Chutaro of Banba /番場の忠太郎/ Banba no Chutaro (1955)

Obscure Japanese Film #8 

Isuzu Yamada and Tomisaburo Wakayama

Based on a play by Shin Hasegawa entitled Mabuta no haha (which translates rather awkwardly as ‘Mother of the Eyelids’), Chutaro of Banba stars Tomisaburo ‘Lone Wolf’ Wakayama in one of his first film appearances as the title character. Having already been a famous kabuki actor before quitting the theatre in 1953 to concentrate on judo (becoming a black-belt in the process), Wakayama’s cinema career saw him go straight into starring roles in action pictures.

Chutaro of Banba has an autobiographical element as original author Hasegawa had himself been separated from his mother at an early age and the hero of his story is a matatabi (wandering yakuza) searching for his long-lost mother. Along the way, Chutaro gets into fights with less honourable yakuza, picks up a couple of waifs and strays, makes a few friends and falls in love. The opening fight scene may seem a little tame as, pre-dating Yojimbo by several years,  it’s too early for spurting blood, hacked-off limbs and even the sound of clashing swords, but Wakayama moves pretty fast for a chubby guy and is even better in a later fight scene when he fends off multiple opponents with a water dipper. 

 

The film boasts a strong supporting cast, three of whom have Kurosawa connections. Chutaro’s friend Hanji is played by Koji Mitsui, who appeared in seven Kurosawa films from Scandal to Dodes’ka-den, most notably as the gambler in The Lower Depths, where he got to deliver the memorable last line, ‘Idiot…you ruined the song.’ He rarely played a leading role, but specialised in acerbic character parts in which his wonderfully rasping voice and expressive facial features made an indelible impression. The English Wikipedia page for Mitsui is surprisingly detailed and well worth a read.

 

Koji Mitsui

Hanji’s sister, who supplies the love interest in the film, is played by Yoko Katsuragi, who was Takashi Shimura’s sick daughter in Kurosawa’s Scandal and also popped up in the Kurosawa-scripted The Portrait (1948), directed by Keisuke Kinoshita, although she has a better part in Kinoshita’s A Broken Drum (1949) as an aspiring actress playing Hamlet. 

Yoko Katsuragi

 

Most notably, however, Isuzu Yamada appears as Chutaro’s mother. Yamada was one of the greats and appeared in three films for Kurosawa, always in villainous roles - most memorably as the Lady Macbeth equivalent in Throne of Blood. In her youth she had been a beauty, often playing romantic leads, and she had in fact appeared in the first version of Mabuta no haha in 1931 – not as the mother, but as Otose, the half-sister Chutaro never knew he had (played in the 1955 version by Sanae Mitsuoka). 

 

Isuzu Yamada

The 1931 film was a silent directed by Hiroshi Inagaki and starring Tomu Uchida favourite Chiezo Kataoka (Bloody Spear at Mount Fuji / Swords in the Moonlight / Killing in Yoshiwara). Kataoka repeated the role for a 1936 version, while a third appeared in 1938 starring Kazuo Hasegawa (Gate of Hell / An Actor’s Revenge), making the 1955 film the fourth but not the last: in 1962, Tai Kato directed a remake with Kinnosuke Nakamura.

This 1955 Shintoho version is directed by Nobuo Nakagawa, remembered mostly for his horror films and sometimes referred to as ‘the Roger Corman of Japan.’ His best-known film nowadays seems to be Jigoku (Hell, 1960) – a shame, as I personally thought that was easily the worst of the five Nakagawa films I’ve seen. Much better were The Ghost of Yotsuya and a couple of female-focused films noir, Death Row Woman and A Wicked Woman. 

Hisaya Morishige, Tomisaburo Wakayama and Yoko Katsuragi

 

Chutaro of Banba has a lot going for it – the strong cast, which also includes an enjoyable guest star appearance by Hisaya Morishige as a surprisingly genial law enforcement official; Kagai Okaido’s dynamic camerawork and excellent sense of composition, and a pretty decent music score by Yasuji Kiyose. The story may be sentimental but there are quirks enough to keep things interesting all the way to the finale, when we are treated to one of those unnecessarily  sad endings that Japanese audiences seem to crave (see my earlier review of The Saga of Tanegashima for more thoughts on this phenomenon).

