Kizu-darake no okite / 傷だらけの掟 (1960)

Obscure Japanese Film #287

Hiroyuki Nagato

When Yasuo (Pigs and Battleships star Hiroyuki Nagato), an apparently naive student, allows himself to be dragged into a bar by Yuki (Sanae Nakahara), a young woman who accosts him on the street, he’s easily persuaded to treat her and her friends to cocktails. Predictably, when the bill comes it’s higher than expected and he’s unable to pay, but he’s allowed to go after leaving his watch with the yakuza who run the place; they’re members of the Hanayama gang. We then discover that Yasuo is actually a young con artist who sells fake Rolexes and that his older brother, Goro (Ryoji Hayama), is a member of a rival yakuza gang, the Noda-gumi.

Ryoji Hayama

When the Hanayama gang catch up with Yasuo and take him prisoner, Goro intercedes and gets him released. Yasuo then abducts Yuki, intending to rape her in revenge, but when the hotel is raided by the cops before he can do so, they escape together and hide out in the carriage of a stationary goods train, where she gives herself to him willingly after he slaps her a couple of times. Then they fall in love, but, like Romeo and Juliet, it’s not long before their rival gangs are at war. Can the self-sacrificing Goro help the young couple escape this life of crime before it’s too late?

Nagato with Sanae Nakahara

Set in Tokyo’s Ikebukuro district, this Nikkatsu production was based on a story by ‘Masaharu Kawase’, a pseudonym of Masaharu Segawa, a young director who was then under contract to Toei but had previously been an assistant to Yutaka Abe, who directed it. Segawa became best-known for comedies, but later made Four Sisters, while Abe was a 64-year-old veteran famous for having worked in Hollywood in the 1920s and brought some of its style back to Japan before building a highly successful post-war career largely on literary adaptations. By this point, he was regarded as old-fashioned – perhaps not unfairly as he was responsible for films like Confession – so his career was in decline and he had to take whatever directing work he could. This yakuza genre piece is by no means typical of his work, then, and was presumably a studio assignment intended to cash in on the increasing popularity of this type of material at the time. However, it speaks to Abe’s adaptability that he clearly had no trouble with the new emphasis on sex and violence and there’s no sense that this is the work of an old fuddy-duddy. It didn’t help him, though – after three more films for Nikkatsu (the latter two of which were very minor B-movies), he reportedly quit when they cut his pay and it seems that he received no further offers of work from any studio.

Nobuo Kaneko

The screenplay was co-written by prolific Nikkatsu contract hack Iwao (aka Gan) Yamazaki together with Takashi Nomura, who went on to become a director and made A Colt is My Passport (1967). It’s stylishly shot by cinematographer Yusuichiro Yamazaki, who also did Shunkin monogatari (1954) and the score by Riichiro Manabe is classier than expected for this type of fare. Still, the formulaic and unoriginal story together with the regrettable inclusion of the rape-leads-to-love cliché prevent this from being anything special even if it is well made and very watchable.

Also notable in the cast are Yoko Minamida as a widowed florist who provides the love interest for Goro, plus Nobuo Kaneko and Hideaki Nitani as the rival gang leaders.

A note on the title:

The title doesn’t translate easily into English, but the film is sometimes listed as The Law’s Bloody Wounds, which seems a reasonable attempt, although I’m not sure that was ever an official release title. At least it’s better than Tarnished Rule, which I’ve also seen it called. On some Japanese sites, the English title is listed as The Ogre in Mt. Oe, but that’s clearly not right!

Watched with dodgy subtitles.

Trailer on YouTube

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Forever, My Love / 佳人 / Kajin (‘Beautiful Woman’/ ‘Good Person’, 1958)

Obscure Japanese Film #252

Ryoji Hayama

1943. Shigeru (Ryoji Hayama) is a student returning from Tokyo to his hometown of Toyooka in Hyogo Prefecture on western Honshu (then part of the San’in region). There, he will have a farewell party before going off to war, but most of all he hopes to see his childhood sweetheart, Tsubura (Izumi Ashikawa), who has been unable to walk since contracting polio at an early age. This has caused her to be largely housebound and live rather like one of the dolls in glass boxes we see in her home.

Jukichi Uno and Sachiko Murase

On the train, Shigeru replays memories from their childhood when, as a boy (played by Hayama’s own kid brother, Kunio Yamaguchi), he would visit her and her kindly mother (Sachiko Murase), while her stern father (Jukichi Uno) looked on disapprovingly. Shigeru would often stop off at the tofu shop, where the girl, Tokie (Miori Karuhata), was jealous of his love for Tsubura. One day, she lured him into the back and seduced him despite the fact that he was yet to reach puberty (the film later backtracks on this somewhat and suggests that they did not go all the way).

