Across Darkness / 闇を横切れ / Yami o yokogire (1959)

Obscure Japanese Film #234

Hiroshi Kawaguchi and So Yamamura

When a stripper is murdered in a love hotel, suspicion naturally falls on Ochiai (Kappei Matsumoto), the mayoral candidate found drunk and unconscious in the same room, but ambitious rookie reporter Ishizuka (Hiroshi Kawaguchi) smells a set-up. Urged on by the editor he idolises (So Yamamura), he starts digging and exposes a tangled web of corruption leading to the current mayor (Jun Hamamura) and transport boss Hirose (Osamu Takizawa). Along the way he falls for the dead woman’s best friend, a fellow stripper named Motomi (Junko Kano)…

Jun Hamamura and Kawaguchi

This Daiei production was from an original screenplay by regular Kurosawa collaborator Ryuzo Kikushima and its director, Yasuzo Masumura (Kikushima also co-wrote Masumura’s Afraid to Die and The Hoodlum Soldier). As you’d expect from Masumura, it zips along at a snappy pace, but unfortunately that in itself is not enough to make an engaging picture, a point that this one certainly proves. It doesn’t help that it relies so heavily on the very limited talents of Daiei boss Matsutaro Kawaguchi’s son Hiroshi, who is in almost every scene, while the slight lift the film gets when the more charismatic So Yamamura is on screen is insufficient to counteract the Kawaguchi effect. Junko Kano is also effective in an almost Gloria Grahame kind of way as a woman who’s been more or less forced to get by on her looks but retains her sense of self by generally refusing to turn on the charm that men seem to expect of her.

Kawaguchi and Junko Kano

Even with a better actor in the lead, though, I question whether this movie would be much improved – somehow, there’s just nothing convincing about the characters or situations or any real reason why we should care about any of it, and I was left wondering what on earth this film’s raison d’être was supposed to be, especially as it’s impossible to take seriously as a political drama. Perhaps it was intended as a send-up of American film noir but, if so, it falls spectacularly flat. Unusually, there’s no music score – presumably the producers felt that the endless amount of talk (much of it shouted) would render music unnecessary. All in all, it’s no wonder, then, that this has been one of the more obscure items in Masumura’s filmography – it’s definitely no hidden gem, that’s for sure. Of course, that’s just my opinion and it’s only fair to note that most of the Japanese viewers’ reviews which can be found online are quite positive, so maybe I’m missing something…

Osamu Takizawa

The print quality on the Japanese DVD release is not great and contains numerous scratches. 

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Main Line to Terror / 動脈列島 / Domyaku retto (1975)

Obscure Japanese Film #192

 

Masaomi Kondo

 

Akiyama (Masaomi Kondo) is a young doctor furious about the death of one of his patients, which he believes was the result of her living right next to a shinkansen (bullet train) track as the intense noise and vibration brought on memories of World War 2 air raids and induced repeated panic attacks which wrecked her health. It’s been around a decade since the advent of the bullet train, and many other people living near to the lines have also suffered greatly, but the rail bosses have done little to address the problems, so Akiyama decides it’s time to take matters into his own hands. He persuades his girlfriend Tomoko (Keiko Takahashi), a nurse, to steal a phial of nitro-glycerine from the hospital and uses it to create a bomb, threatening to destroy a bullet train in ten days’ time if Japanese National Railways (JNR) fail to address the issues immediately. The Police Commissioner (Eitaro Ozawa) calls in investigator Takigawa (Jiro Tamiya), who marshals all the forces at his disposal in a race against time to catch Akiyama and avert a major disaster…

 

Jiro Tamiya and Eitaro Ozawa

 

This Tokyo Eiga production has the type of story that can hardly fail to be gripping, but also calls attention to the issue of noise pollution from high-speed trains, which was something of a hot topic at the time. The film was based on a 1974 novel by the leftist writer Ikko Shimizu (1931-2010) which won the Mystery Writers of Japan Award. His work had a strong element of social commentary and often dealt with themes such as corruption in big business, but was only occasionally adapted for the big screen. In this case, the book was inspired by a lawsuit filed against JNR by 575 residents of Nagoya City which would drag on for over a decade (the residents eventually received substantial compensation and the original bullet trains were gradually replaced by quieter models). However, the idea of one of these protestors turning terrorist appears to have been Shimizu’s invention. As the story makes JNR look pretty bad, it’s unsurprising that they refused to co-operate with the film company, so how certain scenes could have been pulled off without their help is anyone’s guess. 

