Mikio Naruse - Tabi yakusha aka Travelling Actors (1940)

Lovely comedy about two actors who play the front and back legs of a horse and feel their artistry is unappreciated. When the self important barber who funds their show decides to replace them with a real horse, they plan to get even.









Travelling Actors remains Naruse's out-and-out funniest work, a comedy of numerous surface pleasures that unexpectedly deepens in retrospect. In the characters of Hyoroku Ichikawa (Kamatari Fujiwara) and Senpei Nakamura (Kan Yanagiya)—low-level, yet intensely serious traveling theater actors who play, respectively, the front and rear legs of a pantomime horse—Naruse creates a hilariously existential tragicomic duo, a Vladimir and Estragon who have found a Godot that, as narrative circumstances soon dictate, they must defend at any and all costs. (Keith Uhlich - Slant)













5D