DVD of the Week: Giants and Toys

“Giants and Toys,” the 1958 film that I discuss in this clip, was directed by Yasuzo Masumura, a director of distinctive and idiosyncratic talent. He was a filmmaker of bitter conflict, a poet of pleasure and pain; the vibrant, high-relief plasticity of his images conveys an intense physicality. When he filmed bubbly pop-culture satires—such as this one—he exposed the cutthroat corporate maneuvering and the corrupted exercise of power that went into the making of the eye-catching brain candy of the media—and, for that matter, movies, including his own. (The industry comes in for some barbs in the course of the action.) Even the love affairs in his film are rotted out by the pursuit of money and power and the oppressive weight of tradition. Masumura made war films (I wrote about his terrifying Second World War drama “Red Angel” when it came out on DVD, in 2007) and erotic melodramas; this caustic corporate comedy is of a piece with them.