Heinosuke Gosho

Early master of Japanese cinema whose more than 100 features include the country's first sound film, "The Neighbor's Wife and Mine" (1931). Many of Gosho's works, through the mid-1930s and again after WWII, deal with common, everyday subjects; these are treated with a mixture of wry wit and sentimentality, and Gosho displays an honest, if simplistic understanding of his (mostly working-class) characters. "An Inn at Osaka" (1954) and "Growing Up" (1955) are prime examples of his work to have reached the West.