DVD NOTES.

MARTIAL ARTISTRY -- It's news when an American director makes a movie about Japanese soldiers in the Second World War, but Japanese filmmakers have been making them for decades. One of the classics, "Red Angel," by Yasuzo Masumura, from 1966, newly released by the enterprising San Francisco-based distributor Fantoma, goes farther than "Letters from Iwo Jima" in depicting extraordinary acts of depravity and humanity within the ranks of the Imperial Army.

Set in 1939 in occupied China, the story concerns Sakura Nishi (Ayako Wakao), a young Army nurse at a field hospital in Tientsin, who is raped on her first night of rounds by Private Sakamoto, one of many soldiers shown to be animalized by the certain death that awaits them. (As one says, "We either kill men, screw women, or eat rations.") Sent to a field hospital near the besieged front, Sakura helps the chief surgeon, Dr. Okabe (Shinsuke Ashida), perform hundreds of amputations in three sleepless days, and falls in love with him. The cultured and cynical doctor, a freethinker who calls the war stupid and thinks that the maimed soldiers he's saved are better off dead (amputees were not allowed to return home, lest they disillusion the populace), has also become a morphine addict, which renders him impotent; Sakura takes it upon herself to cure him, helping him through the agony of withdrawal.

For Masumura, violence and sex keep close company, as with one ...