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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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) 

 

 

Yaneura no onna tachi / 屋根裏の女たち (‘Women in the Attic’, 1956)

Obscure Japanese Film #187

 

Yuko Mochizuki

Residing in a small seaside town in which fishing is the main industry, Okin (Yuko Mochizuki) is a single mother with a modest noodle restaurant where business is slow, so she hires former stripper Harumi (Mayumi Kurata) to serve the customers and keep them entertained, successfully increasing the number of male punters as a result. 

 

Yasuko Kawakami

 

However, Okin has an innocent teenage daughter, Oko (Yasuko Kawakami), who is about to graduate from high school and comes home one day to find her mother has gone to the shops and Harumi is upstairs having sex with a man. When Okin finds out, Harumi confesses that she had taken money from the man and offers to split it with her. Being a pragmatic woman who knows an opportunity when she sees one, Okin soon dismisses her qualms and it’s not long before she has half a dozen prostitutes living upstairs and noodles have become a mere afterthought. 

 

Kyoko Kishida

 

Each of the women has their own sad story, including Mary (a young Kyoko ‘Woman in the Dunes’ Kishida), who has been separated from the child she had by an African-American G.I. Meanwhile, Oko attracts the attention of Kawai ((Eiji Funakoshi), a seemingly nice guy who gives her a lift on his bike one day only to take her into a secluded spot and rape her…

 

Eiji Funakoshi

 

This Daiei production is a well-made and mostly well-acted film which deserves recognition for dealing frankly with some controversial matters. It’s surely no coincidence that, like Mizoguchi’s Street of Shame and Kawashima’s Suzaki Paradise: Red Light District, it appeared in 1956 when the question of prostitution was a hot topic in Japan (it was finally outlawed the following year, five years after the American occupation ended). 

 

 

Women in the Attic suffers from a number of flaws – some plot threads are left frustratingly unresolved, while the transformations of both Okin from noodle woman to brothel-keeper and Kawai from nice guy to rapist are too abrupt to be fully convincing. There’s also, yet again, the misogynist cliché of a woman falling in love with her rapist – an unexpected element considering that the film was based on a novel published in 1950 by female author Sakae Tsuboi, who had also written Twenty-Four Eyes and provided the source story for Five Sisters (1954). However, it’s entirely possible that this was an invention of director Keigo Kimura and his co-adaptor, Toshiro Ide and, to be fair, this unfortunate aspect is somewhat balanced out by a scene in which Harumi confronts Kawai and slaps him so hard she nearly takes his face off. 

 

Mayumi Kurata

 

Another point that bothered me is the following: Okin’s motivation for her new business venture is supposedly to give Oko a better life by being able to pay for her to have classes in ikebana and dressmaking, and thereby find a good husband. Of course, it’s no surprise that Oko is the one she ends up hurting the most, but the explanation given for this is that Kawai won’t marry her because she’s the daughter of a madam, whereas it seems clear from what we’ve seen of him that this is just an excuse on his part and that he’s simply a louse who would never have married her anyway. But perhaps I’m nitpicking too much – these misgivings aside, this certainly remains an interesting film worth seeing, partly for its refusal to vilify Okin, opting instead to portray her as a well-meaning but unfortunate and rather foolish woman. 

 

 

Yuko Mochizuki, the unlikely star of this film, may have lacked film star looks but was a consummate actress who won awards for her roles in Kinoshita’s A Japanese Tragedy (1953), Naruse’s Late Chrysanthemums (1954) and Imai’s The Rice People (1957). A socialist, she later became a politician and even directed three films (with running times of 40-50 minutes): Umi o wataru yujo (‘Friendship Across the Sea’, 1960) about children being repatriated to Korea; Onaji taiyo no shita de (‘Under the Same Sun’, 1962) which dealt with the discrimination suffered by mixed-race children; and Koko ni ikeru (‘Living Here’, 1962), a documentary commissioned by the All Japan Liberal Labour Union portraying the daily lives of labourers and their families (see https://www.repre.org/repre/vol44/topics/tatsumi/).

Thanks to A.K. 

Amazon Japan (no English subtitles)

The Naked Executive / 裸の重役 / Hadaka no juyaku (1964)

Obscure Japanese Film #151

Hisaya Morishige

Hidaka (Hisaya Morishige) is a widowed office manager with a grown-up daughter, Keiko (Yuriko Hoshi). Now 50 years old, he has a reputation for strictness and is, in fact, a bit of a bastard who has no sympathy for those less fortunate such as Hamanaka (Seiji Miyaguchi), an employee nearing retirement age who begs to be kept on as he has a sick wife to support. 

Yuriko Hoshi

 

Seiji Miyaguchi

When Hidaka gets promoted to senior manager and is to be sent on a lengthy business trip abroad, he reluctantly agrees to help Hamanaka before he departs, but seems to have an ulterior motive. Hidaka has learned to his horror that Keiko has been seeing Okuda (Kiyoshi Kamoda), whom he regards as his most useless employee, and he wants Hamanaka’s help in ending their relationship. 

Kiyoshi Kamoda (not Kodama)

 

However, upon his return, Hidaka is disconcerted to find that Keiko has not only stubbornly refused to cut ties with Okuda, but encouraged him to marry her in spite of her father’s opposition. Hidaka realises he has no choice but to accept the situation, but as a result he finds himself humbled in the eyes of the big boss (Eijiro Tono) and loses his self-confidence. Beginning to suffer from insomnia and depression, he finds unexpected solace in the arms of streetwalker Sakiko (Reiko Dan)…

Eijiro Tono

 

This Toho production is the sort of Japanese film not shown very often in the West, probably because Westerners used to marrying whoever they want and not having to kow-tow to their bosses to the extent we see here may find it hard to relate to. An awful lot of arse-kissing goes on in Hidaka’s office, although it’s simply portrayed as perfectly normal and not satirised at all. In fact, I was surprised to see barely a hint of true criticism of the money- and career-obsessed world Hidaka inhabits. However, the very uber-Japaneseness of the film does lend it a certain cultural curiosity value. 

Hisaya Morishige

 

It’s unusual to see a character like Hidaka as the protagonist of a movie. The fact that he’s played by Hisaya Morishige led me to expect a comedy, but I think this is supposed to be a drama, toothless as it may be. Morishige is an actor little-known abroad, but who played leads for director Shiro Toyoda in Marital Relations (1955) and Shozo, A Cat and Two Women (1956). Hidaka is a character who undergoes a complete, almost Scrooge-like transformation by the end of the film. The problem is that none of it is at all convincing. We are in some weird kind of male-wish-fulfilment fantasy land here with the vivacious Reiko Dan as a highly unlikely streetwalker. It’s not Dan’s fault, though, it’s just a whitewashed portrait of someone reduced to this profession – the contrast with Miyuki Kuwano in the same year’s The Shape of Night could not be more pronounced. 

Reiko Dan

 

From an original screenplay by regular Naruse collaborator Toshiro Ide, The Naked Executive is competently but rather blandly directed by Yasuki Chiba, a veteran who was then under contract to Toho. He seems to have been well-regarded in his time, but the only other film I’ve managed to see by him so far is a rather wonderful comedy entitled Tokyo Sweetheart (1952) starring Toshiro Mifune and Setsuko Hara. 

Yuriko Hoshi