Niwatori wa futatabi naku / 鶏はふたゝび鳴く (‘The Cock Crows Twice’, 1954)

Obscure Japanese Film # 259

Eijiro Tono and Yoko Minakaze

After a man trying to find oil in order to revive the fortunes of his dying seaside town commits suicide, the locals blame Fumiko (Yoko Minakaze), a young woman who had rejected his sudden offer of marriage. Fumiko lives with her father, Tokinosuke (Eijiro Tono, great), who has been going to pieces since his wife ran off with another man. Ostracised by the townsfolk, Fumiko heads towards the sea with the intention of ending it all, but is spotted by an itinerant oil worker (Shuji Sano) who prevents her from going through with it. He and four other men have been left stranded since the suicide of their boss and Fumiko is moved by their kindness and relates to their outside status.

Shuji Sano

Sachiko Hidari, Minakaze and Yoko Kozono

It emerges that Fumiko has two female friends, Yoko (Yoko Kozono/Kosono) and Taniko (Sachiko Hidari), with whom she has made a suicide pact, each carrying a deadly pill in a locket around their necks. Yoko’s reason for being miserable is that she’s the daughter of a concubine (Sadako Sawamura), while Taniko’s is that she’s physically disabled and has to walk with a crutch. The women have agreed that they will all commit suicide together. Meanwhile, the stranded workers are debating whether to flee the town and escape the debts they’ve incurred or stick it out, hoping that a long-awaited telegram will arrive telling them to come to a new oil field. Then Kurama (Yunosuke Ito), an embezzler on the run from the police, arrives and claims to be an oil surveyor who intends to restart the drilling…

Yunosuke Ito

This Shintoho production has an unusual story which is a creation of Rinzo Shiina (1911-73), who wrote the original screenplay and had written the novel on which director Heinosuke Gosho’s Where Chimneys are Seen (1953) had been based. However, there are certain similarities to Vittorio De Sica’s Miracle in Milan (1951), which I strongly suspect influenced this film. With all the talk of suicide, it first appears to be a rather bleak drama, but gradually transforms into a comedy. It’s not like any other Gosho film I’ve seen, and I found it quite engaging and charming in the way it takes delight in continually subverting our expectations. For example, when Fumiko’s wealthy aunt who has been turning down her father’s requests for money appears, we expect that she’ll be a terrible harridan – especially as she’s played by Eiko Miyoshi – but this proves not to be quite the case.

Eiko Miyoshi

It’s surprising to see Yoko Minakaze (1930-2007) in the lead role. She doesn’t look like a film star and, indeed, wasn’t one, but for some mysterious reason I felt her lack of star quality somehow worked in this film’s favour. Coming from the theatre, she enjoyed a long career on stage as well as screens both big and small, but this may well be her most major role in movies.

It’s worth noting that screenwriter Rinzo Shiina had converted to Christianity in 1950 and it’s easy to see how his beliefs influenced this work. It’s also perhaps the reason composer Toshiro Mayuzumi used choral music for his score, although this is one element I didn’t particularly care for. In most respects, though, this film is a gem and it’s also beautifully shot by Joji Ohara, who won a Mainichi Film Concours Award for Best Cinematography for his pains, making this a film crying out for a good quality release.

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The Woman Who Touched Legs / 足にさわった女 / Ashi ni sawatta onna (1952 and 1960)

Obscure Japanese Film #183 and #184

Fubiki Koshiji

 

 

Machiko Kyo

The romantic comedy Ashi ni sawatta onna began life as a magazine serial by the now-forgotten Nadematsu (or Nadeshiko? or Bumatsu?) Sawada (male, 1871-1927) and was first filmed in 1926 (the year of publication) by director Yutaka Abe. The story (in the two existing film versions anyway) tells of Saya, a pickpocket in Osaka who uses her good looks to get close to men in order to steal their wallets. She’s just served three months in prison and is on her way by train back to her home village for the first time in many years. However, she’s not the usual criminal type, and it emerges that her father was suspected of being a spy and committed suicide, so she has been stealing in order to hold an expensive memorial service for him and thereby get revenge on the villagers who ostracised him. Also on the train are Saya’s grown-up but childlike younger brother, a bumbling detective (who previously arrested Saya but is now on vacation), and a pretentious, slightly-effeminate best-selling crime writer who learns about Saya and wants to use her as the basis for his next novel.  

