Based on the Maupassant’s short story first introduced as “First Love”, but now known as “The Return,” Return of a Man is Kim Soo-yong’s eighth film and his first adaptation. The film simultaneously presents the tragic love of Nam-ho and Kyung-hee who meet again after 20 years of separation caused by the Pacific War and the delightful love story of their children. The film sets itself on the border between “the tearjerker melodrama,” a popular genre of the late 50s’ Korean cinema and “Youth film” that led the 60s. In between the traditional genre and the new, Return of a Man projects the crucial events of the Korean modern history onto the lives of individuals and portrays the social phase that reached the threshold of the modernization. The tragic history such as the Japanese Occupation and the Korean War is inscribed in the permanent scar in Nam-ho’s face. And his son, Chul-soo attempts to break from the past and to leap for the future. There is no place for Nam-ho who symbolizes the tragic past in this modernized country. At the end, he has to return to where he came from. (Cho Young-jung)