O-Den jigoku / お伝地獄 (‘O-Den Hell’, 1960)

Obscure Japanese Film #277

Eiji Funakoshi and Machiko Kyo

The early Meiji era (1870s). O-Den (Machiko Kyo) and Naminosuke (Eiji Funakoshi) are young villagers recently married. Naminosuke is suffering from a mysterious illness, but they lack the money to pay for proper medical care. Then Daihachi (Taiji Tonoyama), a man who had wanted to marry O-Den, turns up and gives her the necessary money, but then reveals there’s a catch – she has to sleep with him for it. The two argue on a bridge with rotten railings and Daihichi rather conveniently falls to his doom below.

Taiji Tonoyama

The couple hotfoot it to Tokyo, where Naminosuke is treated by a dashing young doctor, Sugimoto (Keizo Kawasaki), who dresses in the newly-fashionable Western style. He gives Naminosuke a medicine which proves very effective in stopping the pain, but he becomes reliant on it and it’s not long before O-Den is sleeping with the doctor in order to get repeat prescriptions – and so begins her fall into immorality...

Keizo Kawasaki

This Daiei production was based on a novel of the same name from 1935 by Kanji Kunieda (1892-1956), who had previously provided the source material for Tamizo Ishida’s Kenka tobi (1939) and Mizoguchi’s Utamaro and His Five Women (1946) among others, but appears to have remained untranslated in English. His novel was itself based on the story of O-Den (or Oden) Takahashi, who was convicted of murder and beheaded in 1879 at the age of 31. Kodansha’s Japan: An Illustrated Encyclopedia contains the following entry on Takahashi:

Murderess, the most notorious dokufu (wicked woman) of the modern era. Accused of several sex-related murders, Oden was the first woman to be executed by beheading after the Edo period (1600-1868). Born in what is now Gumma Prefecture, she was known from girlhood for her beauty and promiscuity. Her life of crime began after her husband contracted leprosy. When the disease proved incurable, Oden allegedly poisoned her husband and embarked on a career of prostitution, larceny and homicide. Arrested in 1876 for slitting the throat of a used-clothing merchant at an inn in Asakusa, she was convicted and ultimately executed. It was the most sensational crime story of the day, and lurid accounts of Oden’s escapades filled the newspapers. The popular author Kanagaki Robun wrote a spicy novel based on her life, Takahashi Oden yasha monogatari (1879, Tale of Takahashi Oden, the She-Devil), which Kawatake Mokuami adapted as a kabuki play.

I can’t vouch for the accuracy of all of the information in the above entry, but it’s certainly clear that O-Den’s life began to be fictionalised in the very year of her death, and few of her chroniclers seem to have worried much about the actual facts since. Surprisingly, this film version features no throat-slitting, no arrest of O-Den and no execution. It’s also worth noting that, although it’s widely believed that she was the last woman to be executed by beheading in Japan, that’s simply not the case – there were at least a further 22 women put to death in this way in the two years following O-Den’s execution.

O-Den had already been the subject of at least half a dozen previous films, including silent pictures now lost, as well as Nobuo Nakagawa’s Dokufu Takahashi Oden (1958), usually known in English as A Wicked Woman, and a 1935 version of Kunieda’s novel directed by Tamizo Ishida. I doubt that Ishida’s film has survived, but the theme song sung by Kiyozo Shinbashi (who appeared in Sadao Yamanaka’s 1935 film The Million Ryo Pot) has, and you can listen to it on YouTube here. Incidentally, the role of O-Den in Ishida’s film was played by Sumiko Suzuki, who had also played her in a 1929 film. Suzuki (1904-85) is largely forgotten today, but may be known to some as the star of The Ghost Cat and the Shamisen (1938) and she apparently cornered the market in ‘ghost cat’ roles.

