A director from the mid-twenties, Abe had trained in Hollywood, where he played bit parts in films starring his compatriot, Sessue Hayakawa. After returning home, he became known as the Lubitsch of Japan, a reputation founded on his witty and polished social satires. A Mermaid on Land (Riku no ningyo, 1926) traced the romantic rivalry between two young women, one spoilt and rich, the other poor but sincere. Five Women around Him (Kare o meguru gonin no onna, 1927) focused on a bachelor and his several girlfriends. Most famous was The Woman Who Touched the Legs (Ashi ni sawatta onna, 1926), a twice-remade ironic comedy about a writer’s encounter with a female thief. These films, along with most of Abe’s prewar work, are now lost, but among his prewar sound films, Children of the Sun (Taiyō no ko, 1938) remains extant. This interesting story about a home for delinquent children in Hokkaido revealed his eye for landscape and confirmed his capability in a more serious vein.
The vague liberalism of that film was soon abandoned as Abe, with blockbusters such as Flaming Sky (Moyuruōzora, 1940) and Fire on That Flag (Ano hata o ute, 1944), became one of the leading producers of nationalistic propaganda before and during the Pacific War. Even in the fifties, Battleship Yamato (Senkan Yamato, 1953) and I Was a Siberian POW (Watashi wa Shiberiya no horyo datta, 1952) exposed his continuing admiration for Japanese militarism. Much of Abe’s postwar work consisted of undistinguished genre films such as Desert in Ginza (Ginza no sabaku, 1958), a brutal and silly crime thriller set against the backdrop of Tokyo’s fashionable yet seedy Ginza district. However, he achieved a commercial success with the first film adaptation of Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s novel about life among Osaka’s prewar upper middle class, The Makioka Sisters (Sasameyuki, 1950). Later, the freewheeling comedy Season of Affairs (Uwaki no kisetsu, 1959) carried some of his old satirical feeling in its amused take on contemporary social mores. It is unfortunate that the films which earned Abe his fame as a satirist in the silent era are not preserved today.

(Source: A Critical Handbook of Japanese Film Directors) Edit Biography