Although Japanese filmmaker Umetsugu Inoue made movies in a number of genres, he may be best known as a specialist in musicals. He began making musicals at Nikkatsu Studios in the 1950s, eventually catching the eye of the famed Shaw Brothers, who hired him to apply his magic touch to Hong Kong movies in the late 60s. Though this retrospective includes just a handful of the more than one hundred movies he made in his career, it features three newly subtitled classics, a restored print of a film he made using the rare Konicolor process and one of his standout Hong Kong efforts. – Tom Vick, Curator of Film, Freer and Sackler Galleries, Smithsonian Institution