Love in the Mountains / わかれ / Wakare (‘Parting’, 1959)

Obscure Japanese Film #145

Haruko Wanibuchi and Isuzu Yamada

Teenager Kimiko (Haruko Wanibuchi) helps out at a ryokan (traditional inn) in Hakone owned by her widowed mother, Kuniko (Isuzo Yamada). One of the regular guests is a writer named Shimizu (Chishu Ryu), who likes to stay there and use the nearby golf course. On one visit he brings a student assistant, Keiichi (Eiichi Sugasawara), with him, and Keiichi and Kimiko fall in love. However, the course of true love never runs smooth, and matters are complicated by a proposal from a rival suitor as well as by a young man who works at the inn, Taiji (Shoji Yasui), who secretly loves Kimiko, and then there’s Keiichi’s domineering mother (Sachiko Murase), who has other plans for her only son… 

Eiichi Sugasawara

 

Although it throws in a couple of sub-plots involving a couple of Kuniko’s employees who have an illicit relationship resulting in a pregnancy and a former employee who now works in a restaurant to pay for her brother’s medical care, this Shochiku production feels a little thin in the story department even though it was based on a 1955 novel entitled Hana mizukara oshie ari (‘Flowers Teach Themselves’) by Jun Takami (1907-65).

Haruko Wanibuchi

 

It’s a sentimental film, and I found Haruko Wanibuchi’s wide-eyed naivety a tad cloying (I assume her character was supposed to be a little older), but it’s also well-shot and has a nicely varied music score by Mitsuo Kato. Chishu Ryu’s character is not much more than a plot device to bring Kimiko and Keiichi together, but he does manage to invest it with some personality. The dramatic highlight of the film, however, is the face-off between Isuzu Yamada and Sachiko Murase, two fine veteran actresses best-known for their work with Kurosawa – Yamada was, of course, the Lady Macbeth equivalent in Throne of Blood, while Murase was the elderly A-bomb survivor in Rhapsody in August. 

 

Isuzu Yamada

Sachiko Murase

 

Of the director, Masao Nozaki, I’ve been able to find out almost nothing, other than the fact that he directed seven films between 1952 and 1960, all for Shochiku. On the basis of this well-made film, I very much doubt that the abrupt end to his career could have been due to incompetence, so perhaps he passed away around 1960 or slept with the studio head’s wife.

Haruko Wanibuchi and Eiichi Sugasawara

 

The Tycoon / 傷だらけの山河 / Kizudarake no sanga (1964)

Obscure Japanese Film #144

Ayako Wakao and So Yamamura

Having delivered a mega-hit for Daiei studios with Shinobi no mono (1962) and also directed its first sequel the following year, director and lifelong Communist Party member Satsuo Yamamoto was in a strong position to make what he wanted, and so chose the latest novel by Tatsuzo Ishikawa, a writer who shared his political sympathies and had previously provided the source material for Yamamoto’s The Human Wall (1959). 

 

Adapted by one-man scriptwriting machine Kaneto Shindo, The Tycoon stars So Yamamura as the titular character, Kappei Arima, a business magnate with his fingers in numerous pies who has plans to build a new railway line and buy up as much land as possible around the proposed locations of the rail stations. Protests by residents are dealt with through bribery or intimidation. Although married, Arima also has two mistresses, and his wife and both mistresses each have a grown-up son. However, he feels that these women are all past their prime so, when he notices an attractive young woman, Mitsuko (Ayako Wakao), working in his office as a poorly-paid bean counter, he hatches a plan to make her his new mistress. 

Keizo Kawasaki

 

Mitsuko is living with Sakai (Keizo Kawasaki), a struggling artist who believes that he could be successful if he could only study in Paris. She is largely supporting him on her meagre salary, and is thoroughly fed up with living in poverty. One day, she finds herself unexpectedly summoned to Arima’s office and receives a shocking proposal: Arima offers to pay to send Sakai off to France for three years and provide Mitsuko with an apartment and an ample allowance if she will be his mistress while Sakai’s away. Understandably shocked, she initially refuses, but, after talking it over with Sakai, thoughts of the money encourage them to take a more pragmatic view, and they decide to accept the offer. Meanwhile, Arima’s illegitimate sons have both become dissatisfied with their status and decide in their different ways to do something about it…   

Mitsuko makes her Faustian pact

 

Arima’s avarice and selfishness leave a trail of broken lives in his wake, which explains why the Japanese title translates as something like ‘Mountains and Rivers of Wounds’. The character was loosely based on the real-life Yasujiro Tsutsumi, who passed away at the age of 75 just three weeks after this film was released. Oddly, opera singer Yoshie Fujiwara (1898-1976) was originally cast as Arima at the suggestion of producer Masaichi Nagata. According to Satsuo Yamamoto in his autobiography, it quickly became apparent that Fujiwara could not act, so he was replaced by So Yamamura – who had actually been Yamamoto’s first choice but was unavailable, then luckily became available again. Yamamura proved to be the perfect choice and won a Kinema Junpo Best Actor Award for his performance. The strength of his portrait is the way in which it shows Arima not as a mere bully, but as a charismatic man of some humour and charm who knows how to persuade people to come round to his way of thinking, as he does very effectively with Mitsuko. 

