Obscure Japanese Film #11
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| 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.
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| Nobody does emaciated better than Jun Hamamura |
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| 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.
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