The film can be bought in a good quality print with excellent subtitles (by Merlin David) here: https://samuraidvd.com/chutaro-of-banba/ 

A Thousand Cranes / 千羽鶴 / Senba zuru (1969)

Obscure Japanese Film #7

 

Originally published in serial form between 1949 and 1951, then as a single volume the following year, Yasunari Kawabata’s novella A Thousand Cranes was first filmed in 1953 by director Kozaburo Yoshimura. According to IMDb, that version was co-written by Kaneto Shindo and Nagisa Oshima, but this seems highly unlikely as Oshima was still at university then, so it’s probable that Shindo was entirely responsible for the adaptation. The 1969 version also credits Shindo with the screenplay, so it could be that director Yasuzo Masumura was working from the same script as Yoshimura. 

The story deals with the complex relationships between the 28-year-old Kikuji and the two former mistresses of his deceased father. Chikako, a teacher of the tea ceremony, has an ugly black birthmark on her breast which Kikuji once saw as a child; it seems to simultaneously repel and fascinate him. She’s an insensitive, interfering busybody who takes it upon herself to arrange an unasked-for marriage match for Kikuji, although it’s by no means certain that she has the young man’s best interests at heart.  Chikako seems never to have recovered from the insult of being dumped by Kikuji’s father in favour of Mrs Ota, a widow, although she nevertheless remained part of his life on platonic terms after the event. Unwisely, Kikuji embarks on an affair with Mrs Ota, who is almost the polar opposite of Chikako: fragile, sentimental and over-emotional. 

Like Koji Takahashi in Two Wives, Mikijiro Hira (as Kikuji) has the difficult task of playing the stolid male lead between two much bigger female stars. Machiko Kyo gives the best performance as the scheming, impervious-to-insult Chikako, and one can see the schadenfreude written all over her face when tragedy strikes. Ayako Wakao has the lesser part as Mrs Ota, a rather one-note character usually seen either in tears or on the verge of fainting. One interesting difference from the book is that Mrs Ota is portrayed as being less sincere and more manipulative in the film – on two occasions, she appears to surreptitiously check that her tears are having the desired effect on Kikuji. Both women are well-cast, although the then 35-year-old Wakao is ten years younger than the character described in the book and looks it. A Thousand Cranes was the last of 20 films directed by Masumura in which she starred. Apparently, in a 1970 interview, he described her as ‘selfish and calculating’, going on to say that ‘she’s hardly a pure-hearted woman and she knows it,’ [1] so it certainly appears that the two fell out and one wonders whether Masumura’s view of her coloured the portrayal of Mrs Ota in the movie. 

 

I have to admit to having found the Kawabata novella entirely unengaging and Masumura’s film did little to improve matters for me. Although certainly very faithful to the literary original, this unfortunately translates as a series of scenes of people talking in rooms, which seldom makes for exciting cinema. No doubt this meant that only a small budget was required – something which may have been a consideration as the studio responsible (Daiei) was struggling at this point and would go bankrupt two years later. Wakao is good as ever, but A Thousand Cranes is unlikely to satisfy her fans as she has the lesser of the two main female roles and disappears less than an hour into the film.

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[1] Quoted by ‘manfromplanetx’ in his review of The Graceful Brute (1962) on IMDb. Unfortunately, I don’t know the original source.

Games aka Play / 遊び / Asobi (1971)

 Obscure Japanese Film #6

Based on a short story by Akiyuki Nosaka[1], Asobi tells the story of a 16-year-old girl who meets an 18-year-old boy by chance and falls in love for the first time. However, this is a Yasujiro Masumura film – his last for Daiei before the studio went bankrupt – so it’s by no means as sweet as it sounds. The main story takes place over a period of around 24 hours, but is repeatedly interrupted by abrupt flashbacks, some of which shine a light on the girl’s past and others on the boy’s. She has just finished high school and gone straight into a poorly-paid factory job but is considering going to work as a bar hostess to earn more. Her father is an abusive alcoholic, her sister is sick and confined to her bed, and her mother persistently asks her for money. The boy’s mother (Kurosawa favourite Akemi Negishi) is another alcoholic; he’s fallen in with some extremely nasty yakuza who use him to deceive young girls into going to a hotel where they will be drugged, raped and photographed for pornographic pictures. There is some tension in the story as we wait to see whether the boy will leave the girl in the hands of these creeps.

