Please feel free to list more movies like this one if you know of some. No Hollywood movies though.
I can recommend "Fighter in the Wind" for all who have not seen that one. A fictive story, but based on the life of Oyama Masutatsu (founder of Kyokushinkai).
Thanks!
Akira Kurosawa´s "Sanshiro Sugata". A VERY old movie, but it has influenced a lot of later martial arts movies.
Also a nice movie is Johnnie To´s "Throw Down" yet, as far as I can remember, it is not a classical martial arts film.
By the way, both movies deal with Judo.
Fighter in the Wind was nice, but I found it to be quite long.
Redbelt
shareIt's interesting that the Japanese movie industry never jumped on the train of kung fu mania back in the 70' and early 80'. There are thousands of Hong Kong kung fu movies but only a few Japanse movies portraying karate (or Aikijujutsu, Jujutsu, Aikido or Judo)
shareKung Fu in fiction goes way back for China and its sister states, the analogue wouldn't be Karate or Judo, but the Chambara and Shinobi films that have been around since the beginning of Japanese cinema.
Haven't seen the move yet, but since there is a mention of Fighter in the Wind, I'm going to assume Rikidozan is similar. I remember reading somewhere that they were apart of a trilogy, but don't know the third film.