The Burmese Harp / ビルマの竪琴 (1985)

 Obscure Japanese Film #11

Kiichi Nakai as Mizushima

At least in the West, Kon Ichikawa’s own remake of his 1956 masterpiece has been almost completely ignored in recent years. The story concerns a platoon of Japanese soldiers in Burma towards the end of World War 2 who find solace in music. One of their number (who plays the harp of the title) goes missing in action, but a few months later his former comrades are struck by a wandering monk's resemblance to their missing friend. Having recently read the original book, I decided to take another look at the earlier film and a first look at the remake (for which I was unable to find English subtitles). Where version one was in black-and-white academy ratio (an almost square picture) and ran 116 minutes, version two is in colour, has a wider aspect ratio of 1.85:1 and runs 133 minutes. Ichikawa uses two members of his original cast in the remake: Jun Hamamura (who played the emaciated platoon sergeant in 1956) here plays an emaciated village elder, while Tanie Kitabayashi (who played ‘old lady’ in the first film despite being just 44 at the time) reprises her original role. In place of Rentaro Mikuni as the Captain and Shoji Yasui as the harpist Mizushima, the remake gives us Koji Ishizaka and Kiichi Nakai respectively. Both are competent actors, but somehow less memorable than Mikuni and Yasui. 

Nobody does emaciated better than Jun Hamamura

 

The great Tanie Kitabayashi does her old lady shtick one more time

When making the original film, Ichikawa had only been able to take one actor (Yasui) with him to Burma for location shooting, so all of the scenes featuring the rest of the Japanese cast were shot in Japan. Although unable to go to Burma at all for the remake due to the country’s situation at the time, in this case the director was able to take his entire cast and crew to Thailand as a substitute. Perhaps Ichikawa believed he could improve on the original by means of the additional location shooting and use of colour. There are certainly aspects of the story which could be said to benefit from colour, such as the red of the ruby, the green of the parrot’s plumage and the golden-orange of the monks’ robes.  However, despite excellent cinematography throughout, cameraman Setsuo Kobayashi seldom matches the power of the painterly compositions in the earlier picture (by Minoru Yokoyama). Furthermore, in place of Godzilla composer Akira Ifukube’s haunting original score, we have less subtle work from Naozumi Yamamoto which sounds much more like typical movie music. 

 

The screenplay for both versions is credited to Ichikawa’s wife Natto Wada, who had ceased to write for the screen in 1965 and passed away in 1983. Although not quite a scene-for-scene remake, certain sequences are almost shot-for-shot, such as when Mizushima begs the Japanese soldiers holding out in a mountain cave to surrender, and the scene in which he collapses from hunger in a field and some farmers take pity on him and give him their lunches. The differences are minor – the platoon have two ammunition carts in the remake, one of which they manage to lose over a cliff at the beginning with predictable consequences; instead of setting them up, the villagers warn the platoon about the arrival of the British; the old lady gains a deaf-mute granddaughter; and we actually see the old lady’s husband capturing the parrots. Unfortunately, the obviously non-professional British ‘actors’ are very wooden in the remake, whereas their equivalents in the original did a pretty decent job. 

 

Overall, while the 1985 film is by no means a disaster (and was a critical and commercial success in Japan), the magic of the first version is largely absent. Towards the end of his career, Ichikawa also directed remakes of two other earlier (albeit overrated) successes, Ten Dark Women and The Inugami Family, and his later works suggest a director whose inspiration had run dry but was happy to keep on working whatever the assignment. However, with the original Burmese Harp and its shockingly nihilistic companion piece Fires on the Plain he left us two enduring masterpieces of world cinema along with a number of other very good films.

Mr Mrs Miss Lonely / ミスター・ミセス・ミス・ロンリー (1980)

 Obscure Japanese Film #10

Ryudo Uzaki, Mieko Harada and Yoshio Harada

Best-known for playing the vengeful Lady Kaede in Ran (1985), a very young-looking Mieko Harada here plays Chisato, a girl who becomes involved with a couple of minor league criminals (played with insouciant cool by Ryudo Uzaki and Yoshio Harada) looking to scam a corrupt, model-transport-loving businessman (veteran star Rentaro Mikuni, known in the West for films such as Hara Kiri and The Burmese Harp). This brief synopsis probably makes it sound like this meandering, new wave-style film has more of a structured plot than it actually does, although there is quite a good twist ending (albeit one which may not bear too much scrutiny). There’s a framing device of Chisato writing to an unseen novelist to express how much she identifies with the protagonist of his novel, but this seemed entirely unnecessary to me. Another random element is the presence of musicians from the Down Town Fighting Boogie Woogie Band, who repeatedly appear playing in the background of various street scenes (actor Ryudo Uzaki was actually the band’s frontman). 

