Director Teinosuke Kinugasa had himself been a female impersonator on stage and screen, lending authenticity and intensity to this early version of An Actor's Revenge. An enormously popular film in its day, originally in three feature-length parts, An Actor's Revenge was edited for re-release in 1952, and is presented tonight in a rare print from Japan. An Actor's Revenge concerns the vengeance of an onnagata, a Kabuki female impersonator, on the villains responsible for his parents' gruesome death. Kazuo Hasegawa plays three roles: Yukinojo, the actor; Yamitaro, a sprightly thief; and Yukinojo's mother. (Hasegawa repeated the roles almost thirty years later in Kon Ichikawa's bold 1963 version.) Theater permeates the life of Yukinojo to the degree that, even off stage, he is engagingly female, and in fact is irresistible to women in that role even as he is a master of swordplay. Kinugasa was an early exponent of the experimental narrative, most famously in A Page of Madness, and here the distance and drama of Kabuki give him leave to be elegantly dramatic in moonlit sets and fluid camerawork, and wildly playful in his staging and special effects. Mystery lurks behind the mobile artifice of the Kabuki screen, and of the moving camera.