Nobuo Kaneko

Izumi Ashikawa

Tsubura gives Shigeru three stones in a pouch, which he carries with him throughout the war. When he finally returns, it’s on the very day that she’s to be married to the local villain, Tachio (Nobuo Kaneko), who had previously run off with Tokie before abandoning her after six months. Now, he’s taken advantage of Tsubura and her mother’s hardship after her father’s death and pressured her into marriage in order to improve his social status. When Shigeru tries to visit her, Tachio won’t even let him in the house, so there’s little he can do but accept the situation. As he walks off despondently, he runs into Tokie (now played by Misako Watanabe), who is now working as a bar hostess (and, it’s implied, is also engaged in some form of prostitution). Initially, she tries to seduce him again, but he’s still too much in love with Tsubura. When Tokie is offered a job keeping the books for Tachio, she becomes a go-between for Shigeru and Tsubura, delivering messages between the two. Meanwhile, although it’s always been assumed that Tsubura is unable to have sex, she finally has her first period – something her mother hopes to keep secret from Tachio, who has begun bringing prostitutes home and forcing Tsubura to watch while he has sex with them...

Ryoji Hayama and Misako Watanabe

This Nikkatsu production was based on the debut novel of Shigeo Fujii (1916-79), who worked in magazine editing and had managed to get it published as a magazine serial the year before. According to Japanese Wikipedia, it ‘was highly praised by Yasunari Kawabata and nominated for the Akutagawa Prize’. When Nikkatsu bought the rights, he quit his day job and devoted himself full time to writing. Wikipedia also notes that, ‘During his lifetime, he believed that, "If I have saké, I don't need anything else." His clumsy and impulsive personality made him feared by editors, and sometimes even made them dislike him.’ Three further films (all obscure B-movies) were adapted from his work, but he’s remained unknown outside Japan. Like his protagonist, Fujii was also from Toyooka and apparently coached the actors in the local dialect. Unfortunately, I have to say that I found the story to be a contrived and excessively sentimental one, though it seems that such fare was eagerly lapped up by quite a large part of the Japanese cinemagoing audience at the time.

Izumi Ashikawa

The emerging new wave filmmakers of the era, on the other hand, had little patience for this kind of material and, although the sexual frankness of the piece is something you wouldn’t see in a Hollywood picture of this era, it sits awkwardly in what is at heart an old-fashioned (even for its day) tearjerker. As I’ve come to expect from director Eisuke Takizawa, the film is very well-made and it’s hard to find fault with the direction, only in what is (to me, anyway) the poor choice of material.

In terms of the cast, nominal star Izumi Ashikawa first appears 33 minutes in (the childhood prologue is a lengthy one) and I almost felt sorry for her in being stuck with such a role – Tsubura is so ridiculously self-sacrificing it’s actually kind of annoying. For his part, Jukichi Uno manages to escape his nice guy image briefly and play a bit of a bastard pretty well (intriguingly, his name does not appear on the poster, whereas Chishu Ryu’s does, suggesting that Uno took his role; perhaps it was felt that the gentle father of the Ozu films would not be accepted in such a part). However, the best performance comes from Misako Watanabe, who makes the perhaps unlikely character of Tokie feel more like a real human being than anyone else manages to do here. Watanabe, who won a Blue Ribbon Award for her performance in Shohei Imamura’s Endless Desire the following year and is also a well-respected stage actress, is still with us at the time of writing at 93 and has been acting as recently as 2024.

Misako Watanabe

DVD at Amazon Japan (no English subtitles)

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Kaze no aru michi / 風のある道 / (‘Windy Road’, 1959)

Obscure Japanese Film #240

Izumi Ashikawa

Naoko (Izumi Ashikawa) is a young woman still living at home with her father (Shiro Osaka), mother (Toshiko Yamane) and younger sister Chikako (Mayumi Shimizu). Her older sister Keiko (Mie Kitahara) has just got married, and Naoko is expected to marry wealthy ikebana master Kosuke (Yuji Odaka). However, when she meets Kobayashi (Ryoji Hayama), a teacher of special needs children, she finds herself drawn to him despite the fact that he doesn’t have a pot to piss in…

Ashikawa, Yuji Odaka and Mayumi Shimizu

Ryoji Hayama

Based on an untranslated novel of the same name by future Nobel Prize winner Yasunari Kawabata which was published as a serial in a women’s magazine during 1957-58, this Nikkatsu production is the sort of material more usually associated with Daiei Studios. Although the plot hinges on one massively-unlikely coincidence, it’s not as contrived as some that I’ve seen and the film is generally a well-made and enjoyable watch. Having said that, it’s actually the parents who turn out to be the most well-rounded and interesting characters here, which I doubt was the original intention.

