Hiromichi Horikawa

Hiromichi Horikawa (28 November 1916 – 5 September 2012) was a Japanese director and assistant director.

Akira Kurosawa’s assistant on numerous films including Ikiru (1952) and Seven Samurai (1954), Horikawa never achieved his mentor’s fame. Kurosawa himself scripted his directorial debut, Tomorrow I’ll Be a Fire-Tree (1955), about an adolescent and the first three women in his life. A concern with youthful experience was also visible in Horikawa’s second and third films, Summer in Eclipse (1956), a taiyōzoku (“sun tribe”) film based on a Shintarō Ishihara novel, and Last Days of the Samurai (1957), a reworking of the Chūshingura story that focused particularly on the youngest of the participating ronin and his fiancée. Another retelling of a classical Japanese story was the Chikamatsu adaptation The Oil-Hell Murder (1957), after which Horikawa returned to contemporary subject matter with The Naked General (1958), a portrait of mentally handicapped collage artist Kiyoshi Yamashita.