Settlement of love / 愛情の決算 / Aijo no kessan (1956)

Obscure Japanese Film #255

Shin Saburi

Narasaki (Shin Saburi) has married Katsuko (Setsuko Hara), the widow of a soldier who got killed fighting alongside Narasaki in the Philippines and who left her with a son, Hiroshi. However, it was a marriage of convenience and there’s been little intimacy between the two – her husband is suffering from PTSD and suppressing his emotions, so he often comes across as a bit of a cold fish. One of Narasaki’s friends is Ohira (Toshiro Mifune), a less damaged veteran who finds himself attracted to Katsuko. Emotionally starved as she is, she finds herself falling for him despite her moral qualms...

Setsuko Hara

This Toho production was based on a story entitled Kono ju-nen (‘These 10 Years’) by Hidemi Kon (1903-84), who had himself been stationed in the Philippines during the war. It was adapted by Toshiro Ide, a notable screenwriter who worked for many of Japan’s top directors, but is perhaps best-known for his frequent collaborations with Mikio Naruse, whose films this one somewhat resembles. On this occasion, however, the director is none other than star actor Shin Saburi, whom I’ve often criticised in previous reviews for being wooden. After seeing this film, he’s definitely gone up in my estimation as, not only does he give a better performance than usual – indeed, there are times you could almost swear that he’s alive – but he also does a highly creditable job of direction. This was actually the 11^th of 14 films he directed, though I’ve yet to see any of the others.

Toshiro Mifune

Saburi also gets excellent performances out of the rest of the cast, although considering that – apart from Setsuko Hara and Toshiro Mifune – this also includes Keiju Kobayashi, Murasaki Fujima and Kaoru Yachigusa, they may not have needed too much help. Mifune might seem an unlikely romantic lead but, reunited with Hara after their successful pairing in Tokyo Sweetheart (1952), he again shows that he was quite capable of giving a good performance in a non-aggressive role. However, top-billed Hara is the real star of the show here and for her part she demonstrates a wide range of subtle expressions that her work for Ozu rarely allowed her.

Setsuko Hara

Aside from being a strong love story for grown-ups which offers no fairy-tale endings or easy solutions, the film is also an insightful portrait of post-war Japanese life, the story taking place in flashbacks over a period of 10 years from the end of the war until what was then the present day. We witness the lives of the various characters change greatly during this period, especially in economic terms – immediately after the war, they’re all living hand-to-mouth, but some prove able to adapt to new circumstances very successfully and become quite wealthy within just a few years, while others (like Narasaki) are, to their detriment, unable to let go of the past and seem bewildered by the sudden dramatic social changes. Meanwhile, the Americans are a constant background presence throughout – jeeps rumble through the streets and military jets fly over, startling everyone with their sudden noise. Such sights are common in films of the period, and this one in particular shows that the war and its aftermath continued to affect the lives of everyone in the country in all sorts of subtle ways.

A pleasant surprise, then, and a film well-worth seeking out.

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Totsugu hi made / 嫁ぐ日まで (‘Until Your Wedding Day’, 1940)

Obscure Japanese Film #231

 

Setsuko Hara

Yoshiko (Setsuko Hara) lives with her widowed father (Ko Mihashi) and younger sister Asako (Akira Kurosawa’s future wife, Yoko Yaguchi, in her film debut). She’s being courted by Atsushi (Heihachiro Okawa), but feels that she cannot get married until her father finds a new wife to look after him and Asako. A suitable woman is found in the person of Tsuneko (Sadako Sawamura), but Asako is still very attached to the memory of her late mother, so will she accept another woman filling this role? 

 

Yoko Yaguchi

This domestic drama from Toho Eiga seems to prefigure the post-war films of Ozu, even down to the choice of Setsuko Hara as star. It’s well-made and features very natural performances from an impressive cast that also includes Haruko Sugimura as a piano teacher, but it’s arguably a little too low-key for its own good. It also features a couple of rather awkward ellipses and I must say that I found the ending completely unsatisfactory, perhaps largely because writer-director-producer Yasujiro Shimazu chose not to set it up in any way, so that when it comes it’s so out of the blue it feels almost random. 

