Tatsuya Nakadai

David Hudson, writing for Criterion, calls Tatsuya Nakadai an unobtrusive craftsman, a man who reaches for whichever technique suits the context in hand. By the same account, out of the more than a hundred and sixty films he performed in, his own favourite was Masaki Kobayashi's Harakiri, from 1962. Joan Mellen's Criterion essay sets out the work in that part: Hanshiro Tsugumo, shaming the Iyi clan in front of its own retainers and calling in the account for Chijiiwa's death, carries Kobayashi's conviction that some ideas are worth dying for. Across the forty-six films we hold for him the director he worked with most often is Hideo Gosha, with eight; Kobayashi comes next on seven, Akira Kurosawa and Kihachi Okamoto on five each.