Fall Guy

Ginshiro is a film star starting to lose his standing, and the rising Tachibana unsettles him. He pressures his friend Yasu into marrying Konatsu, his pregnant lover. Yasu accepts and starts working as a stuntman to make ends meet. In the end he is offered a stunt nobody else will do. Directed by Kinji Fukasaku, the film was adapted from a play by Kōhei Tsuka, who also wrote the screenplay. The telling takes up what is behind the film set, the hierarchy there, and how expendable a stuntman is. Comedy and cruelty stand in the same scene and the film clears nobody. It took eight awards at the Japan Academy Prizes in 1983, best picture and best director among them.