The Impostor. (Academy.)
The extraordinary Rashomon was an exception among Japanese films, as it would have been anywhere. A more conventional—and on its home ground more popular—production, The Impostor, joins Due Soldi di Speranza at the Academy to form a neatly contrasted double bill. This piece of oriental cloak and dagger, a story of seventeenth-century palace intrigue in which a gallant guardsman outwits an impostor posing as the son of the Shogun, has, for Western audiences, its undeniable longueurs. But, to set against the formal, excessively deliberate and at times confused plot-develop- ment, there are the ceremonial backgrounds, the savage, ritual bursts of swordplay and the tense, aware immobility of the playing. It is not here the quality of the film per se that attracts, nor the exploits of Utaemon Ichikawa, Japan's Errol Flynn, but the strangeness of
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