"The Japanese ghost, being pure passion, is also pure drama" (Donald Richie). In An Actor's Revenge a Kabuki actor knowingly manipulates the gossamer walls between theater, life, and afterlife, to wreak a terrible vengeance on three villains responsible for his parents' death. "An actor's revenge is always a surprise," comments a spy in an apt moment, when the distinction between the female impersonator Yukinojo and the apparition he creates is no more. Like his protagonist, Ichikawa happily casts such distinctions to the stage wings in interpreting a hoary melodrama, handed to him as a commercial penance, with an audacious screen formalism that has best been compared to a dazzling, multi-layered jazz improvisation. He juxtaposes painted sets with naturalistic scenes, lets shadows go free of the figures who made them, combines comic-book with Bertolt Brecht to bring the artifice of traditional Kabuki-with its lifts, revolving stages, disappearing flats-into the film age. Kazuo Hasegawa recreates the dual roles he had played in Kinugasa's 1935 version of An Actor's Revenge: that of the onnagata, Yukinojo, whose female persona is maintained onstage and off; and of the burly smalltime crook Yamitaro, who enjoys nothing more than spying on the actor in his offstage charades.