UEHARA Ken (1909-1991) was the star who made a spectacular appearance in the woman’s film (josei-eiga) produced at the prewar Shochiku-Ofuna studio. It is, thus, often considered that Uehara, as a Shochiku-Ofuna star, performed a typical male role of nimaime, a kabuki character implying the refined young lover in classical Japanese cinema. His star image is, however, apparently different from a traditional masculine figure in the kabuki and the jidaigeki.
It is usually mentioned that classical Hollywood cinema had influenced Japanese cinema at various moments during the period of the 1910s to the 1930s. Japanese film melodrama, whose origin was in foreign, had to be transformed to one of domestic genres in Japanese mainstream cinema. In this aspect, Uehara should be reexamined as a star who was born as the first typical hero of domestic melodrama in Japan.
From a view point of film genre theories and star studies, this paper investigates Uehara and his star persona. The main purpose of this study is to explore critical questions of female spectatorship and possibilities of women’s visual pleasure. Finally, it demonstrates that the woman’s film starring Uehara Ken is one of the prototypes of melodrama in Japanese cinema of the 1930s.
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