River of Forever / 千曲川絶唱 / Chikumakawa zessho (‘The Great Poem of the Chikuma River’, 1967)

Obscure Japanese Film #266

Kinya Kitaoji

Kunie Tanaka

Goshogawa (Kinya Kitaoji) and Yujiro (Kunie Tanaka) are young truck drivers in Toyama. Having to drive to Niigata, they stop off to visit Yujiro’s sister, Yoshiko (Ayumi Ishida), who is in there with tuberculosis. Goshogawa finds himself attracted to a nurse, Nami (Yuriko Hoshi); meanwhile, Yujiro takes the opportunity to tell the doctor (Mikijiro Hira) that Goshogawa has been complaining about his gums bleeding recently. Examining Goshogawa, the doctor discovers that he has leukemia, but doesn’t tell him. However, Goshogawa soon learns the truth, and it emerges that he had been on a fishing boat near Bikini Atoll at the time of the US nuclear bomb test…

Yuriko Hoshi

Mikijiro Hira

This Toho production was based on an original screenplay by Hideko Takamine’s husband, Zenzo Matsuyama, who had a penchant for writing – and sometimes directing – what are somtimes termed ‘issue’ films; in other works, he tackled sensitive subjects such as forced emigration (Mother Country), dementia (The Twilight Years), and disability (The Happiness of Us Alone), some more successfully than others. Unfortunately, this is not an example of his better work, featuring as it does some clumsy – and corny – writing, and being really just a sentimental tearjerker at heart, with realism not on the agenda. (The most idiotic scene is the one in which the shouting policeman lets the cat out of the bag about Goshogawa’s illness).

Yuriko Hoshi

As one would expect from a film directed by Shiro Toyoda and lensed by his frequent collaborator, Kozo Okazaki, it’s very well shot and has some effective scenes – the one in which Goshogawa chases a train in his truck is a technical tour de force – but that’s not enough here, partly due to the deficiencies in the script, but also because there are other issues, too. Kinya Kitaoji and Kunie Tanaka overact shamelessly for the most part, although Kitaoji is effective in some scenes after the diagnosis, while Masaru Sato’s music tries rather too hard to tug at our heartstrings. The women in the cast fare better, but have a tough job given what they have to work with.

The film failed to win any awards, but it was a box office hit, and Kinya Kitaoji and Yuriko Hoshi were re-teamed the following year in Kitahodaka zessho, in which Kitaoji suffers from amnesia instead of leukemia, and again for 1969’s Tsugaru zessho, in which he suffered, I think, from general misfortune. Neither of these cash-ins had any involvement from Matsuyama or Toyoda.

As a footnote, it’s perhaps worth mentioning that, in Japan, it apparently used to be common for doctors not to inform patients if they had a terminal illness, although I believe that this has gradually changed over the last few decades.

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Last Days of the Samurai / 琴の爪 / Koto no tsume (‘The Koto Pick’, 1957)

Obscure Japanese Film #263

Chikage Ogi and Tojuro Sakata

1702, the 15th year of the Genroku era. After 47 ronin – former retainers of Lord Asano Naganori – avenge their lord by attacking and killing Kira Yoshinaka in Edo, they wait for their punishment to be handed down, knowing they will likely be sentenced to commit seppuku. The leader, Lord Kuranosuke Oishi (Koshiro Matsumoto VIII), has noticed that one of his men, Isogai (Tojuro Sakata), seems especially untroubled by the situation and wonders whether his bravado is genuine. Isogai was engaged to be married to koto player Omino (Chikage Ogi), who had no idea that he had been planning to take part in such an action. She’s desperate to speak to him, but the ronin are not allowed visitors, so she puts pressure on her uncle, Den’emon (Ganjiro Nakamura), a member of the clan, to intervene…

Koshiro Matsumoto VIII

Ganjiro Nakamura

This Toho production was based on Oishi saigo no ichinichi (‘Oishi’s Last Day’), part of the Genroku Chushingura series of kabuki plays written by Seika Mayama in the 1930s which revolved around the famous Ako Incident.* Understandably, then, the cast consists largely of actors from the kabuki theatre, although their performances here are not stagy and are, in fact, perfectly appropriate for the cinematic medium. Running a mere 53 minutes, it was the sixth film in the ‘Toho Diamond’ series, which were stand-alone B-movies adapted from various literary works with running times of around an hour.

