Not so widely known here but one of filmdom’s most important survival stories, Shochiku Company started up the year Japan gained Taiwan/Formosa in settlement of the 1894-95 First Sino-Japanese War. Originally involved in producing Kabuki theater performances for the road, the company early realized the potential for what James Agee was later to categorize “the grandest for a major popular art since Shakespeare’s time,” i.e., cinema.

Program Director Richard Peña has written an excellent brief introduction to “The Beauty of the Everyday: Japan’s Shochiku Company at 110,” a September 24-October 20 Special Sidebar to the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s 43rd New York Film Festival. Enlarged with Donald Richie’s readably definitive, updated, just reissued A Hundred Years of Japanese Film (Kodansha International), the outline should be read by all buffs.

And those in the New York area are quadruply blessed by an Aquarian planetary conjunction officially labeled “coincidence.” Starting September 14 and running until early 2006, the Museum of Modern Art is showcasing “Early Autumn: Masterworks of Japanese Cinema from the National Film Center, Tokyo,” fifty-two classics that include several rarities and all newly done in 35mm from original archival or studio negatives. For four weeks, October 21 to November 17, Film Forum plans to screen thirty-one Mikio Naruse (1905-69) films, while Brooklyn Academy of Music’s BAMcinématek celebrates “A Moving Camera: Kenji Mizoguchi,” seven works of that favorite director (1898-1956) of Kurosawa, October 31 through November 22.

The fascinating story is well beyond any reasonable purpose here, although it merits noting that, while the incipient silent film was often looked down upon by Western intellectuals, from studios in eastern capital Tokyo and ancient western capital Kyoto the new art acquired immediate respectability among educated Japanese as well as the groundlings, Molière’s professors and cooks. But, appealing to the same extended audiences that frequented theater, national films were long locked into staginess by inherited acting technique, by onstage benshi who narrated silent films and tied together their unrelated clips (and, logically, resisted the introduction of talkies), and by female parts being reserved for specialized male actors called oyama.

Through the vicissitudes of several wars, the hundred-fifty-thousand-death 1923 Tokyo earthquake, National Policy regulation during the 1930s (by the end of which output was second only to Hollywood’s), the bombing devastation of facilities in 1945 plus Far Eastern Commission/Allied Council censorship that cut production to a mere dozen movies the final trimester of that year, the sci-fi explosion that ended with inroads from television and financial crisis in the ‘70s, Shochiku surpassed rivals Toho and Daiei and best managed to remain afloat of the five majors.

Featuring the U.S. première of Yoji Yamada’s 2004 The Hidden Blade/Kakushi Ken, Oni no Tsume and reaching as far back as the Minoru Murata 1921 Souls on the Road/Rojo no Reikon (to Donald Sosin’s live piano accompaniment), the retrospective touches most any genre imaginable, including the first of “the most successful series in theatrical film history” (Yamada’s Tora-san, Our Lovable Tramp/Otoko wa Tsurai-yo, which inspired forty-seven sequels over thirty years), and can only be summarized even in Film Society releases.

Roughly sandwiched around, but not limited to, the polar shomin-geki of lower-middle-class life and American and European-influenced concerns, and chronologically the modern-times gendai-geki and pre-1871 abolition of feudalism jidai-geki, Lincoln Center’s forty-five films -- only a baker’s dozen or so of which are from familiar names -- constitute a rich potpourri of a major cinema industry and tradition. While no part or parts can approach an idea of the varied whole, three films at quarter-century intervals will be considered below: one a humorous, humane take on the lives of common folk at mid-century, the second a failed though initially interesting police story, the last a case of contemporary technique (minus extreme close-ups) in the service of traditional story.

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Its Ryosuke Saito screenplay liberally taken from a few Masuji Ibuse short stories, Doctor’s Day Off aka No Advice Today/Honjitsu Kyûshin follows the lives of characters seeking to find themselves in chaotic post-war times of “the new democracy.” Viewed by many cognoscenti as the high point of director Minoru Shibuya’s career, this ninety-seven-minute work from 1952 offers as remedy a mix of gentle good humor, the patience and tolerance to be found in tradition, and, above all, love.

