The best Kōjirō Hongō’s war movies
Today we present the best Kōjirō Hongō’s movies. If you are a great movie fan, you will surely know most of them, but we hope to discover a movie that you have not yet seen … and that you love! Let’s go there with the best Kōjirō Hongō’s movies.
Mission: Iron Castle
7.4/10
The Shinobi-no-Mono series was so successful that Daiei Studios dipped into the well one more time, making the best 60′s B&W ninja movie ever seen in the otherwise color-dominated year of 1970. Issei Mori directs Hiroki Matsukata as the reluctant leader of a small band of spies charged with kidnapping a noblewoman from a heavily ninja-proofed castle. The finality of the air slowly began to fill like smoke, and in all that had become dark the loyalty of the Ninja who dared to go shone like light as they entered a world shrouded in mystery. Things do not go as planned in what is possibly the darkest and most fatalistic of the already noir-ish 60′s fare. Both the decade and it’s distinctive style of shinobi cinema went out on a high note with Mission Iron Castle.
Gateway to Glory
7/10
A young man leaves his widowed mother on her improverished farm and makes his career in the Japanese navy.
Etajima, the Naval Academy
The former Japanese Naval Academy was at Etajima, one of the many islands of the beautiful Inland Sea. Among the new cadets were Ishikawa and Murase. Murase's mother had remarried after his father's death and the impressionable boy hated his overbearing father who held the whip-hand over his gentle mother. Out of defiance of his step-father he became wayward. But he was bright and his teacher persuaded him to enter the Academy as he knew that if he left home, his mother need not feel apologetic towards her husband on his account.
Discipline was strict, their studies were hard and, in between, all the new cadets received an ample share of beatings, at the hands of the senior cadets, for the slightest mistakes. Murase thought all picked on him the most, especially Cadet First Class Kogure, who manhandled him at the slightest excuse.
The Falcon Fighters
7.4/10
In the prewar days leading up to the Second Sino-Japanese War of 1937, head flight instructor Lt. Katō Tateo of the Imperial Japanese Army-Air Corps trains new volunteers from the Army's Infantry to become Japan's next generation of fighter pilots at the Tokorozawa Flying School. Flying Kawasaki Ko-4 biplanes, Lt. Katō will train both friend and future foe alike. But as war in China breaks out, Katō now in command of the 5th Rentai will take his untested men flying antiquated planes into aerial combat against the Chinese Air Force who is now headed by Lt. Cho who Katō both earlier befriended and personally trained himself. While Katō's squadron ultimately achieves air superiority over the skies of Manchuria, it comes at a high price in men to which each loss carries a heavy burden that he alone must carry. As the war widens into the Second World War, Captain Katō must battle an ever advancing array of deadlier new enemies flying ever more modern fighter planes.