 

Ko Mihashi

Shimazu, who died aged 48 of stomach cancer just after the war ended, was one of Japan’s most acclaimed directors of the 1930s. Credited with pioneering a new emphasis on realism and the lives of everyday people, it’s likely that he would have been much better known today had he survived and been able to continue directing for another decade or two. Keisuke Kinoshita, one of several fine directors who apprenticed under Shimazu, considered him a tyrant yet admitted he had learnt a great deal from him. 

 

Heihachiro Okawa

Intriguingly, there is a scene in which Asako’s school friends discuss going to see the 1938 French film about a reformatory school for teenage girls, Prison sans barreaux, which had recently been released in Japan, although it was unclear to me whether this was intended to say anything Asako's rebellion, mild as it is.  

 

Sadako Sawamura

 

Watch on my YouTube channel with English subtitles

https://BUYMEACOFFEE.com/martindowsing 

Woman Unveiled / 女であること / Onna de aru koto (‘Being a Woman’, 1958)

 

Yoshiko Kuga

 

Masayuki Mori and Setsuko Hara

Sadatsugu (Masayuki Mori), a lawyer, and his wife Ichiko (Setsuko Hara) are a childless couple who are looking after the daughter of one of Sadatsugu’s clients, who is facing a death sentence, though we never learn precisely what for. The daughter, named Taeko (Kyoko Kagawa), appears to be in her late teens, and is sensitive, timid and rather gloomy, perhaps mostly due to her father’s situation.

 

Kyoko Kagawa

Sadatsugu and Ichiko then find themselves having to look after another young woman of a similar age, Sakae (Yoshiko Kuga), who has run away from home and is the daughter of Ichiko’s best friend. Unlike Taeko, Sakae turns out to be a spoilt, insensitive troublemaker with no filter and no control over her emotions. It’s not long before she’s annoying Taeko with her directness, flirting with Sadatsugu and even coming home drunk and kissing Ichiko on the lips. Meanwhile, Ichiko has a chance meeting with old flame Goro (Tatsuya Mihashi), whom she hasn’t seen for 17 years. Then Sakae finds out and starts sticking her oar in… 

 

Tatsuya Mihashi

 

This production by Tokyo Eiga (a subsidiary of Toho) was director Yuzo Kawashima’s first for them after leaving Nikkatsu. It was based on an untranslated novel of the same name by Yasunari Kawabata originally serialised in the Asahi Shinbun during 1956. Despite the fact that it’s not considered one of future Nobel laureate Kawabata’s most notable works, Kawashima – along with his collaborators Sumie Tanaka (female) and Toshiro Ide (male) – is said to have gone to a great deal of trouble over the screenplay. By all accounts a pretty faithful adaptation, nevertheless Kawashima apparently regarded the film as a failure, feeling that he had failed to make of it any more than an illustrated version of the novel’s key scenes. It’s also likely that some important aspects had to be implied in the film version due to censorship – for example, that Sadatsugu and his wife haven’t slept together much in their ten years of marriage, and that Ichiko’s interest in sex is revived partly due to her kiss with Sakae and partly as a result of meeting Goro again. There’s also some suggestion that Sadatsugu sleeps with Sakae, but it’s not really made clear. However, what’s more frustrating is that we learn nothing of the crime for which Taeko’s father is facing a death sentence and, in fact, never even lay eyes on him – it’s simply a convenient device to give her something to feel troubled about. It seems to me that the inclusion of such a story element rather obliges the writers to expand a little (I would assume that Kawabata went into more detail in his book).

 

Masayuki Mori

 

The film opens with a montage sequence of Yoshiko Kuga shot from behind riding around on her bike and shouting out greetings to various passers-by. This is followed by Akihiro Miwa, the drag queen from Black Lizard (1968), dancing and singing the title song (i.e. ‘Being a Woman’) over the opening credits before two American military planes go roaring overhead, scaring Kyoko Kagawa’s pet bird. It’s hard to know what to make of this opening – apart from whimsy on the part of Kawashima – as none of it seems to bear much relation to what follows. 

