respected kabuki theater star who played the lead. (When Kiyoshi charges Komajūrō with hamming it up, the actor asserts that it's the style of acting that his public pays to see.) In a bit of stunt casting, Ozu did secure Kōji Mitsui from Shochiku for his seventh and final role for the director, as the character who drives the subplot about the amorous escapades of the supporting players; as Hideo Mitsui, the actor had portrayed the protagonist's son in the 1934 version. The troupe is first observed performing a scene from a play about Chuji Kunisada, a 19th-century historical figure who was romanticised as a forest-dwelling Robin-Hood-like hero in a number of plays, novels, and films. In the scene shown, Kunisada (played by Sumiko) is taking his leave of his faithful companions, Gantetsu and Jōhachi, on Mt. Akagi. Wild geese flying south for the winter and crows returning to their nests are used as images of parting. Ozu includes a small joke in the staging of the scene to confirm that this is not a very polished troupe of actors. When Gantetsu delivers the line, "The wild geese are calling as they fly towards the southern skies," he points off-stage into the auditorium. So when Sumiko, as Chuji, turns stage left to deliver the line "And the moon is descending behind the western mountains," she is actually facing east. Despite Nakamura Ganjirō II's fame as a noted star of kabuki theater, he is shown applying full makeup but not actually filmed onstage, though he is heard off-screen as the audience watches him perform and players backstage lament the show's poor attendance. Nakamura recalled that he and Machiko Kyo got sick with a cold after filming the confrontation scene between their characters in the rain. Kazuo Miyagawa served as cinematographer for the film, replacing Ozu's favorite cameraman, Yuharu Atsuta. In an interview, Ozu described the film as an experiment on how to bring life to an old fashioned story in a modern setting and noted that by working with Miyagawa, he realized that different colors required varying degrees of lighting. Release Theatrical Floating Weeds was released on November 17, 1959. It was released theatrically in the United States by Altura Films International on November 24, 1970. Home media Floating Weeds was released on Region 1 DVD by The Criterion Collection as a two-disc set with A Story of Floating Weeds. An