The Naked Sun / 裸の太陽 / Hadaka no taiyo (1958)

Obscure Japanese Film #254

Shinjiro Ebara

Kimura (Shinjiro Ebara) is a young stoker on the railway saving up to marry Yukiko (Satomi Oka), His best friend, Maeda (Tatsuya Nakadai), also works for the railway but is an unhappy man with a reputation for skiving, drinking and gambling. When a colleague’s money goes missing, Maeda is the main suspect and the workers give him a beating until Kimura intervenes and stops it. Later, Maeda asks Kimura to lend him some money, but won’t say what for – Kimura at first refuses, then relents and hands all his savings over to Maeda. Yukiko is furious when she finds out and persuades Kimura that Maeda must have lost it all betting on the bicycle races…

Tatsuya Nakadai

Set in the fictional town of Haginomiya but shot in Utsunomiya, north of Tokyo, this Toei production is the only film to have been based on a novel by the obscure Kazutoshi Himuro. Adapted for the screen by the ubiquitous Kaneto Shindo, it was directed by Miyoji Ieki. Unlike many of Ieki’s better-known films, none of the main characters are children, but otherwise this is fairly typical of his oeuvre in being a work of leftist social realism shot on real locations. Something I don’t remember seeing before in an Ieki film, however, is an accomplished action scene like the one we get here when there’s a fault with the train and Kimura has to climb outside while it’s still moving in order to fix it.

Hitomi Nakahara and Satomi Oka

Toei contract player Shinjiro Ebara had played his first lead in Tadashi Imai’s Rice the year before and went on to marry his co-star, Hitomi Nakahara (aptly nicknamed ‘Bambi’), in 1960. She also appears here as Yukiko’s younger sister. In his hands, Kimura seems quite dull at first and perhaps the filmmakers realised that he was failing to make much of an impression – around 50 minutes in, there’s a scene in which, completely out of the blue, he bursts into a quite extraordinary solo a capella song and dance to which he adds frenzied percussion by slapping himself and anything else near at hand. This is followed by a scene in which he does something weird with his shirt and gives an impassioned speech at a meeting, none of which seemed thinkable from the Kimura featured in the film’s first half. Well, I guess at least nobody was going to accuse him of giving a boring performance after all that...

Less than a year away from stardom, Tatsuya Nakadai’s screen time is quite limited and he’s not yet the assured actor he would soon become as a result of working on The Human Condition. There’s a mystery about his character which is quite intriguing, but ultimately his role feels underwritten, although this may well be the only film in which you’ll see him break down and sob uncontrollably.

The Naked Sun was entered into the 1959 Berlin International Film Festival, where it won the Youth Film Award for Best Feature Film Suitable for Young People. This is perhaps a little surprising considering that it was a West Berlin festival in those days and Naked Sun seems like a film that would have been more popular with the Communists in the Eastern sector. However, in this case the workers only grumble a bit about their pay and conditions and are generally shown as quite a cheerful and hard-working bunch.

Toshio Takahara

The film was ranked 5^th best of the year by Kinema Jumpo magazine, the top four being, respectively, Kinoshita’s The Ballad of Narayama, Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress, Ozu’s Equinox Flower and Ichikawa’s Conflagration (also featuring Nakadai). I’m a little surprised to see it ranked so highly myself but, while I wouldn’t call the film a masterpiece, it’s certainly an interesting and likeable picture and not just for train buffs.

Thanks to A.K.

DVD at Amazon Japan (no English subtitles)

If you enjoy this blog, feel free to Buy Me a Coffee

The Last Judgment / 最後の審判 / Saigo no shinpan (1965)

Obscure Japanese Film #250

Tatsuya Nakadai

Masao Mishima

Jiro (Tatsuya Nakadai), the manager of a pool hall owned by Asai (Masao Mishima), has been having an affair with Masako (Chikage Awashima) since her wealthy engineer husband went to oversee a construction project in Vietnam two years earlier. The husband in question, Riichiro (Fujio Suga), also happens to be Jiro’s cousin. When he returns from abroad, it becomes very difficult for the lovers to continue meeting, especially as Riichiro is not only a jealous and suspicious type, but has a short fuse to boot.

