Eizō Sugawa
| Eizō Sugawa | |
|---|---|
| Born |
September 8, 1930 Osaka |
| Died | October 2, 1998 |
| Occupation | Film director |
Eizō Sugawa (須川栄三 Sugawa Eizō?, born September 8, 1930) was a Japanese filmmaker.
Sugawa was born in Osaka to a family that owned an asbestos manufacturing business. He graduated from the economics department of Tokyo University in 1953, and subsequently joined Toho studios. He was inspired to enter the film industry after watching foreign films, which were imported into Japan in huge amounts following World War II.
While working as an assistant director, he wrote a script titled Kiken na Eiyūtachi that was published in screenplay magazine Independent. Toho producer Masakatsu Kaneko was impressed with the script, which depicted an ambitious reporter involved in a kidnapping incident with a touch reminiscent of American films, and used it as the basis for Kiken na Eiyū (1957), directed by Hideo Suzuki and starring Shintarō Ishihara.
In September 1958, Sugawa and Kihachi Okamoto were promoted to the rank of director by Toho to quell the ire of the company's assistant directors, who objected to the choice of an outsider, Shintarō Ishihara, to direct the film Wakai Kedamono (若い獣).
The promotion put Sugawa ahead of many of his colleagues, who had paid their dues for many years as assistant directors to work their way up to the position of chief assistant director. At the time, he had only worked as a chief assistant director on a single film, Mikio Naruse's 1958 The Summer Clouds (鰯雲, Iwashi-gumo). His promotion to director at the age of 27 after only five years at the company was extraordinarily fast. He eventually made his directorial debut with Seishun Hakusho: Otona ni wa Wakaranai.
Sugawa re-teamed with producer Kaneko on his second film Yajū Shisu Beshi (1959), which was lauded as a Japanese answer to the French New Wave and starred Tatsuya Nakadai, who was in between shooting the second and third installments of Masaki Kobayashi's The Human Condition. However, its original ending, in which the nihilistic protagonist escapes punishment for his crimes, sparked controversy when industry censorship organ Eirin and powerful Toho producer Sanezumi Fujimoto demanded that it be changed.
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