#black river

Path along the Roxbury Black River Trail in Succasunna, New Jersey.

Masaki Kobayashi’s remarkable slice-of-life drama Black River takes place in a slum near an American army base. It’s a festering dump, inhabited by a variety of people, from lowlifes attempting to make a living by exploiting the soldiers to dead-enders with no place else to go. Into this morass wanders a naïve university student, Nishida (Fumio Watanabe), in search of cheap lodgings, who tries to make a little money as a used-book seller. He falls for a pretty waitress, Shizuko (Ineko Arima), who longs to escape from the slum, but their attachment puts him in the line of fire of a swaggering young gangster called Killer Joe (Tatsuya Nakadai), who has his own designs on Shizuko. Presiding over everything is the landlady, who has plans for the property that don’t include its tenants. She’s played to a fare-thee-well by the great Isuzu Yamada, perhaps best known as the Lady Macbeth equivalent in Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood (1957). Here she’s outfitted with a snaggly golden-toothed grill, a fitting correlative for the concealment of the moral rot within. But the real scene-stealer of the film is Nakadai as Killer Joe, in one of his first major film appearances, perfectly blending the charisma that would make him a star with the menace that would allow him to play memorable villains as well as heroes.

Black River

Black River

Black River

Source: www.pixnoy.com/post/6735473871426063605636.

W Remington Street, Black River, New York.

Rating: ★★★ Days Read: 12/30/25 - 1/3/26 (5) Recommend: Sure, if you're into crime thrillers Content Warnings: Sexual Assault, Murder, Serial Killers