"The Japanese ghost, being pure passion, is also pure drama. Its appearances have the presence, the panache, of a skilled actor" (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 the voyeuristic thief Yamitaro in an apt moment, when the distinction between the onnagata (female impersonator) Yukinojo and the apparition he creates is no more. Like his protagonist, director Kon 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 can best be 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. The film is enriched by layers of illusion and reflexivity, on and off camera. Here we find Kazuo Hasegawa celebrating his 300th film appearance by recreating the dual roles he had played in Kinugasa's 1935 version of the story: that of the onnagata, whose female persona is maintained offstage as well as on, and of the burly, small-time crook Yamitaro, who enjoys nothing more than spying on the actor in his offstage charades.