 

Masaomi Kondo and Meiko Kaji

 

Co-written and directed by Yasuzo Masumura, by this time a freelancer after the collapse of Daiei, it’s efficiently made but one of the least characteristic of his works. The plot has its implausibilities, but also a strong police procedural element and a memorable climax involving a bulldozer which made me wonder whether the filmmakers had seen the previous year’s American TV movie Killdozer. 

 

 

Star Jiro Tamiya was a Masumura favourite who had previously featured in the latter’s Black Super-Express (1964), which also had a plot revolving around the shinkansen. His co-star, Masaomi Kondo, had been around for a while, having debuted in Shohei Imamura’s The Pornographers (1966), but was mostly known for his TV work at this point, and the part of Akiyama marked his biggest film role to date. The rest of the cast features some well-known faces – including Meiko Kaji as a barmaid who falls for Akiyama and So Yamamura as the president of JNR – but the characters are generally on the thin side and don’t give the actors many opportunities to impress. Not that it matters much – the film rattles along at high speed much like the trains it features, and there’s also a pretty decent score by Hikaru Hayashi, who often worked with Kaneto Shindo as well as Masumura. 

 

So Yamamura

 

Toei released the similarly-themed Shinkansen daibakuha aka Bullet Train the same year.

Note on the title: The film is sometimes referred to in English as Dynamic Islands, but a more accurate translation of the Japanese title is ‘Artery Archipelago’, which would make sense if one added ‘of the’ in the middle. 

 

Masaomi Kondo and Meiko Kaji

 

The Woman Who Touched Legs / 足にさわった女 / Ashi ni sawatta onna (1952 and 1960)

Obscure Japanese Film #183 and #184

Fubiki Koshiji

 

 

Machiko Kyo

The romantic comedy Ashi ni sawatta onna began life as a magazine serial by the now-forgotten Nadematsu (or Nadeshiko? or Bumatsu?) Sawada (male, 1871-1927) and was first filmed in 1926 (the year of publication) by director Yutaka Abe. The story (in the two existing film versions anyway) tells of Saya, a pickpocket in Osaka who uses her good looks to get close to men in order to steal their wallets. She’s just served three months in prison and is on her way by train back to her home village for the first time in many years. However, she’s not the usual criminal type, and it emerges that her father was suspected of being a spy and committed suicide, so she has been stealing in order to hold an expensive memorial service for him and thereby get revenge on the villagers who ostracised him. Also on the train are Saya’s grown-up but childlike younger brother, a bumbling detective (who has arrested Saya in the past but is now on vacation), and a pretentious, slightly-effeminate best-selling crime writer who learns about Saya and wants to use her as the basis for his next novel.  

Tokihiko Okada, Yoko Umemura and Koji Shima

 

In the 1926 film – which won the first ever Kinema Junpo Award for Best Japanese Film – the leading roles of the female pickpocket, the crime writer and the detective were played, respectively, by Yoko Umemura, Tokihiko Okada and future director Koji Shima. The former two died tragically young – Yoko Umemura (a favourite of director Kenji Mizoguchi) died at 40 following complications from appendicitis while working on Mizoguchi’s Danjuro Sandai (1944); Tokihiko Okada (the father of Mariko Okada) died at 30 from tuberculosis in 1934. Like the vast majority of Japanese silent films, that version is long lost and it’s unlikely that it still existed when Kon Ichikawa made the first remake for Toho in 1952, although he may well have seen it in his youth. Incidentally, according to Donald Richie in A Hundred Years of Japanese Film, rather than featuring a motley bunch of characters and having the bulk of the story set on a train, ‘The original Abe movie was about the upper-middle class in a hot spring resort.’ When he made the film, Abe had actually not long returned from a decade in America, during which time he had acted in a number of Hollywood films, so there’s little doubt that his work was heavily influenced by this experience.

