Blood Is Dry

A man working at an insurance company threatens to kill himself when management announces mass layoffs. The company turns that threat to its own advantage and makes the incident into an advertising campaign. As the campaign succeeds he is no longer a desperate man holding a gun to his head but a possible leader who wants to make use of his failed attempt. The film tells how the most extreme moment of a person’s life is turned into a marketable image, and does so not in accusing language but by showing the process. The account comes from the vein of social criticism in Japanese cinema of the sixties. Keiji Sada plays the lead in Yoshishige Yoshida’s eighty seven minute Japanese film, completed in 1960.