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.