Fujio Suga

Jitsuko Yoshimura

Meanwhile, Asai wants to sell the pool hall and Jiro wants to buy it but lacks the funds. He also has little time to find them as the local yakuza want to buy the place, but then he thinks of a clever solution to his problems. This will involve both seducing a waitress, Miyoko (Onibaba’s Jitsuko Yoshimura), and getting Riichiro to use his explosive temper against himself. But will Jiro be able to stay one step ahead of dogged police detective Kikuchi? (This latter is played by Junzaburo Ban, who played a similar character in the same year’s A Fugitive from the Past.)

Junzaburo Ban

This Toho production was based on the 1949 novel Heaven Ran Last by William P. McGivern (1918-82), who also wrote the novels on which Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat (1953) and Robert Wise’s Odds Against Tomorrow (1959) were based. Heaven Ran Last, though, was never filmed by Hollywood and, like Kurosawa basing High and Low (1963) on Ed McBain’s novel King’s Ransom, it’s an indication of how much American pulp was being translated into Japanese in the post-war years that it came to the attention of director Hiromichi Horikawa. In this case, apart from transferring the story from America to Japan, screenwriters Zenzo Matsuyama and Ichiro Ikeda have stuck pretty closely to the book – too closely, perhaps, according to some Japanese reviewers who have commented that the characters don’t behave like Japanese people. In any case, I found it to be one of the better plots I’ve seen in this type of film as the twists don’t become too far-fetched, as is so often the case.

Chikage Awashima

Several of the same talents from Horikawa’s excellent 1963 noir Shiro to kuro (‘White and Black’, aka Pressure of Guilt) returned for this one, including Japan’s top film composer Toru Takemitsu as well as cast members Chikage Awashima, Masao Mishima, Eijiro Tono and, of course, star Tatsuya Nakadai. The Last Judgment makes an excellent vehicle for Nakadai, who looks very cool driving around in an MG Roadster in his shades and fur-lined jacket and is obviously having a field day being very bad indeed. However, Jiro is saved from becoming a one-dimensional villain not only by Nakadai’s charismatic performance but the fact that his love for Masako, at least, does seem to be genuine.

One of the great things about Takemitsu as a composer was that he knew when to shut up, an all-too-rare talent which is well in evidence here, while Horikawa makes excellent use of industrial noises to heighten the tension in a number of scenes. Another plus is the dark, shadowy cinematography of Tokuzo Kuroda. All in all, The Last Judgment is a very satisfying noir that has been kept in the dark for far too long.

Thanks to A.K.

If you enjoy this blog, feel free to Buy Me a Coffee!

The Beast Must Die: Mechanic of Revenge / 野獣死すべし 復讐のメカニック / Yaju shisubeshi: fukushu no mekanikku (1974)

Obscure Japanese Film #247

Hiroshi Fujioka

At the end of The Beast Must Die (1959), Kunihiko Date (Tatsuya Nakadai), a highly intelligent but amoral student leading a double life as a thief and murderer, escapes the clutches of the police and jets off to America. In this sequel (loosely based on author Haruhiko Oyabu’s 1960 sequel to his original book) he’s back from the States and is now a Moby Dick-obsessed literature professor, but is still killing and stealing in his spare time. Although it’s unclear whether exactly 15 years have passed in story terms, it does look like 1974, and he’s now played by the 28-year-old Hiroshi Fujioka (Nakadai – who had been playing a little younger than his real age in the first film – was 41 by this point and perhaps deemed too old. It should also be noted that he does not appear in this film despite a credit on IMDb).

Date, who was already pretty nasty, has become even nastier (burning a man’s face, casually killing a woman who’s helped him, etc) but has also been given a personal motive for his crimes. This time round he’s targeting the businessmen who drove his father to suicide and took over his company. In my view, despite the fact that this element seems to have been present in the book, this was a mistake – Date is someone who simply does not care about other people, so it makes no sense that he would care about his father so much that he would go to all the trouble he does here to get revenge (in the superior first film, Date does what he does because he views himself as a sort of Nietzschean superman above normal standards of morality).