This film is so unlike Nakagawa’s version of O-Den’s story from only two years previously that it would be easy to miss the fact that they were inspired by the same real-life person. Director Keigo Kimura, who also wrote the screenplay, avoids the obvious exploitation elements of the story and focuses instead on charting the moral downfall of a woman who begins as a model wife trying her best to help her suffering husband. Having been the one to turn Machiko Kyo into a star in his 1949 film A Fool’s Love and worked with her frequently since, he was perhaps also concerned with providing her with a juicy role, which he certainly did. It’s a very sympathetic portrayal of O-Den which views her largely as a victim of circumstance – or fate – and her journey into cynicism is played perfectly by Kyo. In fact, performances are top-notch all round, with Eiji Funakoshi being especially believable in a difficult role as a man frequently almost out of his mind with pain.

Kimura pays considerable attention to period detail, and we see how the then-recent opening up of Japan has introduced various novel experiences to its people, from the eating of beef to having a photograph taken. In terms of style, he uses mainly long- and medium-shots throughout, with few close-ups and slightly longer takes than usual, allowing plenty of freedom to his actors, something which is especially apparent in Kyo and Funakoshi’s final, dramatic scene together. Kimura also seldom cuts to his main characters when transitioning between scenes, opting instead to focus briefly on random people going about their business: a crouching rickshaw driver tapping his pipe on the wheel of his vehicle, a young child fascinated by a sparkler, an old man enjoying a bottle of beer at a festival. As someone who’s always disliked the received wisdom that everything should be there to move the plot along, I heartily approve of these beautiful moments, and it’s these more than anything that, for me, make this an exceptionally fine film.

A note on the title:

The ‘O’ in O-Den’s name is an honorific prefix seldom used today, while the ‘Den’ (伝) can mean ‘legend’ in English, and the film is sometimes listed as ‘The Legendary Hell’, which makes little sense and, as far as I’m aware, was never an official release title. It does seem odd to use to use ‘O-Den Hell’ as a title without the character の, which would indicate that the English should be ‘O-Den’s Hell’ or ‘The Hell of O-Den’; my guess is that O-Den Hell is a sort of nickname, but I haven’t been able to confirm this.

Thanks to A.K.

DVD at Amazon Japan (no English subtitles)

If you’d like to support this blog, you can Buy Me a Coffee

Fudotoku kyoiku koza / 不道徳教育講座 (‘Lectures on Immoral Education’, 1959)

Obscure Japanese Film #276

Shiro Osaka

Fujimura (Shiro Osaka) is an unrepentant criminal released from prison only to find two yakuza whose money he has stolen waiting for him outside. He flees and boards a train bound for Yamashiro, but they follow him onto the train. However, Fujimura finds that he has a doppelganger among the passengers and manages to swap clothes with him while he’s asleep in an effort to shake off his pursuers. It works, but when Fujimura reaches Yamashiro he realises that Bunpei Sagara (also played by Osaka), the man whose identity he has assumed, is a representative from the Ministry of Education whose mission is to deliver a lecture on the importance of morality and decide if the town is worthy of receiving a 10 million yen grant. The town’s VIPs queue up to kiss his butt and Fujimura continues to play the role of Sagara...

Yukio Mishima

If the basic plot of this Nikkatsu production sounds familiar, that’s because it’s an uncredited reworking of Gogol’s play The Government Inspector. However, the credited source is a series of essays by Yukio Mishima originally published in the weekly magazine Shukan Myojo, so it was presumably the screenplay authors (Atsundo Kubota* and director Katsumi Nishikawa) who came up with the idea of raiding Gogol for the storyline. The film retains the title of the essay series which, according to Japanese Wikipedia, ‘is modelled after Ihara Saikaku’s Twenty Unfilial Acts of Japan, which parodies the Chinese Twenty-Four Paragons of Filial Piety and contains carefully selected stories of “unfilial children”.’ Mishima’s essays, which were later collected in book form, have yet to appear in English, but were, apparently, humorous attacks on the hypocrisies of the time. In any case, he clearly approved of the film as he even appears in it as himself in a brief prologue and epilogue.

Hiroyuki Nagato

The upright facade presented by the town of Yamashiro soon proves to be a complete sham, and the place is populated largely by amoral eccentrics: two young students plotting the perfect murder, a high school girl raffling off her virginity, a middle-aged Christian housewife (Chieko Misaki) fantasising about her young muscleman driver, an anti-moral education protest group, and a nerd who claims to be a lady-killer (Pigs and Battleships’ Hiroyuki Nagato). 

