Flower and Snake

Flower and Snake
Poster to the Nikkatsu Roman porno film, Flower and Snake
Directed by	Masaru Konuma
Written by	Oniroku Dan (novel) Yôzô Tanaka
Starring	Naomi Tani Nagatoshi Sakamoto
Music by	Riichiro Manabe
Cinematography	Shohei Ando
Distributed by	Nikkatsu
Release date	June 22, 1974 (Japan)
Running time	74 minutes
Country	Japan
Language	Japanese

Flower and Snake (花と蛇, Hana to hebi^?) aka Flowers and Serpents (1974) is a Japanese soft-core S&M film starring Naomi Tani, directed by Masaru Konuma and produced by Nikkatsu. Based on a novel by Oniroku Dan (born 1931), Japan's best-known author of S&M fiction, Flower and Snake was the first of Nikkatsu’s Roman Porno films to deal with an S&M theme. Together with the later Wife to be Sacrificed (also directed by Konuma in 1974, and starring the same female and male leads) this film is credited with starting the S&M Roman Porno series which helped save Nikkatsu from collapse during the 1970s.

In a very successful effort to avoid bankruptcy, Nikkatsu, Japan's oldest major film studio, had entered the pink film, or soft-core pornography, genre three years earlier, in 1971, with its popular and critically praised Roman Porno series. However 1974 was proving to be another difficult year for the studio, with no real box-office hits.

Since the late 1960s, Naomi Tani had been known as the "Queen of Pink," the most popular actress in the low-budget, independent "pink films" which dominated Japan's domestic cinematic market. Nikkatsu had been trying to recruit Tani into their Roman Porno series for years, but she had always refused since the studio had been reluctant to enter the S&M genre, which was Tani's specialty. Tani finally agreed to join the studio on the condition that her first film be based on the Oniroku Dan S&M novel Flower and Snake. Tani had already starred in a pink film version of Dan's novel entitled Flower and Snake: Rearing the Flesh (花と蛇より　肉の飼育^?), released by Yamabe Pro.