An Actor's Revenge

Three men — Sansai Dobe (Ganjirō Nakamura), Kawaguchiya (Saburō Date) and Hiromiya (Eijirō Yanagi) — are responsible for the suicide of seven-year-old Yukitarō’s mother and father. Yukitarō is adopted and brought up by Kikunojō Nakamura (Chūsha Ichikawa), the actor-manager of an Osaka kabuki troupe.

The adult Yukitarō (Kazuo Hasegawa) becomes an onnagata, a male actor who plays female roles, taking the stage name Yukinojō. Like many of the great onnagata, particularly of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, he wears women’s clothes and uses the language and mannerisms of a woman offstage as well as on. Twenty years later, in the mid 1830s, the troupe pays a visit to Edo, where the men responsible for his parents’ deaths now live. Yukinojō brings about their deaths, then, having achieved his goal, and apparently overcome by the death of an innocent woman who was part of his schemes but whom he became fond of, retires from the stage and disappears.

The events are coolly observed and sardonically commented on by the Robin-Hood-like thief Yamitarō, also played by Hasegawa.

The Japanese title is Yukinojō henge (雪之丞変化). Yukinojō is the stage-name of the central character, who is an onnagata or oyama — a male kabuki actor who plays women’s roles. Among the senses of henge (whose basic meaning is change of form) are ghost, spectre and apparition. The title is sometimes rendered The Avenging Ghost of Yukinojō. Yukinojō uses his stage-craft to terrify one of his enemies by creating the illusion of a ghost, but there is no supernatural element in the film.

In the kabuki theatre the word henge has the technical sense of costume change. The type of play called a henge-mono (変化もの) is a quick-change piece in which the leading actor plays a number of roles and undergoes many on-stage changes of costume. The title thus has as one of its senses The Many Guises of Yukinojō. The usual English title is from a line of dialogue when the character Yamitarō, having learned that Yukinojō proposes to take revenge on his enemies by elaborate plots rather than killing them at the first opportunity, says to himself "As you might expect of an actor’s revenge, it’s going to be a flamboyant performance" (Yakusha no katakiuchi dakeatte, kotta mon da: 役者の敵討ちだけあって、こったもんだ).

• Kazuo Hasegawa as Yukinojō Nakamura and Yamitarō
• Fujiko Yamamoto as Ohatsu
• Ayako Wakao as Namiji
• Raizō Ichikawa as Hirutarō
• Shintarō Katsu as Hōjin, the escaped convict
• Eiji Funakoshi as Heima Kadokura
• Chūsha Ichikawa as Kikunojō Nakamura
• Narutoshi Hayashi as Mukuzu
• Ganjirō Nakamura as Sansai Dobe
• Saburō Date as Kawaguchiya
• Eijirō Yanagi as Hiromiya
• Jun Hamamura as Isshōsai
• Toshio Chiba as Rōnin
• Masayoshi Kikuno as Yukinojō’s father
• Kōichi Mizuhara as Dobe’s retainer
• Shirō Ōtsuji as First Constable
• Tokio Oki as Second Constable
• Michirō Minami as First Townsman
• Yutaka Nakamura as Second Townsman
• Chitose Maki as Townswoman
• Eigorō Onoe as The Shōgun

The voice-over narration is provided by Tokugawa Musei (徳川夢声), the most famous benshi of the silent era.

• An Actor's Revenge on IMDb
• An Actor's Revenge at AllMovie
• DVD Times review
• An Actor’s Revenge and a Director’s Triumph an essay by Michael Sragow at the Criterion Collection