Kindly widower Dr. Minumo (Eijirô Yanagi) has for eighteen years dispensed homely advice as much as pills and prescriptions at a small Tokyo clinic. His only son dead as well, assisted by dissatisfied nephew Gosuke and a slew of live-in nurses and a devoted housekeeper-secretary, he sees patients on his day off and always ambles around on house calls for pregnancies, fevers, mumps and facial wrinkles, while dealing with indigent petty hoodlums and thieves, bar girls, bored rich housewives, shell-shocked veterans, rape victims, even wounded geese-cum-imperial eagles.

Although acting is stylized, the camera static, the many characters confusing, time periods inconsistent and attitudes sexist by current standards, there is a winning old-fashioned humane quality to the whole.

Indicative of emerging modern attitudes, patients are obsessed by inability to pay up front, whereas the doctor is willing to accept his fee in eggs or even not at all: “What can I do, my job is saving lives.” Besides treating appendicitis, childbed illnesses, miscarriages, bone problems and other assorted natural shocks that flesh is heir to, he chides foolish husbands and the cosmetic vanities of wealth and tends to broken hearts, as well.

Convinced the war is still on and that trapped birds are downed aviators, crazed Lt. Okasuri pretty near opens and closes the film, while in between the good soul doctor manages to reform and/or pair off everyone: raped Yuko with messenger Shunzo (son of a first patient, who only now can afford to pay her bill); Gosuke with nurse Taki (Keiko Kishi); and geisha Omachi (Chikage Awashima) with blackmailing gambler Kakichi (Koji Tsuruta).

Some out-and-out serious crimes and their perpetrators are reprimanded as gently and off-handedly as the foibles and theirs. This post-atomic world is harsh, but there is no graphic dwelling on that fact. Patience and love are needed and, it is hinted, a continuation of the good of the earth and the past: one tardy lover must be convinced that his woman is not masculine, but feminine and old-fashioned; and an extortionist will change his erring ways, embrace his lady, and take her as bride back to mother and rural village.

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In contrast, crime is modern urban and proceeds from an empty unredeemable psyche twenty-four years later, in The Castle of Sand/Suna no Utsuwa. From a popular novel, recently deceased Yoshitaro Nomura’s film seems to fit squarely into a familiar detective-film mold, the detailed, at first fruitless investigation of an apparently motiveless killing by a patient veteran detective teamed with his eager, admiring younger partner.

Unwieldy at two-and-two-thirds hours, the story breaks into two, really three, distinct phases. One of the two shorter and latter of them is a preposterous, dry police-room summary intershot with the murderer-composer-pianist’s triumphant moment, while the other through a veil lightly would dramatize the thirty-year-old seeds of the crime, lengthily clarifying à la the Mormon “The Country of the Saints” that pads by fifty percent the Sherlock Holmes A Study in Scarlet. But there is no redeeming reason for the film’s tripartite structure.

The longer, first section of the three realistically if pedestrianly covers the tedium of dead-end leads followed up by Tokyo Inspectors Imanishi (Tetsuro Tamba) and Yoshimura (Kensaku Morita), seeking the sixty-five-year-old victim’s identity and, afterwards, the man’s background and sightseeing itinerary and possible reasons for his bludgeoning. The latter proves particularly thorny, for the dead man is revealed as grocer-become-country-policeman Miki (Ken Ogata), theoretically beloved by everyone.

