Kunio Watanabe

Kunio Watanabe (渡辺邦男 Watanabe Kunio, June 3, 1899; Tagata District, Shizuoka - November 5, 1981; Tagata District {age 82} ) is a Japanese film director, screenwriter, actor, and former activist. He is known for directing over 136 films during his time at Shintoho, Nikkatsu, Toei, and of course Toho companies. His most popular films would be Ikoku no oka (1949), Rajô no ureî (1950) and Onna Sanshiro (1950).
== Career ==
Watanabe grew up in the town of Mishima, in the city of Tagata District (Shizuoka Prefecture). He then studied at Waseda University in Tokyo and by 1924, joining the film industry at Nikkatsu studio as an actor. After a few years as an actor, he finally became a film director in 1927. Then in 1937 Watanabe joined Toho in which he has directed an average of about nine films a year. He made, according to film historian Stuart Galbraith IV, a large number of low-budget B-roll films. 
He then collaborated in parallel with Shintoho (a pro-union film company), being even more prolific and contributing, as production coordinator, leads to the development of this company. In the summer of 1953, when Akira Kurosawa began directing Seven Samurai and exceeded the production budget, Toho's staff circulated the idea of ​​replacing Kurosawa with Watanabe, but that intention did not materialize. The idea was to get Kurosawa to finish the film as soon as possible.
Watanabe was an anti-communist filmmaker, and in the post-war years, he accused many of the people in the Japanese film industry of being communists, causing concern among filmmakers.In the early 1950s, he produced six Toho films of making "communist propaganda," including two older films (One Wonderful Sunday and Those Who Make Tomorrow), which was directed by Kurosawa himself. He appeared as an actor in about twenty films between 1925 and 1927, directed over 230 films and wrote a hundred of screenplays between 1928 and 1970. In 1970, Watanabe made a remake of Kurosawa's Sugata Sanshirō for Shochiku Studio and was the last movie he would directed before his retirement.
He passed away in 1981 from pneumonia at the age of 82 in his hometown of the Tagata District. 
== Filmography ==
* All the films on IMDB