Yumeji Tsukioka

The biggest star in the film, Yumeji Tsukioka, is absent for most of the picture but plays a TV star returning to her hometown to think about her future, while leading actor Shiro Osaka was usually found further down the cast list but acquits himself well in the comic double role. Director Nishikawa seems quite at home with all the absurdist comedy and keeps things moving at a steady pace.

Shiro Osaka

*Sometimes incorrectly translated as Atsuto Kubota.

If you'd like to support this blog, you can Buy Me a Coffee. 

Chieko Masaki

Convicted Woman / 女犯破戒 / Nyohan hakai (1966)

Obscure Japanese Film #275

Yoko Mihara and Takahiro Tamura

Ushinosuke (Takahiro Tamura) is a Kyoto actor who elopes with a young woman, O-Ume (Mayumi Ogawa), in a small boat. She decides they must die together and attacks him with a knife; the boat capsizes in the struggle and only Ushinosuke survives. Seven years later, in repentance, he has become a monk at Enmei-in Temple in Edo under the new name of Dogyo, but his faith is continually tested by lustful young women like Okura (Reiko Ohara), who apparently find his pompous piety and shaven pate irresistible.

Mayumi Ogawa

One day, Ryuzen (Nobuo Kaneko), who knows about Dogyo’s past, comes to the monastery to train as a monk, but appears to have some form of blackmail in mind. Meanwhile, the elderly head priest is dying but tries to seduce Dogyo on his deathbed. A shocked Dogyo runs off and lets himself be seduced by Okura instead while Ryuzen is finishing off the old priest. For some reason, Dogyo then decides to become the wickedest priest that ever lived...

Nobuo Kaneko with TT

This monksploitation meller from Toei was part of the studio’s drive to lure dwindling audiences back into the cinema with the promise of more erotic content, although said content remains mostly rather tame at this early stage. The fact that it was made in black and white and the star is Takahiro Tamura (who had seldom carried a picture before this one) seems indicative of a low budget, as does the silly script by B-movie hack Kikuma Shimoiizaka. Director Eiichi Kudo of 13 Assassins (1963) fame pulls off a few memorable moments, but the unconvincing characters and over-the-top performances soon prove tiresome, making the film quite a let-down after a strong opening sequence.

Reiko Ohara and TT

A note on the title:

Although Convicted Woman appears to have been an official English title, it doesn’t fit the content; the Japanese title can be translated as ‘Female Transgression’ or ‘Women Breaking the Commandments’, either of which make more sense in light of the story.

Thanks to A.K.

If you’d like to support this blog, you can Buy Me a Coffee.

And Yet We Live / どっこい生きてる / Dokkoi ikiteru (1951)

Obscure Japanese Film #274

Chojuro Kawarasaki

Mori (Chojuro Kawarasaki) is one of many day labourers scrambling for jobs clearing up the rubble of post-war Tokyo. After failing to find work one day, he returns to the slum where he lives with his wife, Sato (played by Kawarasaki’s real-life wife, Shizue), and two children only to learn that they’re to be evicted the following day. Sato decides that she should take the kids and stay with her sister until Mori can find a new place.

Mori has a chance of improving his lot when he’s offered a job as a lathe operator, but there’s one problem – how can he survive until payday when his boss won’t give him an advance? Old lady Akiyama (Choko Iida) comes to the rescue by gathering the day labourers together and getting them all to chip in a few yen for Mori, but if it weren’t for bad luck, Mori wouldn’t have any luck at all…

Chojuro and Shizue Kawarasaki (or Kawarazaki)

After his blacklisting from the major studios for being a member of the Communist Party, director Tadashi Imai founded Shinsei Eigasha (the New Star Film Company) with fellow director Satsuo Yamamoto and producer Takero Ito. This was the first film produced by the company and they actually financed it by getting members of the public to contribute 50 yen each. Considering that Imai also managed to produce a good film which was well-reviewed and made a profit, this is an impressive achievement indeed.

