Asakusa kurenai dan / 浅草紅団 / (‘The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa’, 1952)

 

Machiko Kyo

Maki (Nobuko Otowa) is a dancer at the Asakusa Follies,  Ryuko (Machiko Kyo) is a kabuki actress and quick-change artist who was adopted by local gang boss Nakane (Joji Oka) when she was a child. Maki is in debt to Nakane, who has designs on her and ordered his men to beat up her boyfriend, Shimakichi (Jun Negami), and scare him away from Asakusa. However, Shimakichi injured one of Nakane’s henchmen and escaped before disappearing for a year. Now he’s back in search of Maki, but Nakane has not forgotten about him and wants revenge, so he tricks Ryuko into luring Shimakichi into a trap…

 

Jun Negami

This Daiei production was supposedly based on Yasunari Kawabata’s 1930 novel of the same name, a fine English translation of which was published by the University of California Press in 2005 under the title The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa. However, the only thing this film has in common with the novel is that it concerns the criminal underworld of Asakusa, a pleasure district of Tokyo which was twice destroyed – first by the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, later by American bombs. Kawabata’s novel is a largely plotless and uncharacteristically modernist work consisting of a series of vignettes about the petty thieves and prostitutes who haunted the back alleys of Asakusa and kept an eye for out for each other. Not only is there no gang boss like Nakane, but none of the characters from the book appear in the film and the setting has been updated to the post-war era. While the nature of Kawabata’s novel would have made it difficult to adapt for the screen, it’s disappointing that screenwriter Masashige Narusawa failed to come up with a better story than the corny melodrama which unfolds here, especially considering the fact that he was responsible for many fine scripts, including a number for Mizoguchi.

 

Kyo in bumpkin mode

The other reason I found this film something of a let-down is that it was directed by Seiji Hisamatsu, whose later works Five Sisters (1954) and Policeman’s Diary (1955) I greatly enjoyed. On a more positive note, it does offer a fun role for Machiko Kyo, who gets to appear in a number of different guises, as she would also later do in The Hole (1957) and Black Lizard (1962). Watching the scene in which Ryuko pretends to be a country bumpkin, I even found myself wondering who the strangely familiar-looking actress was before realising it was Kyo. 

 

Joji Oka

Otherwise, Joji Oka is a rather hammy bad guy and Jun Negami a decent enough hero, while a young Nobuko Otowa gets to sing the theme song, dance and show off what Daiei touted as her ‘million dollar dimples’. Perhaps it was partly being reduced to a pair of dimples that led her to quit Daiei the year this film was released and pursue largely unglamorous roles from then on.

 

Nobuko Otowa and dimple

Presumably, the film proved popular as Daiei followed it with Asakusa monogatari (‘Asakusa Story’) the following year, Asakusa no yoru (‘Asakusa at Night’) in 1954 and Asakusa no hi (‘Lights of Asakusa’) in 1956, although I believe that each featured an entirely separate story.

 

Machiko Kyo

There had actually been an earlier film of the same title, again supposedly based on Kawabata’s book, back in 1930. It appeared before Kawabata had even finished the novel, which was being published in instalments in the Tokyo Asahi newspaper. Unfortunately, the 1930 film appears not to have survived.

 

 

Thanks to A.K.

 

DVD at Amazon Japan (no English subtitles)

Escape at Dawn / 暁の脱走 / Akatsuki no dasso (1950)

 

Yoshiko Yamaguchi

 

1945. Harumi (Yoshiko Yamaguchi) is a singer in a troupe of female entertainers sent to Manchuria to help the Japanese soldiers forget about their probable imminent deaths. Unfortunately, she quickly attracts the attention of overbearing Lieutenant Narita (Eitaro Ozawa) and is about to be raped by him when Private First Class Mikami (Ryo Ikebe) knocks on the door to deliver a trivial telegram to Narita, allowing Harumi to escape. Harumi and Mikami fall in love, but, when he's wounded in battle, circumstances lead to them being captured together by the Chinese. Mikami is treated with nothing but kindness by his captors, but he’s been completely brainwashed by the Japanese military propaganda machine into thinking that it’s better to die than be taken prisoner…

 