Mako Midori

Hiroshi Fujioka, previously a supporting actor in movies but a star in TV, fails to make much of the character and, while the supporting cast are decent enough, they only have so much to work with. Mako Midori – something of a cult actress in Japan – is among them, but her screen time is limited and she has been better served in other films, such as Yasuzo Masumura’s The Great Villains (1968). Akemi Mari, who plays the other main female role, had been married to this film’s director, Eizo Sugawa, since 1969. She’s fine here, but her film career never really took off, although she had some success on TV.

Akemi Mari

The film is also rather cheap and drab-looking – I suspect that Toho had limited faith in it and only allowed Sugawa (who had also made the first film) a pretty low budget. Incidentally, Sugawa made other unrelated films with the word ‘beast’ in the title, including his previous film, Beast Hunt (1973, aka The Black Battlefront Kidnappers) and the excellent Beast Alley (1965).

On the plus side, the soundtrack features a cool combination of classical and jazz courtesy of composer Kunihiko Murai, who was better known as a producer of pop music, though he also composed the soundtrack for Tampopo (1985). Running a taut 86 minutes, the film also has an appealing leanness about it, and its misanthropic tone is certainly of a piece with its director’s other best-known works so, while it’s certainly not as good as the first film, it’s not a total wash-out. (Incidentally, one of the screenwriters, Yoshio Shirasaka, had also worked frequently with that other great misanthropic director of the era, Yasuzo Masumura).

Starring Yusaku Matsuda, Toru Murakawa’s 1980 remake of the 1959 original is more impressive (if more self-indulgent) than this sequel and recently received the deluxe Blu-ray treatment courtesy of Radiance Films, while a further remake and sequel (neither of which I’ve seen) appeared in 1997 starring Kazuya Kimura as Date.

It’s a bit low-res, but you can watch the film on YouTube with English subtitles here.

Hear part of Kunihiko Murai's original soundtrack on YouTube here.

If you enjoy this blog, feel free to Buy Me a Coffee!

Sazae-san no seishun / サザエさんの青春 (‘Sazae-san’s Youth’, 1957)

Obscure Japanese Film #246

Chiemi Eri

This third film in the Toho series kicked off by the previously-reviewed Sazae-san was the first to be shot in colour, but otherwise director Nobuo Aoyagi repeats much the same recipe, even down to Chiemi Eri dancing along the street singing ‘Bippidi-Boppidi-Boo’, as she had also done in the first film, although there are fewer songs this time around. 

Here Sazae-san becomes engaged to her long-term sweetheart, Fuguta (Hiroshi Koizumi), and tries to prepare herself for married life by taking on the household chores, helping to look after her cousin’s new baby and getting a job in a department store to contribute to the household income. Of course, she makes a mess of all three, and disaster is only narrowly averted when a female customer at the store takes a liking to Sazae and invites her round for tea – it turns out that she’s the wife of Sazae’s father’s boss and sees Sazae as a possible future wife for her son…

Released just in time for New Year, this would have been intended as a film that the whole family could enjoy together, and it retains an old-fashioned innocence and charm, while the new colour photography suits the material well, making it look appropriately more cartoonish than it did in black and white.

After skipping the second film, Tatsuya Nakadai reappears here as Sazae-san’s cousin, but has only one brief scene around 35 minutes in, in which he’s at a hospital waiting to see his newborn child for the first time (typically, Sazae-san manages to mix it up with someone else’s baby to comic effect). Incidentally, Nakadai is not the only Kurosawa favourite to pop up in these films – also present is Kamatari Fujiwara, who appeared in no fewer than 12 Kurosawa pictures, and even made it to Hollywood on one occasion, appearing in Arthur Penn’s underrated Mickey One (1965).

Also deserving a mention is Tomoko Matsushima, who plays Sazae-san’s big-eyed younger sister and is pretty funny in these films. Everyone knows about Johnny Cash’s famous prison gig, but Matsushima performed at Sugamo Prison in 1950 at the age of 5 and apparently reduced around 1,000 war criminals to tears with her rendition of a Japanese song entitled ‘The Cute Fishmonger’. Later in life, she became a TV presenter and was attacked twice by big cats – once by a lion, another time by a leopard, luckily surviving both incidents without major harm. It has been speculated that her large eyes may have been a reason for the attacks as it’s inadvisable to look a dangerous predator in the eye and presumably, therefore, even less of a good idea if you have big eyes...