Under such circumstances, it’s not surprising that there are no big movie stars in the film, although leading actor Chojuro Kawarasaki was a major star of the kabuki theatre and played the lead role in occasional films, such as Sadao Yamanaka’s Priest of Darkness (1936). A communist sympathiser since the late 1920s, he and his theatre group, Zenshinza (the ‘Progressive Troupe’), joined the Japanese Communist Party en masse in 1949, and it was apparently Zenshinza which was largely responsible for raising the money to make And Yet We Live by soliciting donations from their audiences as they toured the country. (According to Japanese Wikipedia, Kawarasaki was later expelled from the JCP in 1967 for being a Maoist.) Kawarasaki and his troupe were later featured in Kozaburo Yoshimura’s excellent The Beauty and the Water Dragon (1955), which I have previously reviewed. His performance here is decent if unremarkable; there’s a drunk scene I disliked, partly because Kawarasaki – like most Japanese actors of the time in such scenes, it seems – overdoes it, but also because I thought that Mori wouldn’t have been so stupid and irresponsible in his situation. However, it is the fact that Mori is portrayed as a flawed individual rather than an idealised working class hero which helps the film to rise above mere commie propaganda. In terms of acting, though, it’s Choko Iida who provides the most memorable characterisation as the feisty old woman.

Choko Iida

In A Hundred Years of Japanese Film, Donald Richie states that ‘The film’s inspiration was De Sica’s The Bicycle Thief (1949) [sic]. Imai shot on the streets of Tokyo, around the major downtown railway terminal of Ueno. His camera was often hidden, and the camera was sometimes placed in real situations.’ While not quite the classic that De Sica’s film certainly is, And Yet We Live is still a very well-made and effective film in the same neorealist vein.

The film benefits from an interesting and mostly excellent score by Masao Oki (1901-71), a highly-regarded composer whose film work was limited, although he worked for Imai on a number of films. His Symphony No.5 ‘Hiroshima’ (1953) is generally regarded as his masterpiece, but is unrelated to the film Hiroshima released the same year.

Watch And Yet We Live with English subtitles on my YouTube channel here.

If you’d like to support this blog, you can Buy Me a Coffee

Time within Memory / 青幻記 遠い日の母は美しく / Seigen-ki (1973)

Obscure Japanese Film #273

Takahiro Tamura

Arai Yohiro

Minoru (Takahiro Tamura) is a middle-aged man who returns to the island of Okinoerabu in the far south of Japan for the first time in over 30 years. He relives long-forgotten memories of his childhood and his widowed mother (Atsuko Kaku), who died there when he was still a boy (Arai Yohiro), and meets an old man (Kamatari Fujiwara) who had been in love with her.

Atsuko Kaku

Based on an autobiographical novel by Jiro Isshiki (1916-88) which won the Osamu Dazai prize on its publication in 1967, this was the first of just two films directed by renowned cinematographer Toichiro Narushima (1925-93), who also worked as his own DP and producer here in addition to co-writing the screenplay. Previously, he had provided first-rate camerawork for mostly ‘new wave’ directors such as Yoshishige Yoshida, Masahiro Shinoda, Noboru Nakamura and Nagisa Oshima after starting out as an assistant cameraman for Keisuke Kinoshita. He clearly learnt a few things from working with such acclaimed filmmakers as, not only is the photography in this film as striking as one would expect from Narushima, but he proves to have a firm hand in other areas too.

Atsuko Kaku

The story is the sort of nostalgic, sentimental material that could easily have become cloying, but Narushima mostly avoids this by preventing his actors from overdoing it and staging his scenes with taste and subtlety, while the device of having the young and old Minoru frequently appearing together - almost as if the older one were a time traveller – works especially well, as does the purposefully non-chronological unfolding of events in the flashbacks (the most dramatic scene is held back until the older Minoru can finally face it). Time within Memory also benefits from its well-used locations and Toru Takemitsu’s score, which provides much of the emotional resonance even if its not one of his greatest.

Yunosuke Ito and Hisano Yamaoka

Delivering a fine performance in only her third film appearance, Atsuko Kaku won the Mainichi Film Concours Award for Best Actress, but for some reason never made another film. Like Tatsuya Nakadai and many other well-known Japanese actors, she was a member of the Haiyuza theatre company. 

