The Lost Alibi aka The Black Book: An Employee’s Confession/ 黒い画集 あるサラリーマンの証言 / Kuroi gashu: Aru sarariman no shogen (1960)

Obscure Japanese Film #45

Keiju Kobayashi

Based on a 1958 Seicho Matsumoto short story entitled Shogen (‘Testimony’) published as part of his ‘Black Art Book’ (Kuroigashu) series, this crime drama stars Keiju Kobayashi as Ishino, a procurement manager for a fabric company. The film spends the first 8 minutes showing us how uninteresting the life of this faceless executive and family man is before revealing his secret – not only does he have a mistress, but the pretty young female in question is an employee who works under him. Chieko (Chisako Hara), is a bubble-headed good-time girl living in a love nest paid for by Ishino. Given the fact that Ishino has a sweet-tempered and still-attractive wife (Chieko Nakakita) as well as two children, he really has no justification for his behaviour, but he seems to have no qualms as long as he’s able to keep it secret and avoid losing face. Leaving Chieko’s apartment after one of his evening visits, he bumps into a neighbour, Sugiyama (Masao Oda), who works as a door-to-door salesman. When Sugiyama becomes a murder suspect, his only alibi is the chance meeting with Ishino, who is extremely reluctant to admit having seen him as he believes it may expose his philandering…

Chisako Hara

 

The story takes some ingenious twists and turns which are all the more effective for being quite plausible. The excellent script is by Shinobu Hashimoto, who collaborated with Kurosawa on numerous occasions, wrote the screenplay for Hara-Kiri (1962) and skilfully adapted the work of Satsuo Matsumoto for a number of films directed by Yoshitaro Nomura.

Ko Nishimura

 

The cast is uniformly good, and also features Ko Nishimura as the detective on the case and Kin Sugai as Sugiyama’s wife. A specialist in downtrodden characters, in one scene she breaks down and begs Ishino for help in an exhibition of raw emotion so powerful it’s uncomfortable for the viewer as well. 

Kin Sugai

 

The star of the film, Keiju Kobayashi, was best-known in Japan at the time for salaryman comedies, so his casting here is interesting in the way it subverts his usual image, as would Kihachi Okamoto’s Elegant Life of Mr Everyman (1963) in a rather different way. He was also an excellent dramatic actor whose other notable performances include Happiness of Us Alone (1961), in which he and Hideko Takamine portrayed a deaf-mute couple with admirable sensitivity, and his cameo as the samurai locked in the cupboard in Sanjuro. Kobayashi had already scored a hit for this film’s director, Hiromichi Horikawa, in The Naked General (1958), for which Kobayashi had won a Best Actor Award. The two would go on to collaborate on a number of further occasions, including on Shiro to kuro (1963), a film not dissimilar to this one and which involved many of the same people. Horikawa described Kobayashi as ‘an irreplaceable actor whose extraordinary performances burst out from an extremely ordinary person.’ Horikawa himself was highly rated by Akira Kurosawa, for whom he had often worked as an assistant director and, on the basis of The Lost Alibi and Shiro to kuro, Horikawa is the Japanese director whose work I would most like to be able to see more of. 

 

Masao Oda and Kin Sugai

The Lost Alibi appears to have been pretty successful and spawned several TV remakes, including a 1965 version starring Rentaro Mikuni. In the case of Horikawa’s version, there is more to it than just a clever crime drama. While not explicitly discussed, Japan’s post-war trauma is evident throughout, the characters embodying the moral vacuum the country seemed in danger of becoming after the seismic cultural shock of defeat, the atom bomb and the American occupation, all of which challenged the people’s long-held values and in some cases led them to embrace materialism or lead lives of hedonistic excess. In this example, the character of Ishino is so far gone that it is made quite explicit at the end of the film that he merely considers himself to have been unfortunate and has learned precisely nothing – a discomfiting ending, to say the least.

The Threat / 脅迫 おどし / Odoshi (1966)

Obscure Japanese Film #44

Rentaro Mikuni and Ko Nishimura

This Toei production begins with a wedding scene reminiscent of the one which opens The Bad Sleep Well. Misawa (Rentaro Mikuni), a sales manager, has arranged a sham marriage between his boss’s mistress and an employee in order to cover up said boss’s philandering. During his speech, Misawa lays it on a bit thick singing the praises of the newlyweds. On the face of it, this beginning has nothing to do with the rest of the movie. However, it is significant in that it reveals an important aspect of Misawa’s character – he is by nature a collaborator, a man only too willing to be used.

Hideo Murota and Ko Nishimura

 Soon after the wedding, Misawa finds his home invaded by two escaped convicts who have kidnapped a baby and need a place to hide out for a night or two until they can collect the ransom and flee Japan by boat. The two men are the small but cunning Kawanishi (Ko Nishimura) and his dim sidekick, Sabu (Hideo Murota). Both Misawa and Kawanishi were soldiers during the war but, unlike Kawanishi, Misawa has no experience of killing, so Kawanishi considers him a coward for keeping his hands clean and enjoys tormenting him for this reason. At one point, he snorts contemptuously, ‘You’ve probably never even raped a woman!’ When coerced into helping Kawanishi collect the ransom money, Misawa seems only too keen to oblige and does more than he is asked, apparently out of cowardice.[1] These scenes are made even more pitiful to watch due to the disparity in size between these two terrific actors – it’s like seeing a German Shepherd being bullied by a Chihuahua. The suspense in the film mainly comes from waiting to see whether Misawa will finally grow a pair and stand up to the intruders.

 

I remember once reading somebody describe Tatsuya Nakadai as the Japanese Brando. Personally, I don’t consider that a very accurate comparison as Nakadai is no method actor and his style seems quite different to me. But you could certainly make a case for Mikuni as the Japanese Brando – his approach was far more method than Nakadai’s and, like Brando, he never bothered to try and court the audience’s sympathy. In this film, he takes a beating to rival the one dished out to Brando in The Chase. In another scene, he lays into his wife. As Mikuni was famous for taking realism to extremes, it may have been difficult to cast the female lead here, which is well played by the slightly dumpy Masumi Harukawa (star of Shohei Imamura’s Intentions of Murder). In fact, the cast is rock solid all round and it’s also nice to see Kunie Tanaka pop up as a dopey policeman.

 

Kunie Tanaka and Masumi Harukawa

 

Director Kinji Fukasaku went on to enjoy a long and successful career, of course, and on this evidence it’s not hard to see why as it's all very well staged and shot, especially the action scenes. He also co-wrote the screenplay and it’s the attention to psychology which really makes this film a cut above the average thriller.

The babysitter from hell.

 

At the time of writing, the film can be viewed on YouTube here.

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[1] Mikuni had actually attempted to evade the draft during the war. Though unsuccessful, he served as a soldier without ever firing his gun. Nishimura, on the other hand, had been a kamikaze pilot but survived after his mission was cancelled.