Eitaro Ozawa and Yamaguchi

Produced by Shintoho, the company founded by those who split from Toho after the studio’s big labour dispute of 1947, Escape at Dawn was nevertheless distributed by Toho. Like director Senkichi Taniguchi’s previous film, Jakoman and Tetsu, it was also produced by Tomoyuki Tanaka and co-written by Akira Kurosawa. In this case, the source was a 1947 novel by Taijiro Tamiya (1911-83) entitled Shunpu den (‘The Story of a Prostitute’, not available in English). Tamiya had served in Manchuria during the war (as had Taniguchi) and also written Nikutai no mon (‘The Gate of Flesh’), first filmed in 1948 by Masahiro Makino and later by Seijin Suzuki, Hideo Gosha and others. 

 

Ryo Ikebe

 

Although Tamiya is said to have created the character of Harumi with Yoshiko (later Shirley) Yamaguchi in mind, in the novel she was a Korean prostitute (or ‘comfort woman’), while it’s made very clear in the film that she is not a prostitute, and she has also become Japanese. Apparently, the original version of the screenplay was faithful to the novel on these points, but the content of Japanese films was still being controlled by the occupying Americans, who insisted that changes be made. It’s hard to see how such whitewashing benefitted the Americans, so their decision was presumably just a case of them imposing their own cultural nanny-state ideas of the time about the depiction of ‘immorality’ on screen. An unfortunate knock-on effect was that Harumi’s behaviour in the way she throws herself at Mikami and won’t take no for an answer now appeared extremely odd coming from a Japanese singer rather than a Korean prostitute. According to Stuart Galbraith IV in his book The Emperor and The Wolf, Kurosawa eventually got fed up with the requests for endless rewrites and left Taniguchi to it. He also states that,

…long preproduction, expensive exterior sets, and tangled red tape to secure permission for use of military hardware for filming (machine guns, etc) made it the most expensive Japanese feature to that point.

I’ve read elsewhere that it was also the first post-war Japanese film to feature scenes of Japanese soldiers on the frontlines. In any case, while it’s certainly a compromised vision, the film is at least very well-made and often technically impressive, with cinematographer Akira Mimura winning a Mainichi Film Concours award for his efforts. On the other hand, the essentially simple story of a predictably doomed romance feels overstretched at almost two hours. As Lieutenant Narita and his men are stationed in the desert, the film is very much like a Japanese Foreign Legion movie, and memories of Marlene Dietrich and Gary Cooper in Morocco (1930) are often brought to mind. There are some surprisingly sensual scenes between stars Yoshiko Yamaguchi and Ryo Ikebe – at one point, she bites his hand hard enough to draw blood, then sucks the wound, which he seems to enjoy. This would have been considered strong stuff in Japan in 1950 and probably helped at the box office.

Seijun Suzuki directed a more faithful version of the original novel in 1965.

Bonus trivia:

Setsuko Wakayama, who plays one of Harumi’s colleagues, had married director Senkichi Taniguchi in 1949, but they divorced in 1956 when he had an affair with actress Kaoru Yachigusa. This adultery scandal harmed Taniguchi’s career greatly – after directing an average of three films a year until 1957, he was subsequently out of work for over two years. When he did return to directing, the quality of the material he was offered was significantly lower than it had been before the scandal.

 

Setsuko Wakayama

DVD at Amazon Japan (no English subtitles)

Jakoman and Tetsu / ジャコ万と鉄 (1949)

 

Toshiro Mifune and Kamatari Fujiwara

 

 

Eitaro Shindo

Kyubei (Eitaro Shindo, better known as Sansho the Bailiff) has a herring-fishing business in Hokkaido and is anticipating the annual arrival of the fish when his son, Tetsu (Toshiro Mifune) – presumed missing in the war – unexpectedly turns up. Tetsu is surprised to find that one of the fishermen employed by his father just lies around all day drinking saké and refusing to work. The man in question is Jakoman (Ryunosuke Tsukigata), an aggressive individual with an eye-patch whom everyone is afraid of and who has a beef with Kyubei because Kyubei stole his boat to escape from Sakhalin island when the Japanese were chased out by the Russians at the end of the war. 