Jun Hamamura

As a passive observer of his own past, Takahiro Tamura has less to do despite ostensibly having the lead role, while other notables among the cast include Yunosuke Ito as Minoru’s eccentric inventor grandfather and Hisano Yamaoka as his wife, Taiji Tonoyama as a shopkeeper sympathetic to the young Minoru, and Jun Hamamura as a mumbo-jumbo mumbling shaman. However, it’s Kamatari Fujiwara who impresses the most among the supporting cast when he sings and accompanies himself on the shamisen in a uniquely individual style (assuming he wasn’t dubbed).

If you’d like to support this blog, you can Buy Me a Coffee.

Kamatari Fujiwara

The Sharks / 鮫 / Samé (1964)

Obscure Japanese Film #272

Kinnosuke Nakamura 

The late Muromachi period, c.1467, the beginning of the Onin War. Samé, or ‘Shark boy’ (Kinnosuke Nakamura), is a young shark fisherman who lives as an outcast near a fishing village on the Echizen coast. As itinerants, his family are not accepted by the villagers and he is forced to hand over his catch every day and accept the scraps they allow him to keep for himself. When hostility towards the itinerants increases, their huts are burned and Samé’s mother (Akiko Kazami) killed, so he and an itinerant elder (Yoshi Kato) decide to head for the capital (Kyoto) on foot in search of a better future. 

Yoshi Kato

However, the old man falls ill and passes away en route, after which Samé hooks up with a middle-aged woman (Michiyo Kogure) making the same journey alone. She has a mysterious supply of meat which keeps them going but, horrified to discover that it’s actually human flesh, Samé abandons her and continues on his own.

Michiyo Kogure

Minoru Chiaki

It’s a time of widespread famine, and Samé turns to stealing in order to survive. He’s taken under the wing of Shirasawa (Minoru Chiaki), a one-armed criminal with a black mark on his face, who teaches Samé to be more ambitious in his thievery and even encourages him to kill. Inevitably, the pupil eventually turns on his master and, by the time Samé has become a fully-fledged adult, he’s a ruthless man indeed. 

Daisuke Kato 

He next joins a gang of mercenaries led by Genji of Chikushi (Daisuke Kato) in the hope of receiving not only wealth but a position of power in exchange for the heads he takes in battle. By this time, his willingness to commit evil seems to know no bounds, but when he tries to rape a nun (Yoshiko Mita), her unexpected reaction awakens his lost humanity.

Yoshiko Mita

Based on a best-selling, prize-winning two-part novel of the same name by Nobuhiko Matsugi (1932-2016) and adapted for the screen by director Tomotaka Tasaka’s regular collaborator Naoyuki Suzuki (who also frequently worked for Tomu Uchida), like many of Tasaka’s films, this is a lengthy one, clocking in at around 165 minutes. With former kabuki actor Kinnosuke Nakamura – one of the biggest stars of Japanese cinema at the time – in the lead role. it was a major production for Toei, so it’s surprising that it’s not better known, though this is likely because it was not an award winner and appears to have been out of circulation for many years. At the time, Kinema Junpo ranked it 17^th in the list of best films of 1964, and it was the third most successful of the year in terms of box office.

Nakamura

The film depends heavily on its star, Kinnosuke Nakamura, a talented actor but one who had a tendency to go over the top, which he certainly does here, with his maniacal laugh being overused in the later scenes. It might also have been better to cast a younger actor in the part of Samé as a boy – indeed, it took me a while to realise that the 32-year-old actor was playing a boy at the beginning. Regarding the other cast members, it’s as surprising to see Michiyo Kogure as a cannibal as it is predictable to see the cadaverous Jun Hamamura – who had already tasted ‘monkey meat’ in Fires on the Plain (1959) – desperate for a taste, but it’s the two Seven Samurai veterans, Minoru Chiaki and Daisuke Kato, who come off best as Nakamura’s two mentors of villainy.

