Sadao Nakajima (Film Director) Wiki, Biography, Age, Wife, Net Worth

Exemplary among his pictures which balance sudden explosions of violence with moments of startling sentimentality is his 1979 hit Sochiyo no Kubi, a lengthy meditation on the end of an era (the yakuza immediately before Japan’s war in China broke out and escalated into World War II).

Rape, torture, gunplay, nothing was off-limits in a typical Nakajima scenario, such as the fitful, hysterically violent Bakamasa Horamasa Toppamasa (1976) and the amazingly raw and passionate Riot at Shimane Prison (Bodo Shimane Keimusho, 1975), which actually caused a controversy in Japan for its realistic portrayal of prison brutality. The violence in Nakajima’s work is often accompanied by a deep-running sentimentalism: he is considered by Japanese critics to be a “wet” director, as compared to the “dry”, cynical style of fellow Toei yakuza-helmer Kinji Fukasaku.

In the 1960s, Nakajima concentrated on samurai films, but found his true metier in the 1970s with the explosion of second-generation yakuza movies.

These so-called jitsuroku (true record) stories were far more violent than their yakuza movie counterparts of the 1950s and 60s, and none more so than Nakajima’s.

Born in Chiba in 1934, Nakajima joined Toei in 1959, and was promoted to director there in 1964. He has never directed outside the studio since, and has been well regarded there as one of Toei’s most prolific and dependable hitmakers.