Unfortunately, what could have been quite a moving tale failed to work for me for a number of reasons. The colour cinemascope photography and editing are very well-executed as one would expect from Masumura, but I never believed that these characters were real people. Despite a good performance by Keiko Takahashi, the girl seems naïve to an absurd degree, while debut actor Masaaki Daimon as the boy – who tries desperately to appear older and tougher than he is – shouts every line of dialogue at the top of his voice, even during a visit to the cinema! Daimon is by no means a bad actor, but I felt that Masumura should have asked him to dial it down a bit. These two characters make a tiresome pair and things are not helped by the over-the-top portrayals of the many sleazy characters who surround them. There’s a high slap-count characteristic of Japanese films of this era (especially those of Masumura), and every slap sounds like a whiplash hitting sheet metal, while the score by Takeo Watanabe sounds like something from an Italian giallo. 

The film was likely intended mainly as a vehicle for Keiko Takahashi, Daiei’s controversial young star who had made her debut appearing nude at the age of 15 in the 1970 film High School Student Blues. Altogether, it’s an uneasy combination of sex, violence and sentimentality that fails to gel.

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[1] Nosaka also wrote Grave of the Fireflies, as well as the novel upon which Shohei Imamura’s The Pornographers was based.

Two Wives / 妻二人 / Tsuma futari (1967)

Obscure Japanese Film #5

In the 16^th of their 20 films together, Yasuzo Masumura directs star Ayako Wakao in a contemporary romantic crime drama closely based on a 1955 novel by Patrick Quentin entitled The Man with Two Wives.[1]  The screenplay is by the prolific Kaneto Shindo, best-known in the West as the writer-director of Onibaba (1964). Apart from the Japanese setting, the main difference between the book and the film is that the former is a whodunit, whereas in the film the identity of the guilty party is never a mystery. Although Wakao is excellent as always, in truth she is somewhat miscast as the character she plays is supposed to be dowdy and Wakao, of course, is the antithesis of that particular quality.

The film opens with Kenzo (Koji Takahashi) running into his old flame Junko (Mariko Okada) one night and finding her down on her luck and shacked up with the sleazy Kobayashi (Takao Ito), who beats her up whenever he gets drunk. Junko was the only person who believed in Kenzo when he was a struggling young writer, but when he abandoned his literary aspirations and went to work for a magazine (Housewife’s World), he caught the interest of the boss’s daughter, Michiko (Wakao), married her, and so abandoned Junko as well. Nevertheless, he still has feelings for Junko.

Michiko is a philanthropist who has set up a fund for disabled children, but she tends to irritate others, especially her rebellious sister, Rie (Kyoko Enami), who sees her as a meddling, self-righteous do-gooder. For her part, Junko clearly never got over Kenzo, and was only attracted to Kobayashi as he, too, is a struggling young writer. At her suggestion, Kobayashi submits a manuscript to Housewife’s World through Kenzo; although it’s rejected, he manages to get himself introduced to Rie and begins plotting to marry her for her money and abandon Junko, just as Kenzo had done (albeit out of weakness rather than cold calculation). However, Michiko sees through Kobayashi and takes matters into her own hands, but her actions unwittingly lead to blackmail, murder and a complicated web of lies which eventually expose corruption among those close to her and give the lie to the magazine’s tagline: ‘Clean! Bright! Beautiful!’

I found the male lead, Koji Takahashi, a little wooden, but he may well have been instructed to play the role in stoic fashion and keep it low key. He seems to have been a TV star who never really made it in the movies and in any case I suspect that Masumura wasn’t too concerned with having a strong male actor in the role – as the title suggests, this film is more about the women. Wakao’s co-star, Mariko Okada, is another fine actress of equal stature who had appeared in the films of Ozu, Naruse and Kinoshita; she later married the director Yoshishige Yoshida, for whom she made many films. Okada also played Oida to Tatsuya Nakadai’s Iemon in Illusion of Blood (1965) and later gave a fine comic performance opposite Nakadai in I Am a Cat (1975). Unfortunately, the nature of the plot means that Wakao and Okada have only two fairly brief and rather tame scenes together towards the end. Overall, despite her miscasting, Wakao makes it work and there’s never a false note in her performance. The same can be said of Okada, who seems more suitably cast as the unfailingly sweet-natured Junko.[2] Kyoko Enami, best-known as the star of the Woman Gambler film series, is also good value as Michiko’s bad-girl sister.  

