Born 1898, Uchida began his career as an actor before making his directorial debut with Officer Konishi (Ah, Konishi-junsa) in 1922, co-directed with A Page of Madness's Teinosuke Kinugasa. True to the period, he produced literally dozens of films during the silent and early talkie period leading up to the war, though how many of these still survive is unclear. In 1945, the left-leaning director traveled to the formerly Japanese-occupied area of Manchuria in China to join the Manchuria Film Association, or Man'ei, and was not to return for ten years. One can only guess what happened during this time, but fortunately he came back to Japan to create a significant and diverse body of works right up to the 1971 film, Swords of Death .