It was also the third film directed by Hiromichi Horikawa, a former assistant to Kurosawa who made some good films but perhaps never lived up to his early promise. Here, obviously working on a tight budget, he omits the attack completely and the film mainly consists of people talking on tatami. However, thanks in part to Horikawa’s precise blocking and effective camera placement, it nevertheless makes for compelling drama, and Masaru Sato’s subtle, unintrusive score is also a definite asset. There’s also a nice line in dry humour, perhaps provided by another Kurosawa collaborator, screenwriter Ryuzo Kikushima, who co-wrote the screenplay with Tokuhei Wakao – at one point, the men realise that none of them know the correct etiquette for committing seppuku as they’ve never seen anyone actually do it, while when Omino attempts to disguise herself as a man in order to gain access to her fiancé, Oishi takes one look at her and says something to the effect of, ‘You wouldn’t happen to be a woman by any chance, would you?’ For me at least, this modest little film is a gem which deserves a higher rating than the 5/10 it currently has on IMDb.

Ogi in feminine and masculine guises

*This series of plays had already been the basis for Kenji Mizoguchi’s two-part film of 1941-2.

BONUS TRIVIA: The film led to the marriage of actors Tojuro Sakata and Chikage Ogi, the latter of whom later became a politician. 

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Chi to daiyamondo / 血とダイヤモンド (‘Blood and Diamonds’, 1964)

Obscure Japanese Film #256

Akira Takarada

A group of five criminals headed by Utsugi (Jun Tazaki) plan to steal diamonds worth 360 million yen in an armed robbery in Kobe, but when they make the attempt, they discover that another gang has had the same idea, and a shoot-out ensues. The other gang, headed by Koshiba (Makoto Sato), make off with the diamonds, but Koshiba is wounded by a gunshot in the process. They hide out in an abandoned garage while one gang member, Jiro (Tetsuo Ishidate), goes off to kidnap a young woman, Tsunako (Yuki Nakagawa), threatening to kill her unless her surgeon father (Takashi Shimura) operates on Koshiba. Meanwhile, both Utsugi’s gang and the police are on their trail, and private detective Kuroki (Akira Takarada) is following Koshiba’s girlfriend, Rie (Kumi Mizuno), in the hopes of getting the diamonds and selling them to the insurance company…

Kumi Mizuno

Like the previously-reviewed Brand of Evil from the same year, this is a co-production between Takarazuka Eiga and Toho. It’s also a similarly noir-ish vision featuring shadowy, high-contrast cinematography with lots of skewed angles, a cool jazz score and mostly unsympathetic characters. Strangely, this one also evokes memories of Reservoir Dogs, in this case because of its heist-gone-awry plot in which one gang member is shot and has to hole up in an abandoned building, together with a climax in which everyone’s pointing guns at each other. It seems highly unlikely that Tarantino could have seen either film before making his debut, though, so this is probably all pure coincidence.

Makoto Sato

In my view, this is a more satisfying film than Brand as it has a less convoluted plot and doesn’t outstay its welcome. It looks great thanks to cameraman Shinsaku Uno (who also shot Kihachi Okamoto’s splendid Aa bakudan), while jazz guitarist Shungo Sawada’s score sounds pretty good even if it’s not especially memorable. The acting is decent although a couple of the actors playing the more junior gang members go a bit OTT. I found Kumi Mizuno especially effective playing a woman not about to let any man get the better of her, and it’s great to see Takashi Shimura not wasted for a change – here, he has a substantial supporting part as the doctor losing confidence in his abilities because age is catching up with him. However, the top-billed star is Akira Takarada, who made his name playing the hero in the original Godzilla (1954). He was never very highly-rated as an actor, but actually acquits himself quite well cast against type as the private eye who’s little better than the criminals he’s pursuing. Makoto Sato, whose own limitations were sometimes exposed when playing a leading role, also gives a strong performance as the worst of the bad guys.

Takashi Shimura

The director, Jun Fukuda, was to become best-known for his monster movies such as Ebirah, Terror of the Deep (1966) and Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla (1974) but is known to have despised the genre and seen it merely as a way to make a living. Working from an efficient original screenplay by Ei Ogawa and Moriyuki Mafuji, in this film he makes excellent use of real locations in a similar way to Hideo Gosha in movies such as Cash Calls Hell (1966), suggesting that Fukuda’s career could have gone quite differently had he started out a few years earlier.

Originally screened as a double feature with the previously-reviewed Naked Executive.

Watched with dodgy subtitles.

DVD at Amazon Japan (no English subtitles)

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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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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.

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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.

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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).

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