The film benefits from Masumura’s typically no-nonsense direction and tight editing, clocking in at around 90 minutes as virtually all of his films do. The widescreen cinematography and muted colour scheme, while not exceptional, look good throughout, and there’s a classy string quartet score by Tadashi Yamauchi. In the latter stages, the plot becomes increasingly complex in quite a clever way, but Masumura keeps it plausible, wisely focusing on the characters rather than the plot twists. Being Masumura, he also introduces some discordant elements such as the dissolute aristocratic voyeur. However, although Arrow Video have released some excellent DVD editions of the director’s films recently, I suspect that the comparative lack of sex and violence along with other typical cult movie elements in Two Wives means that this particular film is unlikely to receive such a release. Furthermore, I personally did not feel that Two Wives could in any way be placed in the suspense genre as some have described it. The omission of the novel’s mystery element and the string quartet score – which lends an air of detached melancholy to the proceedings – are evidence that this was not the intention. Instead, it seems to me that Shindo and Masumura were more interested in making a thoughtful adult drama examining lives built on shaky foundations which are easily caused to crumble.

Intriguingly, Wakao and Okada played love rivals again the following year in Tadashi Imai's The Time of Reckoning (Fushin no toki), although their roles were reversed, with Okada playing the wife and Wakao the mistress. Alas, Imai's film – the only other one in which the two both appeared – seems currently impossible to see in the West. 

[1] Patrick Quentin is actually a nom de plume of the British writer Hugh Wheeler.

[2] As there is no indication that Junko was ever married to Kenzo, the title seems something of a misnomer.

Flic (2005)

Obscure Japanese Film #4

At one point in Flic, a minor character says he joined the police because he saw a French film called Un Flic (A Cop), thus explaining the title of this film. However, Masahiro Kobayashi’s film has little in common thematically or aesthetically with Jean-Pierre Melville’s ice-cool 1972 thriller, and the protagonist here, Detective Murata (Teruyuki Kagawa), could not be further removed from the suave policeman played by Alain Delon. 

Murata has not been to work since the murder of his wife six months earlier. He has tried to resign, but his boss won’t let him. His partner, Namekawa (Seiichi Tanabe), comes to his apartment telling him it’s time to get back to work. Murata reluctantly agrees to join him on an assignment to Tomakomai, an industrial town in Hokkaido, where they are to meet the disabled brother of a murder victim and bring him to Tokyo in order to identify his sister’s body. The victim had been killed with a chainsaw in a love hotel shortly after arriving in Tokyo from Tomakomai, but the murderer is still at large. When they arrive in the town, Namekawa is keen to complete their task as quickly as possible, but Murata goes beyond his remit and begins conducting his own investigation. As Murata is the senior of the two men, there is little Namekawa can do about this, even though the local police dislike such interference. Things become complicated when Murata uncovers clues suggesting that the woman may not have been the victim of a random psychopath after all. However, he is also battling with his own demons – Murata is an alcoholic who has been suffering from insomnia since his wife’s murder, and he finds it increasingly hard to tell the difference between reality and the fantasies playing out in his mind.

This is the kind of film guaranteed to annoy those who like a conventional narrative with everything neatly wrapped up at the end, but those open to something more ambiguous should find this thoroughly absorbing despite the slow pace. Kobayashi often keeps his camera on his actors when they’re not doing anything in particular, and rarely uses close-ups. This has the effect of making you feel you’re watching something real rather than a cleverly-staged scene. And while Flic cannot really be described as a thriller, the story is certainly compelling and goes off in some unexpected directions.

It’s an unsettling film, thanks in large part to Teruyuki Kagawa’s performance. As Murata, he is quite creepy at times, and seems to be in such a pit of despair that social conventions have become meaningless to him. He is rude to his colleagues, and tends to stand too close to people, unnerving them with his thousand-yard stare. At one point there’s a long-held shot of him staring directly at the camera which is truly haunting.

Presumably in order to illustrate Murata’s fractured state of mind, Kobayashi uses repeated pan shots, some of which are exact repeats, some not. I don’t think I’ve ever seen this disorienting technique in another film and, in fact, it’s difficult to think of films with which Flic could be easily compared, although there were certainly times when I was reminded of the work of David Lynch.

A peculiarity of this film is that it’s divided into two ‘chapters’, with the end credits sung by a lone guitarist (Wataru Takada) at the end of each chapter. I’m uncertain whether the film was originally released like this, or whether this is some kind of TV edit of the film. At the time of writing, Flic can be viewed with English subtitles on Youtube at the links below:

https://youtu.be/mrYnuuk-rcw

https://youtu.be/bcbbCLPLqA0