Shirō Toyoda (豊田 四郎, Toyoda Shirō, 3 January 1906 – 13 November 1977)[1][2] was a Japanese film director and screenwriter who directed over 60 films during his career which spanned 50 years.[3] He was denoted for his high-quality adaptations of works of many important twentieth-century Japanese writers.[1][2][4]
Born in Kyoto, Toyoda moved to Tokyo after finishing high school. Intent on becoming a theatre playwright at first,[5] he studied scriptwriting under the pioneering film director Eizō Tanaka.[2][5] He joined the Kamata section of the Shōchiku film studios in 1925 and worked as an assistant director under Yasujirō Shimazu, before giving his directorial debut in 1929.[2][5] Forced to continue to work as an assistant director,[2] and dissatisfied with the material he was given at Shochiku,[5] he moved to the independent Tokyo Hassei Eiga Shisaku studio (later Toho).[5] There he directed the successful Young People (1937) and gained a reputation for directing literary adaptations with a humanistic touch, in particular Uguisu (1938) and Spring on Leper's Island (1940).[1][5]
After World War II, Toyoda adapted the works of writers like Yasunari Kawabata, Kafū Nagai, Naoya Shiga, Jun'ichirō Tanizaki and Masuji Ibuse for his films.[2][4] Distinguished by their visual imagination and superb acting,[4] they established Toyoda's reputation as an actor's director.[5] Noted works of this era include The Wild Geese (1953), Marital Relations (1955), A Cat, Shozo, and Two Women (1956), Snow Country (1957) and The Twilight Story (1960).[1][2][4] Working as closely with his cameramen and scenarists as with his actors, he relied on a steady group of collaborators, including cinematographers Kinya Kokura and Mitsuo Miura and scriptwriter Toshio Yasumi.[5]
Toyoda died in Tokyo in 1977.[2]
Scripts not realised by Toyoda himself:
Toyoda's films have repeatedly been shown at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive as part of retrospectives,[6][7][8] and three of his works added to the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in 1987.[9]
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