Watched without subtitles.

DVD at Amazon Japan (no English subtitles).

If you enjoy this blog, feel free to Buy Me a Coffee!

Sazae-san / サザエさん (1956)

Obscure Japanese Film #245

Chiemi Eri

Kamatari Fujiwara and Nijiko Kiyokawa

Sazae (Chiemi Eri) is a young woman still living at home with her father (Kamatari Fujiwara), mother (Nijiko Kiyokawa) and two younger siblings. She applies for a job at a women’s magazine but, after being directed to the wrong door by the handsome young Fuguta (Hiroshi Koizumi), she accidentally ends up working for a literary publisher instead. Her first task is to deliver the proof of a book to an author, but he turns out to be the same man she had had an embarrassing misunderstanding with in a department store and she is fired. Fuguta suggests she try to get a job at a detective agency instead – unexpectedly, she succeeds, but her first assignment happens to be to spy on her cousin, Norisuke (Tatsuya Nakadai), as his fiancee’s mother wants him investigated before agreeing to the marriage. She disguises herself as an old woman and begins to follow him around…

Chiemi Eri

This Toho production was their first in a series of ten musical comedies starring singing sensation Chiemi Eri as Sazae-san, a daydreaming tomboy with a strange hairdo. It was based on a comic strip by Machiko Hasegawa (1920-92), Japan’s first professional female manga author, which first appeared in 1946 and ran in various newspapers until 1974. There have been various other adaptations, most notably an anime TV series which has been running since 1969, making Sazae-san a true Japanese institution, albeit one that’s remained little-known in the West.

One of the ironies of Japanese cinema is that, the more westernised the characters, the less likely a film has been to receive distribution abroad. The overseas market has tended to favour tales of samurai, geisha and yakuza, and (as far as I’m aware), Sazae-san has never been distributed in Europe or the U.S. At the end of the film, we see the family celebrating Christmas – which, of course, is not a Japanese festival, and the film is full of instances of Japanese people attempting to emulate westerners. The most extreme example of this is seen in the department store, where none of the mannequins look remotely Japanese.

The film was released in December of 1956 as the main feature in a triple-bill which also included two Tenten Musume pictures of under an hour each – very similar fare directed, like Sazae-san, by Nobuo Aoyagi, who had earlier made the excellent World of Love and the previously-reviewed Hyoroku’s Dream Tale (both 1943), but by this stage in his career seemed happy to be directing anything. In this case, there’s little to say about his direction except that it’s competent. Still, there’s some fun to be had from Sazae-san’s antics, and Chiemi Eri proves herself an adept comedienne as well as singer. Incidentally, in her daydreams, Sazae has a sensible haircut, glamorous attire and sings American-style jazz songs.

Tatsuya Nakadai

It’s also amusing to see a young Tatsuya Nakadai as Sazae’s slightly slow-witted cousin in the days when he still had to take whatever roles he could get. It’s difficult to think of a less typical Nakadai role than this one, and it has to be said that he doesn’t look entirely comfortable singing along to Jingle Bells at the film’s climax. He managed to avoid the second film, but was roped back in for the third in the series before escaping for good.

Watched without subtitles.

DVD at Amazon Japan (no English subtitles)

If you enjoy this blog, feel free to Buy Me a Coffee!

Rise, Fair Sun / 朝やけの詩 / Asayake no uta (‘Poem of the Morning Glow’, 1973)

 

Tatsuya Nakadai

 

The Shinano Plateau, Nagano. Left without a position after Japan’s defeat, former naval officer Sakuzo (Tatsuya Nakadai) is now a comparatively poor but hard-working and extremely proud farmer with a teenage daughter, Haruko (Keiko Takahashi), and two younger children, all of whom he is raising by himself. His wife, Yaeko (Kaneko Iwasaki), seems to have been unable to bear the drudgery, has developed a drinking problem and left him for an easier life, shacking up with Kamiyama (Yosuke Kondo). He’s the president of Apollo Tourism, who want all the farmers in the area to clear out so they can use the land to build a holiday resort. As the farmers are all in debt to local bigwig Inagi (Shin Saburi), Kamiyama conspires with him to make them an offer they can’t refuse, but some – like Sakuzo – prove inconveniently stubborn. When land surveyors are sent in, violence breaks out… 