Tokihiko Okada, Yoko Umemura and Koji Shima

 

In the 1926 film – which won the first ever Kinema Junpo Award for Best Japanese Film – the leading roles of the female pickpocket, the crime writer and the detective were played, respectively, by Yoko Umemura, Tokihiko Okada and future director Koji Shima. The former two died tragically young – Yoko Umemura (a favourite of director Kenji Mizoguchi) died at 40 following complications from appendicitis while working on Mizoguchi’s Danjuro Sandai (1944); Tokihiko Okada (the father of Mariko Okada) died at 30 from tuberculosis in 1934. Like the vast majority of Japanese silent films, that version is long lost and it’s unlikely that it still existed when Kon Ichikawa made the first remake for Toho in 1952, although he may well have seen it in his youth. Incidentally, according to Donald Richie in A Hundred Years of Japanese Film, rather than featuring a motley bunch of characters and having the bulk of the story set on a train, ‘The original Abe movie was about the upper-middle class in a hot spring resort.’ When he made the film, Abe had actually not long returned from a decade in America, during which time he had acted in a number of Hollywood films, so there’s little doubt that his work was heavily influenced by this experience.

Ryo Ikebe

 

Ichikawa modelled his version on Hollywood’s screwball comedies of the 1930s, and top-billed Ryo Ikebe as the detective appears to be attempting to emulate Cary Grant. It’s certainly the most animated I’ve ever seen Ikebe on screen, but not his most successful performance in my view. On the other hand, Fubuki Koshiji, who plays Saya, is a natural comedienne and is in her element here. It’s a little surprising to see So Yamamura mincing his way through his performance as the presumably gay writer, but he stops short of full-on caricature, thankfully. One nice touch is that his character’s niece is played by Mariko Okada, whose father had played Yamamura’s role in the 1926 original. 

 

So Yamamura and Mariko Okada

Sadako Sawamura and Yunosuke Ito

Eiko Miyoshi

A terrific supporting cast also features Yunosuke ‘why the long face?’ Ito, Sadako Sawamura, Sawamura’s brother Daisuke Kato and ex-husband Kamatari Fujiwara, and decrepit old lady specialist Eiko Miyoshi. It’s a jolly ride which zips by in a fast-paced and entertaining fashion, although some of the one-liners were no doubt lost in the subtitles I auto-translated from Japanese. 

 

Kyo with Hajime Hana

 

Daiei produced a colour remake a mere eight years later, directed by Yasuzo Masumura. Although Kon Ichikawa and his wife Natto Wada are again credited with the screenplay, it appears to have been revised – whether by Ichikawa and Wada or by Masumura I have no idea, but in neither version does the story make a great deal of sense. In any case, the 1960 version seems more calculated as a vehicle for a particular star – in this case, Machiko Kyo, who plays Saya in a more blatantly sexy manner than Fubuki Koshiji, although she’s arguably less of a natural for comedy. The detective is played as a much more slow-witted character by the far less well-known Hajime Hana, but I found him more amusing than Ryo Ikebe, while Eiji Funakoshi is slightly less effeminate as the writer than So Yamamura had been. 

 

Jiro Tamiya and Eiji Funakoshi

Shiro Otsuji, Kyo and Haruko Sugimura

Other notables in the cast include Haruko Sugimura in the role formerly played by Sadako Sawamura, and Jiro Tamiya and Kyoko Enami making early appearances in minor roles. Perhaps the most notable difference is that Masumura puts far less emphasis on Saya’s motivation for being a thief and, in fact, drops the memorial ceremony scene entirely – the cynical Masumura would probably have considered this mere sentimentality. Personally, I wouldn’t consider either version a must-see, but I slightly preferred Ichikawa’s on the whole. He was obviously into it anyway, as he also directed a 45-minute TV version in 1960 with Keiko Kishi as Saya, Frankie Sakai as the detective and Tomo’o Nagai as the writer.

