The Big Wave (film)

The Big Wave (Japanese: 大津波, Hepburn: Daitsunami) is a 1961 drama film based on the 1948 novel by Pearl S. Buck. An American-Japanese co-production, the film was directed and produced by Tad Danielewski from a screenplay co-written with Buck, and stars Sessue Hayakawa, Mickey Curtis, Koji Shitara, and Hiroyuki Ota. The story centers on two boys, Yukio (played by Ota and Curtis) and Toru (Shitara and Ichizo Itami), growing up in a coastal village that is often threatened by natural disasters.

Four years after they made a televised adaptation of The Big Wave and founded Stratton Productions, Buck and Danielewski began developing the film in 1960. Buck visited Japan on May 24 and held a meeting to discuss the film's production. Principal photography began in September 1960 and concluded that December.

The Big Wave was screened in Hirosaki and Niigata in 1961, and released in the United States on April 29, 1962. It garnered mostly favorable reviews from Western critics, but many criticized the slow pacing. A lack of existing contemporary documentation has made its box office results as well as screening locations and dates in Japan unknown. The film has since become largely unavailable to the general public. A print owned by the Kawakita Memorial Film Institute was screened in Unzen, Nagasaki on October 29, 2005, but has since been disposed of. The Library of Congress owns the only known remaining print of the film.