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No Bosoms. The man who capitalized most on the foreign imports and touched off the real postwar revival in Japanese moviemaking was Masaichi Nagata, 48, boss of the Daiei studios, who was purged for his World War II propaganda films, but soon after was taken off the purge list. Nagata studied foreign imports to find out what gave them their appeal, then applied what he could to his own products. For Japanese audiences, he decided, the romance of French movies would not do, nor would the sexiness of Italian films. "Unfortunately," says Nagata, "we don't have the bosoms, and even if we did, the kimono would hide them." Nagata's formula: a typically Oriental story, plus clever camera work. Rashomon, which has so far grossed $310,000 in the U.S., was the first result; Ugetsu was the second.
Nagata believes that there should be a U.S. market for three to five topnotch Japanese films a year, and that each should gross $1,000,000. For Japanese moviemakers, this would mean big profits, since their costs are low. Top salaries for stars are about $11,000 a film, extras make 80¢ a day, and the average cost of a full-length black and white film is only around $63,000 v. $900.000 in the U.S. And, says Nagata: "By showing the Japanese countryside in all its beauty, we can attract tourists and more dollars"—as well as stimulate U.S. interest in Japanese houses, furniture, pottery, etc. But the biggest payoff would be political. The worst blight on Japan's movie industry is still the glut of pro-Communist films financed by left-wing unions, the Japanese Communist Party. Red China and Russia (which often buy them for cash in advance). Nagata thinks that if the U.S. market proves profitable, the other major studios would stop distribution of Communist films. They might even start making some with a pro-American slant.