Gonza the Spearman is a classic tale of passions subsumed to honor, devotion suffused in duty. Gonza (Hiromi Go), a lancer in the employ of the Asaka clan, allows himself to be romantically linked with both the daughter of his master and the sister of one of his rivals at court and then falls for the master’s wife, Osai (Shima Iwashita), to whom he becomes unwittingly bound in a treacherous plot. For this period melodrama, Masahiro Shinoda teamed up with Kazuo Miyagawa, who captured the pictorial beauty of the early years of the Tokugawa Shogunate, an era of peace.