Ryo Ikebe

 

Ichikawa modelled his version on Hollywood’s screwball comedies of the 1930s, and top-billed Ryo Ikebe as the detective appears to be attempting to emulate Cary Grant. It’s certainly the most animated I’ve ever seen Ikebe on screen, but not his most successful performance in my view. On the other hand, Fubuki Koshiji, who plays Saya, is a natural comedienne and is in her element here. It’s a little surprising to see So Yamamura mincing his way through his performance as the presumably gay writer, but he stops short of full-on caricature, thankfully. One nice touch is that his character’s niece is played by Mariko Okada, whose father had played Yamamura’s role in the 1926 original. 

 

So Yamamura and Mariko Okada

Sadako Sawamura and Yunosuke Ito

Eiko Miyoshi

A terrific supporting cast also features Yunosuke ‘why the long face?’ Ito, Sadako Sawamura, Sawamura’s brother Daisuke Kato and ex-husband Kamatari Fujiwara, and decrepit old lady specialist Eiko Miyoshi. It’s a jolly ride which zips by in a fast-paced and entertaining fashion, although some of the one-liners were no doubt lost in the subtitles I auto-translated from Japanese. 

 

Kyo with Hajime Hana

 

Daiei produced a colour remake a mere eight years later, directed by Yasuzo Masumura. Although Kon Ichikawa and his wife Natto Wada are again credited with the screenplay, it appears to have been revised – whether by Ichikawa and Wada or by Masumura I have no idea, but in neither version does the story make a great deal of sense. In any case, the 1960 version seems more calculated as a vehicle for a particular star – in this case, Machiko Kyo, who plays Saya in a more blatantly sexy manner than Fubuki Koshiji, although she’s arguably less of a natural for comedy. The detective is played as a much more slow-witted character by the far less well-known Hajime Hana, but I found him more amusing than Ryo Ikebe, while Eiji Funakoshi is slightly less effeminate as the writer than So Yamamura had been. 

 

Jiro Tamiya and Eiji Funakoshi

Shiro Otsuji, Kyo and Haruko Sugimura

Other notables in the cast include Haruko Sugimura in the role formerly played by Sadako Sawamura, and Jiro Tamiya and Kyoko Enami making early appearances in minor roles. Perhaps the most notable difference is that Masumura puts far less emphasis on Saya’s motivation for being a thief and, in fact, drops the memorial ceremony scene entirely – the cynical Masumura would probably have considered this mere sentimentality. Personally, I wouldn’t consider either version a must-see, but I slightly preferred Ichikawa’s on the whole. He was obviously into it anyway, as he also directed a 45-minute TV version in 1960 with Keiko Kishi as Saya, Frankie Sakai as the detective and Tomo’o Nagai as the writer.

 

Note on the title:

The original novel and 1926 film have a slightly different title from the remakes: Ashi ni sa hatta onna (足にさはった女), which could be translated as The Woman with a Scar on Her Leg. Although the remakes are usually referred to in English as The Woman Who Touched Legs (or similar), the 1952 version at some point had the English title of Doubledyed Detective, while the 1960 version has also been known as A Lady Pickpocket in English. Furthermore, it’s not entirely clear what is meant by the Japanese title. Ashi can mean leg, legs, foot or feet and, as there are no articles or possessive pronouns in Japanese, it’s anyone’s guess whether it should be ‘her leg/foot’, ‘the leg/foot’, ‘a leg/foot’, ‘his leg/foot’, ‘their legs/feet’, etc. While it might be necessary to touch somebody else’s leg when stealing a wallet from their trouser pocket, I think the title is intended to refer to Saya’s legs – which she uses to attract men in order to get close enough to pick their pockets – rather than those of her victims, so The Woman Who Used Her Legs would seem a better title. 

 

Thanks to A.K. 

1952 version DVD at Amazon Japan (no English subtitles)

1960 version DVD at Amazon Japan (no English subtitles)

English subtitles for 1960 version courtesy of Coralsundy