 

Kaneko Iwasaki and Keiko Takahashi

 

Rise, Fair Sun was a co-production between Toho and Haiyuza, the theatre company to whom Nakadai and a number of his fellow cast members (including Kaneko Iwasaki and Yosuke Kondo) belonged. The film was directed by Kei Kumai and based on his original screenplay, co-written with the little-known Akiko Katsura and the slightly better-known Hisashi Yamanouchi, who had worked on three of Shohei Imamura’s early pictures. Like many of Kumai’s films, it has an obvious left-wing, social conscience theme. 

 

Shin Saburi and Nakadai

 

In the early 1970s, many Japanese feature films returned to using the old academy ratio that the studios had originally abandoned around 1957, and this film is one example of such. As I understand it, this was mainly done because it was cheaper and the studios’ profits were diminishing, but I also wonder whether it may have been related to the more TV-friendly nature of the academy ratio as the sale of films to television after their cinema run was more of a concern by this point. In any case, it’s part of the reason why Rise, Fair Sun has something of a TV miniseries feel to it. However, that’s not to say that the film fails to impress visually – mostly shot on location, it features some beautiful scenery and attractive cinematography by Kozo Okazaki (Goyokin, Inn of Evil) which includes a spectacular shot of Haruko and her young lover silhouetted against the sun towards the end. Another plus is the score by Kumai’s regular composer, Teizo Matsumura, which is refreshingly free from the usual clichés. 

 

 

The film is generally very sympathetic to Sakuzo despite the clear suggestion that his wife has been a victim of domestic violence, an implied additional motivation for her absence. Like Toshiro Mifune in Redbeard, there’s a scene in which Nakadai appears to forget that he’s not in a samurai movie and launches a one-man attack on multiple opponents – in this case grabbing a surveying pole and going into full Sword of Doom mode on the unfortunate surveyors. As if to compensate for this violent side, he tries to save a bloated cow (by stabbing it!) and, while digging on his land, he discovers an ancient pot from the Jomon people (who were believed to have lived in harmony with nature to a remarkable degree). This instantly turns his farm into a major archaeological site, and when a Jomon face sculpture is dug up, he declares it better than anything in the Louvre (which he has apparently visited while in the navy). This unexpected plot thread is quickly dropped, but – with symbolism not too hard to decipher – we will later see a shot of a bulldozer carelessly running over another piece of Jomon pottery. 

 

 

 

 

The film marked veteran star Shin Saburi’s return to the big screen after an absence of 12 years, during which time he had been very active as both an actor and director in television. It was his first film opposite Nakadai and there’s a memorable confrontation scene between the two, who were reunited the following year in Satsuo Yamamoto’s The Family. Nakadai had known his other co-star, Kaneko Iwasaki, since the very beginning of his acting career and the two had appeared in a number of films together. Though she has seldom had leading roles in feature films, Iwasaki is the official representative of Haiyuza at the time of writing and remains a highly respected stage actor who played the King Lear equivalent in Haiyuza’s 2024 production Dokoku no Ria (‘Lear’s Lament’). 

 

 

 

 

 

The production of the film was overshadowed by the publicity around the nude swimming scene featuring an 18-year-old Keiko Takahashi – then known as Keiko Sekine – who had already been a popular star for a couple of years at this point. Although the inclusion of such a scene may have been a cynical move by the producers, it was tastefully shot by Kumai, but in any case it was not enough to make Rise, Fair Sun a hit either at the box office or with the critics. Though screened in competition at the Berlin Film Festival, it failed to win any prizes. This is not too surprising as, despite some good work in a number of departments, it’s basically a noble effort which doesn’t quite gel – mainly, I think, due to the flawed script and somehow unconvincing characters. In my view, stories of this type often work better with a more Ken Loach-type approach, in which the use of improvisation by a cast of mainly non-professionals can be more effective.

The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) Film Library in Californiaa has a 35mm print of this film with English subtitles

Thanks to A.K.