AllMovie

Japanese filmmaker Heinosuke Gosho started out in the silent era and went on to direct his country's first full-sound film, The Neighbor's Wife and Mine (1931). The son of a geisha, the Tokyo-born Gosho attended a commercial school and entered films in 1923 as an assistant director to Shimazu. Two years later, Gosho became a full-fledged director and was an extremely popular figure in Japanese cinema, noted for his faithful adaptations of novels and plays. He is also noted for his wry and occasionally moving looks at the travails and foibles of the ordinary lives of working-class people. In addition to directing, Gosho often wrote his own scripts and founded his own production company in 1949. Though he made close to 100 films between the 1920s and the late 1960s, he is still relatively unknown in the Western World where his best-known film is Four Chimneys (1953). Other good examples of his films available in the West include An Inn at Osaka (1954) and Growing Up Twice (1955).