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context: movies > genres
Samurai Films
One of the major strands of early Japanese cinema was remaking kabuki plays, and samurai were at the centre of many of these. The filmmakers took a lot from Hollywood swashbucklers starring the likes of Flynn and Fairbanks. Samurai movies were a mainstay of the industry, and were among the few genres virtually immune to the increasingly repressive censorship; but on the other hand they were almost impossible to make under the US occupation.
Plenty more on some specific samurai films elsewhere in this section, but I want to add one note: the yakuza film, which became a huge genre, largely derived from the samurai film. Early films often bore little resemblance to the reality, but the style of the yakuza in these films was adopted by the real gangsters.