A specialist in jidai-geki, Futagawa is remembered largely for the silent films he made at Makino Productions in collaboration with popular action hero Tsumasaburō Bandō. Several of these survive: Kageboshi (Edo Kaizokuden: Kagebōshi, 1925) is admired for having introduced a greater psychological depth into a genre hitherto concerned largely with action, while the most famous, Orochi (1925), is considered of importance in establishing the anti-heroic persona of the “nihilist hero” in revolt against society, which would be developed by Daisuke Itō. The film’s melancholy mood was genuinely affecting, though it lacked Itō’s depth of political implication, the hero’s sufferings being the result more of hard luck than of social injustice. Noel Burch has called Futagawa “the epitome of the academic neo-Western director”; however, while his style had a certain classical economy, his preference for staging action scenes in long shot was as characteristically Japanese as were his thematic concerns. It seems, moreover, that he made occasional films in a deliberately experimental mode: the lost Whenthe Gravestone Snores (Boseki ga ibikisuru koro, 1925) was apparently influenced by the then fashionable expressionism of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920, Robert Wiene).
In the thirties, Futagawa worked at Shochiku, where he continued to specialize in period films, often starring the dashing Chōjūrō Hayashi (later renamed Kazuo Hasegawa). However, his sound films were not widely admired, and he retired from direction in 1939. An attempted comeback in the fifties was unsuccessful. Futagawa’s younger brother, Eisuke Takizawa, also worked as a director. (source: A Critical Handbook of Japanese Film Directors) Edit Biography