Toshiko Yamane and Shiro Osaka

Masayoshi Ikeda’s music is a slightly eccentric mish-mash of styles, but quite effective on the whole, and the rather cheeky audience-teasing climax even features a passage that sounds similar to John Williams’s famous cello piece from Jaws. Another memorable use of music in the film is the counterpoint provided by the upbeat tune which plays on the jukebox while Kosuke is getting Naoko drunk so that he can have his wicked way with her.

Mie Kitahara

It’s surprising to see Mie Kitahara in such a small role here as she was, I think, Nikkatsu’s top female star at the time, but it’s an example of how Japanese studios back then tried to squeeze as much out of the stars they had under contract as possible – Kitahara featured in seven films released in 1959, which was actually taking it easy in comparison to some. This film is, instead, a vehicle for Izumi Ashikawa, who was touted as Japan’s answer to Audrey Hepburn and was a decent if unremarkable actor. She married fellow actor Tatsuya Fuji in 1968 and promptly retired but is still with us at the time of writing at the age of 90.

Ashikawa and Yamane

The director of this film, Katsumi Nishikawa (1918-2010), was especially well-known for films based around female stars, the previously-reviewed A Portrait of Shunkin (1976) being a good example. He worked in a wide variety of genres but never quite made the top rank, although he’s one of the few directors to have his own museum (located in Tottori Prefecture – click here for further information).

Mountain Pass / 峠 / Toge (1957)

Obscure Japanese Film #196

 

Yoko Minamida

 

Tsukiko (Yoko Minamida) is a young woman dabbling in acting who gets signed by a movie studio where she is cast alongside star actress Harumi Sada (Misako Watanabe), a selfish bitch. Tsukiko’s father, Reisuke (Masao Shimizu), is a distinguished former diplomat who now lives with Tsukiko’s stepmother, Tomiko (Sachiko Murase), with whom she has an uneasy relationship, believing that Tomiko stole Reisuke away from her late mother. 

 

Masao Shimizu

 

Sachiko Murase

 

Tsukiko keeps running into nice guy magazine reporter Daisuke (Ryoji Hayama), a friend of her twinkly-eyed uncle (Jukichi Uno). However, after she meets the wealthy and money-obsessed Junzo (Shoji Yasui), who wants to marry her, she decides that the film biz is not for her and becomes his wife. Unfortunately, it turns out that Junzo and Harumi are former lovers; when Harumi happens to be on the same train as the newlyweds, she asks them which hotel they’ll be staying at and then transfers to the same one with the intention of seducing Junzo…

 

Ryoji Hayama

 

 

Shoji Yasui

 

Despite its title, this romantic drama from Nikkatsu studios has little to do with mountains – there’s some talk about Daisuke finding a mole up a mountain, which seems to be a strained metaphor for something or other, but that’s about it. Based on a serialised novel of the same name by Jiro Osaragi (best-known for his series of novels featuring his hooded swordsman character, Kurama Tengu), it was adapted by one Tamio Aoyama, whose brief screenwriting career resulted in only nine credits. Frankly, on the evidence of this film, it’s not hard to see why – there are  more coincidental meetings (one of my pet hates!) than you can shake a stick at, most of the characters are mere types rather than recognisable human beings, and Tsukiko’s marriage to Junzo is entirely unconvincing. 

 

Jukichi Uno

 

 

Misako Watanabe

 

The actors do their best, with Yoko Minamida and Sachiko Murase making especially heroic efforts with the flawed material they’ve been lumbered with, while Misako Watanabe can hardly fail to make an impression in the fun bad girl role, but for the most part these characters – especially the male ones – never really come to life. The corny string-dominated music score of Takanobu Saito and pedestrian direction by Buichi Saito (no relation) certainly do not help matters either. Director Saito had been an assistant to Ozu and began his own career making films of a similar type to his mentor, but had little success until he switched to more commercial fare such as The Rambling Guitarist (1959) and it’s eight sequels. 

 

Yoko Minamida

 

While the theme of how to deal with an unfaithful partner has potential and it’s satisfying to see Tsukiko refuse to be a victim and stand up for herself at the end, Mountain Pass is too contrived to be judged anything more than a mediocre piece of work.

Thanks to A.K.

Amazon Japan (no subtitles)

Bonus trivia: Shohei Imamura was assistant director on this film and can be seen playing one of the staff at the studio where Tsukiko makes her movie debut.

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.