 

Setsuko Hara

Though by no means a bad film, Woman Unveiled also features a disappointingly corny, Hollywood-style score by Toshiro Mayuzumi and wraps things up in mostly conventional fashion, although the change undergone by Kyoko Kagawa’s character is somewhat unexpected. The posters promoted Setsuko Hara as the main star, but it’s Yoshiko Kuga who steals this one – the term  ‘charm offensive’ springs to mind here, as she simultaneously manages to be both charming and offensive. Incidentally, the role is strikingly similar to the one she played in the previous year’s Banka (aka Northern Elegy), in which she also caused trouble for a middle-aged and married professional played by Masayuki Mori. For all its flaws, Woman Unveiled remains a well-made and intelligent film arguably more in the Naruse mould than the Kawashima one (if such a thing existed) with a trio of very different but interesting and well-rounded female characters at its centre.

Thanks to A.K.

DVD at Amazon Japan (no English subtitles) 

 

 

Women of Tokyo / 東京の女性 / Tokyo no josei (1939)

Obscure Japanese Film #59

Setsuko Hara

 

Women of Tokyo stars Setsuko Hara as the conveniently-named Setsuko, who works as a typist for an automobile company. She has eyes for Kohata (Akira Tatematsu), a salesman for the same company, but is put off when she sees him get into a fist-fight with another salesman, Takayama (Taizo Fukami), who has accused Kohata of stealing a contract from him then begged for it back on the grounds that he needs the money for his sick wife and children. However, when Kohata explains to Setsuko that he knows for a fact that Takayama’s wife is not sick and he’s just an unscrupulous character who will say anything to get a contract, they become friends again. 

Akira Tatematsu

When Setsuko’s father (Kinji Fujiwa) falls ill, the family need money for his hospital bills, so Setsuko asks Kohata to help her join the sales department and become the company’s first female salesperson. Kohata is reluctant to do so and warns her of the unpleasantness she is likely to face from his aggressively competitive colleagues, but she is undeterred and he relents. After a slow start, she begins to have success in her new career, but her burgeoning self-confidence makes Kohata uneasy and he becomes interested in her cute younger sister Mizuyo (Kazuko Enami) instead… 

Kazuko Enami

 

This Toho production was tailor-made as a vehicle for their 19-year-old star Setsuko Hara who, despite her youth, was already something of a veteran, having made 26 films before this one. Hara is seen in a rather implausible range of attractive outfits for a character supposedly in desperate financial straits for most of the running time, but fortunately her performance is quite natural and convincing.

 

Based on a novel published the same year and said to have been written for Hara by the prolific Fumio Niwa (a male), this has a surprisingly strong feminist perspective for its time. There may even be a hint of lesbianism in Setsuko's relationship with her best friend, Takiko (Reiko Mizukami), and the rather mannish Western clothes in which they sometimes both sometimes dress. Films such as this which endorsed Western culture and values were shortly to be suppressed by the Japanese authorities until the end of the war.

 

Reiko Minakami

The film also criticises the culture of unchecked capitalism in which the salespeople become little better than hungry wolves fighting over a scrap of meat, while another interesting aspect is the ending, which plays with audience expectations in quite a clever way. 

 

I was also struck by the way director Osamu Fushimizu filmed two scenes in particular. The dialogue between Kohata and Mizuyo shot through the window of a moving car must have been difficult to achieve in 1939, and even 20 years later such scenes were usually filmed in a studio with unconvincing back projection. The other scene which stood out for me was the one in which Setsuko is assaulted in the street by the villain of the piece, Takayama – a sequence which Fushimizu makes more threatening through his use of background noise and the odd reflections on Takayama’s face.

 

As much of the film is less remarkable, it’s difficult to assess the extent of Fushimizu’s talent on this picture alone, but he has an intriguing Kurosawa connection, having employed Kurosawa as an assistant director on his 1936 film Tokyo Rhapsody and later made Current of Youth (1942) from a Kurosawa script. Fushimizu made 15 films before his death at the premature age of 31 in 1942 (the cause is not known to me, but I would be interested to hear it if anyone knows). Another ill-fated contributor to this film was actress Kazuko Enami, who succumbed to tuberculosis in 1947 and was the mother of Kyoko ‘Woman Gambler’ Enami. Women of Tokyo was remade in 1960 by Shigeo Tanaka with Fujiko Yamamoto starring.
 

Thanks to Japana Kino for making Women of Tokyo available with English subtitles on YouTube here.