Ajimura (Ken Takakura) as two new dead bodies are found. - Actors:
- Rentarô Mikuni, Sachiko Hidari, Kôji Mitsui, Yoshi Katô, Sadako Sawamura, Susumu Fujita, Akiko Kazami, Seiichirô Kameishi, Shûsuke Sone, Mitsuo Andô, Rin'ichi Yamamoto, Shôken Sawa, Tadashi Suganuma, Sachi Shindô, Yuriko Anjô, Kôji Sekiyama, Itsuma Mogami, Tatsuya Kitayama, Kôsaku Okano, Nobuo Yana
- Directors:
- Tomu Uchida
- Producers:
- Hiroshi Ohkawa
- Writers:
- Naoyuki Suzuki, Tsutomu Minakami
- Aka:
- Kiga kaikyô / Straits of Hunger
- Genres:
- Classics, Drama, Thrillers
- Countries:
- Japan
- BBFC:
- Release Date:
- 26/09/2022
- Run Time:
- 183 minutes
- Languages:
- Japanese Dolby Digital 1.0 Mono
- Subtitles:
- English
- Formats:
- Pal
- Aspect Ratio:
- Widescreen 2.40:1
- Colour:
- B & W
- BLU-RAY Regions:
- B
- Bonus:
- Introduction by writer and curator Jasper Sharp
- Scene-specific commentaries from leading Japanese film scholars Aaron Gerow, Irene Gonzalez-Lopez, Erik Homenick, Earl Jackson, Daisuke Miyao, and Alexander Zahlten
- Original theatrical trailer
- Image gallery
- Tomu Uchida filmography
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Reviews (1) of A Fugitive from the Past
Three Hours of Fate: A Noir Epic You Feel in Your Bones - A Fugitive from the Past review by griggs
Three hours can feel like a dare, but this one makes the case for its length. What starts as “man on the run” turns into something heavier: a story about how one incident can knock a life off its tracks, and how hard it is to climb back when the system has already decided what you are. It’s got that postwar Japanese-epic weight — Kurosawa scale, Mizoguchi sadness — but with an even colder sense of fate.
Mikuni Rentarô is fantastic as Takichi Inugai / Kyôichirô Tarumi: stoic, cornered, and gradually haunted by his own survival. The detective’s ten-year pursuit gives the film its moral backbone — part duty, part obsession — and Hidari Sachiko’s Yae brings a bruised tenderness the film never turns into sentimentality.
The atmosphere does a lot of work: the typhoon escape (with real storm footage), the layered, dreamlike transitions, and that Gothic “mountain that makes dead people talk” hanging over everything like a thought you can’t shake. It slows down at points, but the whole point is the weight of time — and by the end, it lands.
1 out of 1 members found this review helpful.