Obscure Japanese Film #52
Shoji Nakayama
Set in Manchuria in 1937, The Military Policeman and the Dismembered Beauty opens with a Japanese soldier (whose face is concealed) having a secret liaison with a young Japanese woman (Akiko Mie). We then jump to a scene in which the (thankfully unseen) rotting torso of a pregnant woman is discovered in a well at a Japanese military barracks. The corpse has contaminated the army’s water; some rookies are forced to eat rice cooked in it by their seniors, but the latter also soon find themselves forced to eat the dodgy gohan, in their case by an indignant officer – karma in action!
Just another day at the office for the Japanese Military Police
A military policeman, Tokusuke Kosaka (Shoji Nakayama), is sent from Tokyo to investigate the murder, but he meets with opposition from the local MPs. Despite having no evidence, they decide to pin the crime on the cook, Sergeant Tsuneyoshi (Shigeru Amachi), so they hang him upside down and try to whip a confession out of him. However, Kosaka begins to have visions of the dead woman which lead him to important clues and, eventually, the real murderer.
I have a feeling I’ve just made this film sound more interesting than it actually it is – the story has potential, but the execution here is strictly routine and the cast unremarkable. The screenplay by Akira Sugimoto was based on a 1957 book by Keisuke Kosaka (1900-1972) entitled The Military Police Squirm: 68 Days of Headless Torso Investigation (Notautsu kenpei: Kubi nashi dōtai sōsa 68-nichi), which appears to have been based on a true story. Kosaka, who had himself served as a military policeman in Manchuria and was the model for the character Kosaka in the film, has a pretty interesting bio – according to Japanese Wikipedia, he helped to save the life of the Prime Minister during the attempted military coup of 26 February 1936 and later received a death sentence as a war criminal due to his involvement in the execution of an American airman. However, he ultimately got away with serving a few years in prison before turning to writing after his release. One wonders how much we should trust such a person’s version of events – certainly, the film portrays Kosaka as the good guy and most of the other Japanese soldiers as brutes.
More of a murder mystery than a horror film despite its title, The Military Policeman and the Dismembered Beauty, is a modest B-movie unlikely to get pulses racing these days. However, it was enough of a hit at the time that the same studio (Shintoho) produced The Military Policeman and the Ghost (Kenpei to yurei) from an original screenplay the following year, again starring Shoji Nakayama in a similar role. For his part, director Kyotaro Namiki does a competent if uninspired job – his earlier Hirate Miki (1951) was a more impressive piece of work.
Watched without subtitles.
No comments:
Post a Comment