Tokai no kaii 7-ji 03-bu / 都会の怪異 七時三分 (‘Mystery of the City: 7:03’, 1935)

Obscure Japanese Film # 271

Eiji Nakano

A newspaper reporter, Tarama (Zenpei Saga), gets a call from an old friend, Miyamoto (Eiji Nakano), who’s broke but about to become a father with Noriko (Sachiko Chiba) although they’re not yet married. Miyamoto works for a dubious company specialising in insider trading but his boss won’t lend him a penny and he’s hoping that Tarama can help him financially. They arrange to meet that night for a drink in Ginza; later, on his way to meet Tarama, Miyamoto is approached by an old man (Yoyo Kojima) in the street who wants to sell him the evening paper – only it’s not that evening’s paper, it’s the one for the following day. Miyamoto assumes he’s a crackpot and buys a paper to get rid of him.

Yoyo Kojima

At a bus stop, Miyamoto notices a young homeless woman sleeping in the street next to a newspaper advert with the headline ‘Brutally murdered body of a young girl found in a sewer. Murder thought to have been committed by prostitute due to financial hardship.’ After boarding a bus, he begins perusing his paper and is astonished to see that it does indeed bear the following day’s date. Among the headlines are ‘Shock news! Murder suspect is popular singer, Hanako Hanamura’,  ‘Robbery on the bridge at 4:30 in the morning!’, and ‘Earthquake causes fire at Chameleon Bar’ – the very bar in which Miyamoto has arranged to meet his friend and where the proprietress (Chikako Hosokawa) favours oil lamps over electric ones. However, the item which most piques his interest is the following day’s racing results, but at this point he still assumes it’s all some kind of elaborate joke. 

Sachiko Chiba

Tarama fails to show, so Miyamoto heads home. When an earthquake hits and the fire brigade rush past him on their way to the Chameleon Bar, he realises that the contents of his mysterious newspaper should be taken seriously after all. Determined to raise some money to bet on the horse races, he decides to ask Noriko for some things to pawn and leaps into a taxi, where he’s disconcerted to learn that the driver keeps his wife’s ashes in an urn on the back seat. After visiting Noriko, he wakes up a pawnbroker (Osamu Takizawa) who has already closed for the night, but he’s disappointed with the amount of money he receives. Remembering the newspaper story about the robbery on the bridge, he decides to head there and rob the robber. He ends up killing the man he suspects to be the robber and throwing his body in the river. The man’s wallet contains only a little money (implying that he killed an innocent man), but now he at least has the funds he needs to make a different kind of killing. After winning big at the racetrack, he starts to become nervous about the police connecting him with the dead man and decides to leave Tokyo. He gives Noriko some money and says he’s going to Osaka and will send for her later, but heads for Yokohama instead. In another taxi, he takes out the newspaper again and notices something he’d overlooked the first time – his own obituary, which states that he died at 7:03 that evening. It’s now 6:35...

Eitaro Ozawa in one of his earliest screen roles as a cop

Japanese horror films from the 1930s are as rare as hen’s teeth, so it was a real treat to see this obscurity, especially as it turned out to be pretty good. Running a mere 55 minutes, I’m uncertain whether or not it’s complete – the fact that the newspaper story about a popular singer becoming a murder suspect is not followed up made me suspect there are scenes missing. 

Nakano and Chiba

The film begins with a title stating that it’s based on the final work of Itsuma Maki. Born at the turn of the century, Maki had died of a heart attack* aged just 35 shortly before the film was made (whether or not he died at 7:03 I don’t know). Itsuma Maki was actually one of several pen names of Kaitaro Hasegawa. Under the name Fubo Hayashi, he had created the famous one-eyed, one-armed swordsman Tange Sazen, while Maki was his chosen name for crime and horror stories, of which this last had been finished by Maki’s editor (who knew the intended ending) after the author’s death. However, Maki had spent time in London in the late 1920s, where he’d purchased numerous books of crime and horror stories, and ‘7:03’ is, in fact, closely based on the short story ‘The Old Man’ by the British author Holloway Horn.** Incidentally, Maki’s version of the story is apparently more humorous than the film, which plays it nightmarishly straight throughout. 

Kojima and Nakano

One nice touch is that actor and opera singer Yoyo Kojima plays not merely the old man, but also pops up in four other roles: a driver, the man Miyamoto kills, the disconcerting man who wants to use the phone box, and a racetrack spectator. When Miyamoto walks the deserted streets just before meeting the old man who sells him the paper, there’s also an effective use of sound and shadows to suggest a hidden danger which brings to mind Val Lewton’s later approach to similar material. It’s atmospherically shot by cinematographer Akira Mimura, who would go on to shoot Sanshiro Sugata (1943) for Kurosawa. 