 

Like many Yamamoto films, The Tycoon is rather long (152 minutes), and in this case it feels it. There’s no real development of the main protagonist – Arima is a greedy capitalist bastard at the beginning of the film, and he’s still a greedy capitalist bastard at the end – and it all gets a bit repetitive as he lights another big cigar and steamrollers the opposition in yet another board meeting. The sons do not make for very compelling characters, and Mitsuko’s chance meeting with Arima’s only legitimate son, Akihiko (Koji Takahashi), which leads to an affair, just seems like a clumsily contrived excuse to pile on the melodrama. That’s not the silliest part, though – that prize must be reserved for the scene in which Sakai explains to Mitsuko that he has been visited by a private detective wanting to investigate the two of them without saying why and Sakai has told him everything he wanted to know instead of telling him to sod off as any sane person would do. 

 

Yamamoto was a good (but in my opinion not great) director, and this is a well-made film, but sometimes his ideological stance veers too close to communist propaganda, and I feel that The Tycoon is a case in point. It’s certainly true that people like Arima exist, but it’s not clear what the film has to tell us other than that greed is bad, so the two-and-a-half-hour running time feels unwarranted. Wakao manages to give her part more depth than most would have managed, and we can see how conflicted Mitsuko is, but still, it’s a supporting role and the focus is not on her for the most part. However, despite its flaws, the film was well-received at the time and ranked 7^th on Kinema Junpo’s best films of the year list. 

Yatsuko Tan'ami as one of Arima's mistresses, with a Noh mask of Ko-omote perhaps representing her long-lost innocence

 

Thanks to A.K., and to Coral Sundy for the English subtitles which can be found here.

DVD at Amazon Japan.

Hot Spring Doctress / 温泉女医 / Onsen joi (1964)

Obscure Japanese Film #143

When a new doctor arrives to replace the old drunk Dr Yabuuchi (Ichiro Sugai) at a hot spring resort in Izu, the residents are shocked to learn that his replacement is (gasp!) a woman, Dr Shiotsuki (Ayako Wakao). She proves to be strong-willed and soon gains the respect of the often badly-behaved residents, who include Dr Yabuuchi’s best friend, randy old codger Tahei (Ganjiro Nakamura playing to type); Yabuuchi’s rotund son, Masahiko (Taro Marui), who looks after the local orphans; and cynical geisha Omura (Utako Shibasawa), who Dr Shiotsuki tries to talk out of having an abortion…

 

 

This Daiei production was the final entry in their series of five ‘onsen’ B-pictures which began with Onsen geisha in 1963 (not to be confused with Toei’s later ‘Onsen Geisha’ series which ran from 1968-75). It’s one of nine films that Wakao made with director Keigo Kimura (1903-86), a veteran who made his first film in 1930 and retired two films after this one, having directed 93 pictures. His filmography covers a wide range of genres, including a number of prestigious literary adaptations, and his 1955 film Sen-hime was nominated for the Palme d’Or. Like many of his movies, that one starred Machiko Kyo, whom he had been responsible for bringing to prominence with his 1949 film, A Fool’s Love. Hot Spring Doctress seems to represent something of a comedown for Kimura, whose work is hard to judge overall as so little of it is currently accessible. 

Taro Marui

 

On the whole, this is a rather dated but harmless comedy which is not as sexist as it might have been and passes the time pleasantly enough, getting by largely on the considerable charm of its star, Ayako Wakao. It’s also hard to dislike a film in which the romantic male lead is the portly Taro Marui, a Daiei contract actor who had scored a hit in Zuzushii yatsu (‘Shameless Guy’), a TV drama produced by Daiei in 1963. Marui subsequently received many offers from other TV production companies, but Daiei refused to loan him out. His career suffered when he spoke out about this, and he committed suicide in 1967.

Thanks to A.K., and to Coral Sundy for the English subtitles, which can be found here.

DVD at Amazon Japan