 

 

Meanwhile, a woman named Yuki (Yuriko Hamada) turns up in search of Jakoman, and it emerges that she’s in love with him despite the fact that he wants nothing to do with her and treats her roughly. In the midst of all this personal drama, the herring finally appear just as the men call a strike due to low pay…

 

 

Yuriko Hamada

This Toho production* was based on a 1947 novel entitled Nishin ryoba (‘Herring Fishing Grounds’) by Tokuzo Kajino (1901-84, sometimes incorrectly listed as ‘Keizo Kajino’ or ‘Shinzo Kajino’). The screenplay was co-written by the director, Senkichi Taniguchi, and Akira Kurosawa, with whom Taniguchi frequently collaborated during this stage in their careers, and its full of characteristic Kurosawa touches. One such is when Kyubei’s son-in-law (Kurosawa favourite Kamatari Fujiwara), an apparently slow-witted clerk given to hiccups and sneezing, plays the shakuhachi (bamboo flute) and moves everyone to tears, instantly clearing up the mystery of what his wife (Nijiko Kiyokawa) sees in him. Indeed, the script seems to have been largely the work of Kurosawa, with Taniguchi making some changes when he came aboard as director, and Kurosawa apparently brought the characters of Jakoman and Tetsu to the fore for the film, whereas the source novel had Kyubei as its main protagonist.  Concerning Taniguchi, it’s hard to take him very seriously as a director given the hokum that he made in the final years of his career, while the fact that so many of his other films are basically inaccessible means that he’s likely to be forever regarded as a footnote to Kurosawa (who was said to have done much of the editing on Taniguchi’s early films). 

 

Mifune – who has to perform a spectacularly weird song and dance which I bet embarrassed him – looks great and is effortlessly likeable as Tetsu, while Ryunosuke Tsukigata is almost too convincing as the villainous Jakoman, his one eye glinting with concentrated malevolence. Tsukigata had previously played two of the opponents in Kurosawa’s Sanshiro Sugata films and has a staggering 499 credits on the Japanese Movie Database. The female lead, Yuriko Hamada, also makes a strong impression even if her feisty character is tamed at the end. (Hamada’s fate remains a mystery – she made her final film in 1957 and nobody seems to know what happened to her after that.) Excellent use of locations and a fine score by Godzilla composer Akira Ifukube also help to make this an enjoyable watch. The main flaw of the film is that it lacks subtlety in the way it puts across its rather obvious moral message. 

 

Yoshiko Kuga

 

In regard to Kinji Fukasaku’s 1964 remake, while it was a good idea to replace the original film’s subplot of Tetsu falling in love with a girl he sees playing the organ in a Christian church** (played by an almost unrecognisably young Yoshiko Kuga) with one in which he falls in love with the sister of a deceased comrade whose family he visits, in my opinion that was the only thing that the remake did right. Aside from that, everything that was good about the first film has evaporated in Fukasaku’s tedious version, which seems to have been a vanity project initiated by its star, Ken Takakura. Unfortunately, that’s the one which is available in a very nice limited Blu-Ray from 88 Films.

The original film was a box office success and spawned a sequel entitles Jiruba Tetsu (1950) again starring Mifune, Yuriko Hamada and Eitaro Shindo and co-written by Kurosawa but directed by Isamu Kosugi and produced by Tokyo Eiga. 

 

*Actually, although it was distributed by Toho and bears the Toho logo at the beginning, the following title card announces the film as a ’49 Years production’. It seems to be the only film credited thus, something which appears to be a result of the labour dispute that was going on at Toho at the time. Perhaps the strike called by the men in the film was partly a comment on the situation, but though the fishermen settle their differences with Kyubei, that was sadly not to be the case at the studio.

**According to ‘I Love Jakoman’ on Amazon Japan,

… it was Taniguchi's idea for Tetsu to fall in love with the church girl, and upon hearing it, Akira Kurosawa reportedly remarked, "That stinks." (Taniguchi himself said this at a Taniguchi Film Screening).

Only Kurosawa and Taniguchi are credited with the screenplay for the 1964 remake, but it’s unclear whether either had any involvement in the changes made.

Watched without subtitles

 

Yuriko Hamada