Excessive repetition here, and in much Japanese cinema, irritates Westerners but, as Richie remarks, is an element in the island-nation’s theater and has passed into its cinema. Unseasonable heat and endless station stops and trains inside and out- seem recurrent motifs, but are wasted and come to nothing despite chance rail encounters with handsome rising musician Eiryo Waga (Go Kato) and bar girl Reiko (Yoko Shimada). There will prove to be a relationship between these two, and also with Sachiko (Karin Yamaguchi), Waga’s intended and the daughter of a wealthy wheeling-dealing politician. But such is beside the point, as are improbably recovered shreds of a window-tossed white shirt. Solution will come slowly, in an Osaka government registry rebuilt after the 1945 firebombing, and quickly, in unfairly withheld double take, from a photograph accidentally glimpsed above a movie-house door.

Then on to a grim but unintentionally funny baldly read summary, to a buildup and thunderous symphony-hall success with trite officers-in-the-wings, and to the wanderings of a leprous beggar (Yoshi Kato) and his silent beautiful child. We learn that “Destiny” -- in a double sense -- is not “choosing happiness [but] being born and living life,” that parent is eternally bound to child, and that medical advances can now cure leprosy. Lost along the way are the makings of a good old mystery we saw at the start.

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The prolific Yamada’s The Hidden Blade mixes the traditional in story and attitudes, on the one hand, with twenty-first-century camerawork and sharp angle along with a humor some viewers will find jarring. Too long at a hundred-thirty-two minutes, and reminiscent of its director/co-writer’s The Twilight Samurai/Tasogare Seibei, this fading-warrior version of the modern Western is not, however, revisionist by any stretch. Its females are politically incorrectly subservient and obedient, new winds and fashions from the corrupted East (Edo, to be renamed Tokyo) presage the end of a sacred golden era, and honor of ancestors and code demand revenge and renunciatory retreat into small-island farming or shopkeeping.

In a Japan rapidly metamorphosing only seven years after its forced 1854 “opening,” lower-caste samurai brothers-in-law Munezo Katagiri (Masatoshi Negase) and Samon Shimada (Hidetaka Yashioka) live in the northern village to which the former’s household has been reduced after his father Hanbai’s unmerited Goken River Bridge disgrace and hara-kiri. For three years the modest household has been kept in order by Kie (Takako Matsu), the unsophisticated girl who came from a farm at sixteen to be schooled in housewifery by Munezo’s mother. The faithful maid does not understand but respects distinctions of “caste,” while, rejecting counsel to choose a bride, the honorable samurai cannot admit to himself his immediate love and instead tries to learn newly imported firearm warfare.

The girl leaves for an arranged marriage into the Iseya merchant clan but is so mistreated and overworked that she suffers a miscarriage and, three years later, falls gravely ill. In public defiance of propriety, Munezo demands her divorce, carries her home piggyback, and with her kid sister Bun nurses the woman back to health.

Meantime, former companion and fellow swordsmanship pupil Yaichiro Hazama (Yukiyoshi Ozawa) has been arrested for plotting in the capital but, disgracefully sent home to solitary confinement, escapes to a mountain dwelling with father and daughter-in-law hostages.

The venal, syphilitic Senior Retainer Shogen Lord Hori (Ken Ogata) prompts clan leader Ogata (Nenji Kobayashi) to insist that, although Munezo has surprisingly never fatally wounded anyone, he ferret out and kill superior warrior Yaicyhiro. The confrontation between the two is more realistically depicted than most such encounters, and in fact ends in unusual fashion, but immediate revelations of double-dealing lead to two additional deaths that clear the slate. Bidding forever farewell to teary sister Shino (Tomoko Tabata) and her Samon, accompanied only by dim-witted family servant Naota, Munezo departs over a symbolic arched bridge, to find and fulfill his heart, a wrap-up for so many films from many cultures. Are we all not in the end more alike than we think?

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As with that of any prodigious producer -- and in this case over eight decades -- Shochiku Company’s output is bound to be uneven. In spite of political, social and economic shifts, however, its product has been of a generally high caliber, furnishes an essential capsule of Japanese and world cinema, and is of that enduring interest that is seasoned by variety.

(Photo: from Shochiku's The Hidden Blade)