Over the course of five decades, 16 of his films made the yearly top ten lists at the Japanese box office—a second place record in the industry.
[1] It was a B movie, a low-budget film meant to fill out a double feature, but he quickly ascended to the A list that same year.
[1][4] Masuda and Ishihara's follow-up, Red Quay (1958), was based on the 1937 French film Pépé le Moko.
It was also Masuda's first jidaigeki (period drama) and predated the popularity of the ninkyo (honour versus duty) subgenre which began in 1963 and continued late into the decade.
However, Masuda's biggest hit was Red Handkerchief in which Ishihara stars as a disgraced police detective–cum–construction worker who shoots and kills his girlfriend's father.
Nikkatsu viewed new Diamond Line star Tetsuya Watari as a potential successor and they had Masuda remake a number of Ishihara films with him.
Masuda loosely remade his own Red Quay into Velvet Hustler (1967) which stars Watari as a "happy-go-lucky" hitman who goes on the run after killing a yakuza boss.
The two returned to regular modus operandi in Gangster VIP (1968), which was based on the memoirs of real-life yakuza Goro Fujita.
[1][6] Remaining a sought after talent, Masuda was approached by the Twentieth Century-Fox Corporation to co-direct the blockbuster American-Japanese co-production Tora!
[1] Fox producer Elmo Williams had recommended him based on his Red Handkerchief and reputation as a "creative mind and a disciplined worker".
[8] Throughout the next 20 years Masuda helmed a string of major studio productions, including Catastrophe 1999: The Prophecies of Nostradamus (aka Last Days of Planet Earth, 1974) and three more big-budget war films for the Toei Company: The Battle of Port Arthur (1980), The Great Japanese Empire (1982) and The Battle of the Sea of Japan: Go to Sea (1983).
[6] He invited Masuda to direct on Leiji Matsumoto's science fiction television and film series Space Battleship Yamato (aka Star Blazers).
The eponymous first film gained popularity when it played against Star Wars (1977) in Japanese theatres and it has been cited as the beginning of the golden age of anime.
[9][10] He also made room for more intimate subject matter such as his High Teen Boogie (1982), in which a teenage biker falls in love with a straight-laced girl.
It starred Sayuri Yoshinaga as a detective in near-future Tokyo and Omar Sharif as a Chinese Triad boss.
His primary mentor at Nikkatsu was Umetsugu Inoue from whom he learned the value of linking together large setpieces to draw in audiences.
He continued to write for his own films but mostly due to time constraints as he would have preferred to hire other writers, which did after he left the studio.
[2] The actors also were favoured over a distinctive visual style which, as writer Jasper Sharp suggested, may have accounted for his popular success in the star-based studio system.
[11] Despite production line genre work forming the bulk of his oeuvre, Masuda has always been able to express his views, even subversive ones,[12] and reflect on societal issues through his films.
[1][7] His films from this period remain little known outside Japan, largely eclipsed by the cult fame of Nikkatsu enfant terrible Seijun Suzuki.
Tora!, but his contributions somewhat are overshadowed by co-directors Richard Fleischer and Kinji Fukasaku—the latter of which later achieved international cult notoriety for his own yakuza films—despite having been responsible for the lion's share of the Japanese segments of the film.
The first Yamato film originally reached overseas audiences in 1978, including theatrical screenings in England and American television.
[19] No Borders, No Limits is an expanded edition of the version that accompanied the Nikkatsu Action Cinema retrospective Schilling programmed for the Far East Film Festival.
[20][21][22] The Criterion Collection has optioned a number of films from the retrospective to be made available for the first time in the North American home video market.
[23] At the 1981 Japanese Academy Awards, Toshio Masuda was nominated for Best Director for his film The Battle of Port Arthur.
He developed a reputation as a "hitmaker" and 16 of his films breached the top ten list for domestic Japanese box-office revenues.