Hiroshi Inagaki's Rickshaw Man
 

I have searched high and low for this movie on DVD, or even on VHS, but I haven't found much. There was a non-english edition released, and even that is out of print. http://www.hkflix.com/xq/asp/filmID....qx/details.htm

I tried searching amazon.jp but I guess I don't have the proper language packs because I can't read anything on the site, almost all the text shows up as a bunch of question marks.

There is a DVD set of a movie called Shaolin Posse/Rickshaw Man, but according to the reviews I have read, it is not the same Rickshaw Man. It will sometimes be listed as though it is the same film, on netflix for instance the description says that it is directed by Hiroshi Inagaki, stars Toshiro Mifune, etc. but the customer reviews warn that it is not.

Does anyone know if this film is available, in any format, region, etc.? I suspect that there may be a Japanese DVD, but I can not find it. If anyone knows anything about this, I would really appreciate your help, Mifune is my absolute favorite actor and I understand that this is one of his finest performances.

Sorry for thread title, its actually Hiroshi Inagaki, not Kihachi Okamoto.

Japanese DVD, no English subs

Hong Kong DVD, no English subs

The second one is the same version as you linked to.

finding a japanese title is relatively easy, there are several ways of doing it.

one is to find it in english on cdjapan, then remove that name from the items page URL and replace it with their japanese-language equivalent (which has the same layout) - neowing. you can effectively do the same with yesasia, just switch the language option at the top once you've found it.

any browser can display different languages : you're looking for the menu option refering to 'text encoding', in which you'll see many languages mentioned several or more times, and you just need to find the relevant one for the site you're looking at.

here's kihachi okamoto at jmdb :

http://www.jmdb.ne.jp/list/l0050510_5.htm

Thanks for the tips. I love Japanese films, but there aren't a great deal of them available in R1. Criterion does a good job at getting a few of them out, but there are a lot that never make it over here, even high profile ones. Rickshaw man for instance won the Golden Lion at Venice, and the Samurai Trilogy made by the same lead actor and director team (Mifune and Hiroshi Inagaki) has been pretty popular internationally.

there are more subtitled live-action japanese films in america than anywhere else. criterion, though it has picked key directors and some great films, still never manages to compensate for how tastes vary - even if they do manage a large audience who head for the criterion label without realising these same directors have films they may prefer : i'm not that keen in shinoda's 'double suicide' in comparison to 'assassination', which was issued by MoC in the UK. even though films from japan have frequently been award winners at festivals across the globe for decades, the range that fit into that unspoken catagory are still relatively unexplored - IMDB will show which films have won which awards, perfectly easy to browse these lists too.

The only way to see Rickshaw Man with english subs is on VHS, it's titled Rikisha-Man and is very expensive (around 60$).

The french site Cinemasie.com has a pretty good database of asian films and filmographies, there's an english version, but you can't access the news and the reviews as they are french only.