The Flesh is Weak / 美徳のよろめき / Bitoku no yoromeki (‘Faltering Virtue’, 1957)

Obscure Japanese Film #174

Yumeji Tsukioka

 

28-year-old Setsuko (Yumeji Tsukioka), a former member of the aristocracy, has come down in the world somewhat after the war and ended up marrying below her class to Ichiro (Rentaro Mikuni), whose uncouth table manners appal her. 

 

Rentaro Mikuni

 

Despite being a wife and mother, she’s unable to forget her first love, Tsuchiya (Ryoji Hayama), especially as she keeps running into him (small place, Tokyo!). When her mother dies, Tsuchiya attends the funeral and, while paying his respects, whispers in Setsuko’s ear that he will be waiting for her the following day at 3 pm at a shrine. They start seeing each other on the sly, but he seems like such a nice guy that she believes it will remain platonic and her conscience will be clear. However, he has a weird fixation with eating breakfast naked… 

 

Ryoji Hayama

 

When Setsuko’s best friend, Yoshiko (Chikako Miyagi) – who is cheating on her own husband – arranges an excuse for Setsuko and Tsuchiya to sneak off to a hotel in Izu together, Setsuko freaks out when her uncle turns up at the hotel with some golfing buddies, stretching this film’s coincidence quota to the limit. Furthermore, Tsuchiya starts having non-platonic thoughts and tries to act on them, but finds himself rebuffed by Setsuko, who feels that she must remain faithful to her husband and certainly doesn’t want to eat breakfast naked with anyone…

 

 

This Nikkatsu production was adapted by Kaneto Shindo from a newly-published bestselling novel by Yukio Mishima (yet to be translated into English, but available in Chinese and Italian). The opening narration by actor Masaya Takahashi goes on for over 10 minutes and betrays the film’s literary origins. However, while the ending is apparently close to that of the novel, what happens in between is quite different, and it appears that Mishima’s original had Setsuko carrying on an extended sexual affair with Tsuchiya which results in two pregnancies, both of which are aborted. They also eat breakfast naked together, but I guess you couldn’t show that in a film in 1957 (so why have them talk about it, you may well ask). Anyway, although Mishima himself did not regard the novel as one of his serious literary efforts, he was not impressed and wrote in his diary that he could not imagine a more stupid movie. 

 

 

It doesn’t help that Setsuko is a self-pitying snob who is unnecessarily stern to her good-humoured maid, making it hard to feel much sympathy for her. Nikkatsu’s biggest female star at the time, Yumeji Tsukioka, does as well as can be expected under the circumstances, but Rentaro Mikuni is wasted in a role with little substance and Ryoji Hayama fails to make much impression as Tsuchiya. 

 

Chikako Miyagi

 

Chikako Miyagi fares better as the cheerfully amoral and flashily-dressed Yoshiko, and it’s nice to see Koreya Senda – who had just played a rare leading role in director Ko Nakahira’s Temptation – pop up again here as Setsuko’s dad. 

 

Koreya Senda

Nakahira also seemed to have a fondness for his namesake, actor Ko Nishimura, who appeared in at least half a dozen of his films, including this one in which he has a small part as a blind masseur who sees things his client (Setsuko) can’t. If only Nakahira could have seen the defects in the script… 

 

Ko Nishimura

 

Thanks to A.K.

The Spider Man / 蜘蛛男 / Kumo-otoko (1958)

Obscure Japanese Film #89

Susumu Fujita

 

Based on a 1929 novel of the same title (yet to be translated into English) by Edogawa Ranpo, this low-budget thriller stars Susumu Fujita in the role of Ranpo’s regular detective character, Kogoro Akechi. Fujita – best-known for playing the title role in Akira Kurosawa’s debut feature Sanshiro Sugata (1943) – first appears around 30 minutes in when Akechi is called in to investigate a gruesome murder. A young woman has been abducted and killed while attending a job interview, after which her dismembered body was found concealed inside a number of body sculptures. Akechi is soon on the trail of mad master criminal Dr. Kuroyanagi (Joji Oka), who gets his kicks out of murdering young women resembling the wife who betrayed him. He next sets his sights on movie star Yoko (Chikako Miyagi). However, using a series of increasingly bizarre disguises culminating in an outsize Cyrano de Bergerac nose, he continually eludes capture. His fiendish schemes reach their strange climax when he abducts a whole busload of young beauties and forces them to be models in a tableau of hell he presents before a live audience. 

Joji Oka

 

The Spider Man was originally released in two parts – the first entitled Satsujinki Kumo-otoko (literally ‘Murderer Spider Man’) running 97 minutes, the second Kumo-otoko no gyakushu (‘Spider-Man’s Counterattack’), which I haven’t been able to find a running time for. The version I saw displayed the title of part 1 in the opening credits, but was actually a re-edit of both parts combined. It appears that each part was edited down to around 55 minutes and simply spliced together, making a total running time of 109 minutes. The print was a fairly low-res VHS transfer which is watchable but far from ideal. 

Chikako Miyagi

 

The picture was directed by one Hiroyuki Yamamoto (1908-?), a name that could hardly be any more obscure. Oddly, it was his first film since 1943 and was also to be his last, perhaps because the production company (Shin Eiga) folded shortly after this was released. He first directed in 1937, and it appears that the majority of his 11 previous films were military propaganda works. 

 

The Spider Man is quite fast-paced, entertaining hokum which was evidently shot quickly and cheaply. For this reason, it never fully realises its potential and fails to make the most of its hell-tableau climax, which could have been far more memorable with a little extra care. Overall, the film is a fairly tame affair despite the potential nastiness of the story, and it’s perhaps just as well that it remains the only version of this particular Ranpo novel given how explicit a treatment it might have been given in more recent years. 

Joji Oka

 

Susumu Fujita had played Akechi before in a 1948 film, Issunboshi (now lost), but mostly phones it in here. Much better value is Joji Oka, who attacks his role with a gusto appropriately reminiscent of Lionel Atwill. Intriguingly, Oka had played Ranpo’s detective himself in a 1950 film entitled Tsurara no bijo, which received a limited Japanese DVD release in 2016 courtesy of collectors’ magazine publisher DeAgostini.

Watched without subtitles.