The title betrays the sub-genre of this period drama (jidai geki), treachery and conspiracy within a samurai clan. The two antagonists are the sinister Sannosuke (Ippei Soma) and the young Shinhachi (Chojiro Hayashi), who returns home full of optimism at the beginning of the film after three years' service in the capital. He will be seeing his fiancée Chigusa (Akiko Chihaya) again –but the prince has taken her as his concubine. From then on Shinhachi issuspected of vengeance - inspired treachery against the head of the clan, eventhough he is loyal to the point of self-sacrifice and resists all incitements of the scheming Sannosuke. [...]
The film is punctuated by long, lyrical intertitles – providing precious indications of the stylistic register of the benshi who would have narrated the film – and by at least five beautifully choreographed fight scenes.
After the financial disaster of his independently produced experiment KURUTTA IPPEIJI (A Page of Madness, 1926),Teinosuke Kinugasa started making jidaigeki at the Shimogamo studio in Kyoto for Shochiku, which until then had specialised in contemporary gendai geki appealing to its predominantly female audience. In 1927 Kinugasa launched the glittering screen career of Chojiro Hayashi, a new type of jidai geki hero. In sharp contrast with such heroic, tough stars of the genre as Tsumasaburo Bando (Orochi) and Denjiro Okochi (Chuji Tabi Nikki),Hayashi's screen persona was that of a bidanshi, a slim youth whose androgynous beauty rivalled the attractions of any female star without losing any masculine appeal. After Hayashi left Shochiku in 1937,he was to change his screen name to Kazuo Hasegawa. FUUN JOSHI marked the beginning of the actor's lifelong working relationship with Kinugasa.
As with AI NO MACHI, a nitrate positive of FUUNJOSHI survived in Europe and was preserved by the Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique in Brussels. The film was shipped with others by Shochiku to Berlin in1929, at a time when the company was trying to develop an export market inEurope – a project which, however, was to be unsuccessful [...].
Mariann Lewinsky, Le Giornate del cinema muto /Pordenone Silent Film Festival catalogue, 2001