Souls on the Road

Minoru Murata, Shochiku, 1921, produced with Kaoru Osanai. Two plots in the snow: a failed violinist walks home with wife and child and is turned away by his father; two ex-convicts beg at a villa on Christmas Eve. The sources are Gorky's The Lower Depths and Wilhelm Schmidtbonn. Eye Filmmuseum calls it the oldest Shochiku feature known to survive. Osanai had worked in Reinhardt's theatre, and the parallel cutting is Griffith grammar in a Japanese winter.