Nakano

This is the only film I’ve seen by director Sotoji Kimura (1903-88), though he made quite a few during his 30-year-plus career. This seems not to have been at all typical of his work, much of which was on musicals and comedies – something I found pretty surprising after watching this! Perhaps the film was a box office flop, but to me it’s a pity he didn’t make more like it.

Leading man Eiji Nakano was a star of contemporary dramas known for his fashion sense, bad boy image and violent temper – his Japanese Wikipedia page states that film critics were afraid to give him a bad review in case he beat them up. In this case, I need not fear his ghost as I thought he gave a fine performance. He appeared in a dozen films for Mizoguchi but more or less retired from the cinema in 1939 to pursue other interests. 

The film was made for PCL Film Productions, which was active from 1933-37 and later became part of Toho. 

*English Wikipedia states that he died of acute bronchial asthma, but Japanese Wikipedia gives the cause as a heart attack. 

**The easiest way to access the original Holloway Horn story is probably via Gav Cross’ likeably eccentric reading on YouTube.

Japanese sources:

https://borderland.txt-nifty.com/weblog_on_the_borderland/2009/03/post-7ed1.html

https://nihoneiga1920-1960.hatenablog.com/entry/2022/11/23/125253

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Demon Statue/ 魔像 / Mazo (1952)

Obscure Japanese Film #65

Tsumasaburo Bando and Isuzu Yamada

This Shochiku production is based on a popular story by the creator of Tange Sazen, Kaitaro Hasegawa (1900-35). Mazo was first published in 1930 under one of his pen-names, Fubo Hayashi, and the story has been filmed multiple times. Set in the mid-Edo period, it concerns Takanosuke Kamio* (Tsumasaburo Bando), who works as a guard at the castle and is disgusted with the corruption of his superiors. They also mock him as effeminate as he prefers to spend his time with his beautiful young wife, Sonoe (Keiko Tsushima). 

Keiko Tsushima

 

One New Year’s Day, he is summoned to appear before them and the abuse goes further than usual, instigated by Omisuke Tobe (Mitsuo Nagata), who is jealous of Takanosuke as he had desired Sonoe for himself. He throws something at Takanosuke, gashing his forehead, and the group of 18 men bully him into making an apology for some imaginary transgression. Seated on the tatami, Takanosuke bows low and when he remains that way, Omisuke begins to shove him but is disconcerted when Takanosuke suddenly laughs in his face and walks out. Omisuke sees this crazed laugh as an insult and goes after him. Returning a while later, he drops dead in front of the others and they realise he has been slain by Takanosuke, who goes on the run. He falls in with a ronin, Ukon Ibara (Tsumasaburo Bando again), who looks just like him, and his wife, O-Gen (Isuzu Yamada). They also hate the corrupt officials and decide to help Takanosuke to get revenge on the other 17 men…

Given that an alternative translation of ‘mazo’ is ‘golem’, I had expected to see a monster made from stone or clay going on the rampage, but in that I was sadly disappointed. I can only assume that Takanosuke himself is the ‘demon statue’ in the sense that he is unflinching in his revenge. This story of rebellion has quite a lot in common with director Tatsuo Osone’s later Honno-ji in Flames, even down to the forehead-gashing suffered by the hero. 

 

Tsumasaburo Bando

However, this is the lesser of the two works – it’s a smaller scale production and contains a surprising amount of comic elements, including the coquettish wife portrayed by Isuzu Yamada, who steals every scene she’s in. 

Isuzu Yamada

 

If it seems hard to believe this is Lady Macbeth from Throne of Blood, after having seen at least 23 of her films by this point, I’ve been so impressed by her versatility that I’ve come to think of her as a sort of female Alec Guinness. 

Tsumasaburo Bando x 2

 

Tsumasaburo Bando is also good in two contrasting roles, but then he had certainly had plenty of practise as he had played them both twice before (see note below). He was one of those big stars of the era who is largely forgotten about now, perhaps partly because he passed away due to a stroke only one year after making this film. Also something of a revelation here is Masao Mishima, who appears in a role completely unlike any other I've seen him in and pulls it off nicely.

Masao Mishima

 

This is a well-made and enjoyable film, but ultimately an inconsequential one which never really rises above the level of entertainment. 

Tsumasaburo Bando

 

*An alternative reading of Takanosuke Kamio is Kyounosuke Kajio. I’m uncertain which is correct. 

Other versions:

1930 by Daisuke Ito starring Denjiro Okochi

1936 by Jun Ishigami also starring Tsumasaburo Bando 

1938 by Hiroshi Inagaki also starring Tsumasaburo Bando 

1956 by Kinnosuke Fukada starring Ryutaro Otomo

1962 as Chimoji yashiki ('Blood Letter 

Mansion') by Eiichi Kudo starring Ryutaro Otomo

Isuzu Yamada