10/4: Ballad of Orin

I'm mainly familiar with Masahiro Shinoda from a few of his 1960s contributions to the Japanese New Wave, films which took off from genre premises (samurai, gangsters) and deconstructed them. With those earlier films in mind, Ballad of Orin (literal translation Melody in Gray) from 1977 initially seemed to be a big surprise. This is a much quieter, more evenly paced film than Shinoda's wild,