Kurahara achieved his innovative peak in the 1960s, during a period of wide-spread and cutting edge jolts of creativeness at all amounts of European theatre, business to undercover. The almost unrivaled 1960 youth-gone-wild masterwork The Distorted Ones was Kurahara’s most exciting participation to the exigencies of the moment: a vivid snarl at all factors decent, cleanse with a crazy feeling of independence and strength, despite its roots deeply within the facilities program. Kurahara would proceed operating for Nikkatsu until 1967, his globetrotting, road-movie-ing, and itinerant location-shooting propensities developed by the studio’s unfolding generation method of the time: the recently inaugurated and soon to be complex mukokuseki (borderless) measures film, loaded with European vehicles, way-out pop art generation style, and worldwide styles carried by European competitors for hottest guy on earth—Ishihara, Akira Kobayashi, Joe Shishido, and several other attractive hunks from the studio’s ever-evolving “diamond line” of “mighty folks.” Always in the mainstream—even as he energetically detoured into spectacular France New Wave–inspired improvisations like The Distorted Ones, off-kilter versions on styles from Fellini’s La strada in the incredible 1962 Shishido celebrity vehicle–cum–art film Wine glass Ashton, and off-the-charts freakouts like 1964’s taboo-charring Dark-colored Sun—Kurahara was not of Japan’s beginning Sixties New Trend so much as together with it: a modern if always more retail oriented other visitor of Oshima’s and Imamura’s whose thoughts was ever riffing on the innovative developments and intense tempos of when, even as he enhanced upon that language and included unique shadings and customized impulses all his own. 

 

Born in the expansive town of Kuching, in Sarawak, Borneo (where his dad maintained a plastic plantation), Kurahara came back to Asia as a boy and provided in the Fast near the end of Community War II, without seeing measures, then joined the film application at Nihon School. An beginning associate with a pre-Godzilla Ishiro Ford led to an apprenticeship under Toho Companies expert Kajiro Yamamoto (former teacher to Akira Kurosawa), but Kurahara kept facilities purchasing, operating temporarily as an associate film director at Shochiku before negotiating on Nikkatsu in 1954, the season Japan’s most ancient film manufacturer started again generation after a long war time break. Still an associate film director during the brief zenith of the taiyozoku-eiga, Kurahara proved helpful on powerful auteur Ko Nakahira’s sun group box-office demolish Crazed Fruit before creating his directorial very first with 1957’s I Am Holding out, a sultry, noirish enchanting car for youthful on- and offscreen fans Ishihara and Mie Kitahara. (Nikkatsu associate Seijun Suzuki had started his guiding profession just the season before.) Working well within the studio’s treatments of the period, Kurahara used the rest of the 1950's improving his grinds on properly designed theft capers, interoffice espionage potboilers, and dream-logic post-sun-tribe younger generation pictures like 1959’s The Lady from the Sea, about a relationship between a taiyozoku-esque youngster yachting fanatic and a shark that has believed voluptuously women people type.