 

Note on the title:

The original novel and 1926 film have a slightly different title from the remakes: Ashi ni sa hatta onna (足にさはった女), which could be translated as The Woman with a Scar on Her Leg. Although the remakes are usually referred to in English as The Woman Who Touched Legs (or similar), the 1952 version at some point had the English title of Doubledyed Detective, while the 1960 version has also been known as A Lady Pickpocket in English. Furthermore, it’s not entirely clear what is meant by the Japanese title. Ashi can mean leg, legs, foot or feet and, as there are no articles or possessive pronouns in Japanese, it’s anyone’s guess whether it should be ‘her leg/foot’, ‘the leg/foot’, ‘a leg/foot’, ‘his leg/foot’, ‘their legs/feet’, etc. While it might be necessary to touch somebody else’s leg when stealing a wallet from their trouser pocket, I think the title is intended to refer to Saya’s legs – which she uses to attract men in order to get close enough to pick their pockets – rather than those of her victims, so The Woman Who Used Her Legs would seem a better title. 

 

Thanks to A.K. 

1952 version DVD at Amazon Japan (no English subtitles)

1960 version DVD at Amazon Japan (no English subtitles)

English subtitles for 1960 version courtesy of Coralsundy

Five Sisters / 女の暦 / Onna no koyomi (‘A Woman’s Calendar/Almanac’, 1954)

Obscure Japanese Film #177

Kyoko Kagawa

 

Yoko Sugi

 

Their parents now deceased, two adult sisters now live together in their old family home on an island, Shodoshima, in the south of Japan. The youngest of five sisters, they are Kuniko (Yoko Sugi), a schoolteacher who is reluctant to get married, and Mie (Kyoko Kagawa), who is around nine years younger and has a very different attitude – unbeknownst to Kuniko, she’s in love with a burly pig farmer (Gen Funabashi) and wants to marry him. 

 

Gen Funabashi, Kyoko Kagawa and friend

 

As the anniversary of their father’s passing is approaching, Kuniko and Mie decide that it’s time to have a family get-together, so they invite their three elder sisters to visit. The most senior, Michi (Kinuyo Tanaka), lives in Hiroshima and has five children of her own and a lazy, pachinko-addicted husband (Hisao Toake), while Takako (Yukiko Todoroki), who lives in Tokyo, is married to a man who’s in prison for getting caught up in a demonstration. Finally, there’s Kayano (Ranko Hanai), who lives in Osaka and is unhappily married to Sugie (Masao Mishima), who’s always unfavourably comparing her to his first wife. Will the examples of the three visiting sisters deter Mie from marriage as they have in Kuniko’s case? Or has she been scared into thinking she must get married in order not to end up like Ofuku (Eiko Miyoshi), a crazy old maid who lives on the island? 

 

Kinuyo Tanaka

 

Yukio Todoroki

Ranko Hanai

This Shintoho production was based on a story by Sakae Tsuboi, entitled simply Koyomi (‘calendar’ or ‘almanac’) and first published in 1940. Tsuboi (1899-1967) was the youngest of five daughters from Shodoshima, so she may well have based the character of Mie on herself. She also wrote Twenty-Four Eyes, which is also set on Shodoshima. Her only full-length work to have been translated into English, it was, of course, turned into a highly successful film by Keisuke Kinoshita in 1954. 

 

 

Like Policeman’s Diary (1955), the only other film I’ve seen by director Seiji Hisamatsu, this one is also reminiscent of Kinoshita’s work. Looking back at my review of that film, I described it as ‘a charming, bittersweet comic drama from a more innocent age’, a description which could equally apply to Five Sisters. However, unlike Kinoshita – who had a fondness for slightly gimmicky visual techniques – Hisamatsu’s direction is the kind that never draws attention to itself. Nothing terribly dramatic happens in this film, yet somehow I was never bored, and few films have dealt with the theme of marriage in such a light but thoughtful way.  It was screened in competition at Cannes in 1955, but seems to have rarely been seen since, at least outside of Japan. 

 

 

 DVD at Amazon Japan (no English subtitles)

 Thanks to A.K.