 

Mieko Harada and Rentaro Mikuni

Chisato could not be more different from Lady Kaede; here, playing an apparently feckless teenager, Harada wears her hair in braids for most of the film and, somewhat annoyingly, is always sniffing for no apparent reason. Co-written under a pen-name by Harada (who also co-produced) in collaboration with director Tatsumi Kumashiro (best-known for his Roman porno films), this Arts Theatre Guild production feels self-indulgent in that one suspects not only that they made a lot of it up on the spot, but that not a single suggestion was rejected. However, despite the fact that the film is much too long (2 hours 18 minutes) and would undoubtedly stretch the patience of many viewers, I rather liked it on the whole due to the lack of clichés, the oddball characters (which also include Kihachi Okamoto favourite Hideyo Amamoto as a wily old schemer) and the consistently unexpected ways in which scenes were staged. It’s also well-photographed (Takao Oshikiri) and scored (Shuichi Chino). 

Hideyo Amamoto and Yoshio Harada

 

The Far Road / 遠い一本の道 / Toi ippon no michi (1977)

 Obscure Japanese Film #9

Sachiko Hidari preparing to shoot a scene for The Far Road

Sachiko Hidari (1930-2001), the director, producer and star of The Far Road, began her acting career at Shintoho Studios in 1952 and spent most of the ‘50s playing cute, cheerful, giggly young women. However, her off-screen personality was quite different – she was serious, intelligent, unusually outspoken and keen to do meaningful work. In 1959, she married the now largely forgotten ‘New Wave’ director Susumu Hani and soon became a highly respected actress, winning no less than three major Japanese film awards for her performances in Hani’s She and He and Shohei Imamura’s The Insect Woman (both 1963). Other memorable roles included the prostitute who falls in love with Rentaro Mikuni’s fugitive in Tomu Uchida’s Straits of Hunger (1965) and the war widow trying to uncover the truth of her husband’s death in Kinji Fukasku’s no-punches-pulled Under the Flag of the Rising Sun (1972). Unfortunately, her success made it difficult for her to find enough time to look after her daughter, so her younger sister, Kimiko Nukamura, stepped in to help out, but this led to an affair between Kimiko and Hani which caused Hani and Sachiko to divorce the same year The Far Road was released.

With The Far Road, Hidari became the first female feature film director in Japan since Kinuyo Tanaka, who had last directed in 1962. Hidari’s film was an independent production financed by the National Railway Workers’ Union. This type of alternative to studio financing had been pioneered by director Satsuo Yamamoto after he was blacklisted by the studios in 1947 for over a decade due to his Communist Party membership – he had responded by obtaining his budgets from various union organisations and carrying on regardless. Given this set-up, it’s no surprise that Hidari’s film has a strong pro-union, anti-capitalist stance and features a combination of experienced actors and railway workers. In fact, it’s very much the Japanese equivalent of a Ken Loach movie. 

In a rare leading role, Hisashi Igawa (star of Hiroshi Teshigahara’s Pitfall) plays Ichizo, a railway worker in Hokkaido who has just completed 30 years’ service and receives a watch and a bonus as a reward. The fractured narrative then jumps back and forth between the past and the present, with flashbacks detailing the struggles of Ichizo and his long-suffering wife, Satoko (Hidari), to raise their two children and make enough to get by. 

Hisashi Igawa and Sachiko Hidari

 

Hidari is fine, but the acting honours here go to the underrated Igawa, who is so convincing that it’s hard to believe he even is acting. Rarely has an actor been prepared to make himself so unsympathetic, although – despite his bullying, drunkenness and insensitivity – Ichizo has his good points and stands up for his colleagues in disputes with the bosses. Also notable in the cast is the wonderful Taiji Tonoyama, the bald, jug-eared, weary-eyed star of Kaneto Shindo’s The Naked Island (1961), here playing a veteran colleague of Ichizo’s who treats the bosses with barely-concealed contempt. Another distinguished actor, Hideji Otaki, also pops up, though in quite a small part.

The Far Road benefits from a strong modernist score courtesy of Minoru Miki although, while the cinematography is decent enough, the overcast Hokkaido skies and railway yard settings make for a rather drab visual experience.  Furthermore, while the film is certainly well-made, Hidari seems to have paid little attention to keeping the audience engaged and there are some scenes of speeches and union debates which are, frankly, downright tedious. Indeed, the narrative seems all over the place and would have benefitted from a tighter structure – I suspect that some scenes may have been improvised, which would partially account for this. However, one has to admire the way Eijanaika writer Ken Miyamoto manages to work Hashima Island into the story by having Ichizo’s daughter’s fiancé a former inhabitant of the place who wants to show his future in-laws where he was brought up. Located off the coast of Nagasaki, Hashima is a small abandoned island once populated by coal miners living in concrete apartment blocks which even today cover the majority of the land there. The facility used forced labour during the war but continued production in the post-war years until its final abandonment in 1974. The conclusion of The Far Road has Ichizo and Satoko wandering around this gargantuan, haunting symbol of exploitation which must be one of the most hideous places on Earth. 

Hashima Island

While I doubt that The Far Road would have resurfaced were it not for the current interest in female directors, it is in many ways a remarkable achievement by Hidari despite its flaws and certainly has some memorable scenes.

Seen as part of the British Film Institute’s Japan 2021 season.

Link to the DVD on Amazon Japan (no English subtitles listed)

Joan Mellen on The Far Road