Jun Hamamura

Like Nakamura, director Tasaka was left-leaning politically, and the film makes it very clear that Samé is driven to crime by poverty and the merciless feudal system. Although most of Samé’s actions are selfish ones, at one point he clearly takes sides when he attacks some men escorting stocks of rice, liberating the food not for his own benefit, but for all the starving poor to share. This scene is also an example of several complex action sequences involving numerous actors that Tasaka stages quite brilliantly. His usual cinematographer at the time, Masahiko Iimura, makes effective use of colour and widescreen, although I couldn’t help thinking that black and white would have suited such dark material better. There’s also a fitting score by one of Japan’s top film composers, Masaru Sato. However, well worth seeing though it is, I wouldn’t personally make any claims for this film as a lost masterpiece because I found it rather lacking in subtlety both in terms of story and performance, and I didn’t buy Samé’s rather corny religious redemption at the end.

Thanks to A.K.

If you’d like to support this blog, you can Buy Me a Coffee.

Tokai no kaii 7-ji 03-bu / 都会の怪異 七時三分 (‘Mystery of the City: 7:03’, 1935)

Obscure Japanese Film # 271

Eiji Nakano

A newspaper reporter, Tarama (Zenpei Saga), gets a call from an old friend, Miyamoto (Eiji Nakano), who’s broke but about to become a father with Noriko (Sachiko Chiba) although they’re not yet married. Miyamoto works for a dubious company specialising in insider trading but his boss won’t lend him a penny and he’s hoping that Tarama can help him financially. They arrange to meet that night for a drink in Ginza; later, on his way to meet Tarama, Miyamoto is approached by an old man (Yoyo Kojima) in the street who wants to sell him the evening paper – only it’s not that evening’s paper, it’s the one for the following day. Miyamoto assumes he’s a crackpot and buys a paper to get rid of him.

Yoyo Kojima

At a bus stop, Miyamoto notices a young homeless woman sleeping in the street next to a newspaper advert with the headline ‘Brutally murdered body of a young girl found in a sewer. Murder thought to have been committed by prostitute due to financial hardship.’ After boarding a bus, he begins perusing his paper and is astonished to see that it does indeed bear the following day’s date. Among the headlines are ‘Shock news! Murder suspect is popular singer, Hanako Hanamura’,  ‘Robbery on the bridge at 4:30 in the morning!’, and ‘Earthquake causes fire at Chameleon Bar’ – the very bar in which Miyamoto has arranged to meet his friend and where the proprietress (Chikako Hosokawa) favours oil lamps over electric ones. However, the item which most piques his interest is the following day’s racing results, but at this point he still assumes it’s all some kind of elaborate joke. 

Sachiko Chiba

Tarama fails to show, so Miyamoto heads home. When an earthquake hits and the fire brigade rush past him on their way to the Chameleon Bar, he realises that the contents of his mysterious newspaper should be taken seriously after all. Determined to raise some money to bet on the horse races, he decides to ask Noriko for some things to pawn and leaps into a taxi, where he’s disconcerted to learn that the driver keeps his wife’s ashes in an urn on the back seat. After visiting Noriko, he wakes up a pawnbroker (Osamu Takizawa) who has already closed for the night, but he’s disappointed with the amount of money he receives. Remembering the newspaper story about the robbery on the bridge, he decides to head there and rob the robber. He ends up killing the man he suspects to be the robber and throwing his body in the river. The man’s wallet contains only a little money (implying that he killed an innocent man), but now he at least has the funds he needs to make a different kind of killing. After winning big at the racetrack, he starts to become nervous about the police connecting him with the dead man and decides to leave Tokyo. He gives Noriko some money and says he’s going to Osaka and will send for her later, but heads for Yokohama instead. In another taxi, he takes out the newspaper again and notices something he’d overlooked the first time – his own obituary, which states that he died at 7:03 that evening. It’s now 6:35...

Eitaro Ozawa in one of his earliest screen roles as a cop

Japanese horror films from the 1930s are as rare as hen’s teeth, so it was a real treat to see this obscurity, especially as it turned out to be pretty good. Running a mere 55 minutes, I’m uncertain whether or not it’s complete – the fact that the newspaper story about a popular singer becoming a murder suspect is not followed up made me suspect there are scenes missing. 

Nakano and Chiba

The film begins with a title stating that it’s based on the final work of Itsuma Maki. Born at the turn of the century, Maki had died of a heart attack* aged just 35 shortly before the film was made (whether or not he died at 7:03 I don’t know). Itsuma Maki was actually one of several pen names of Kaitaro Hasegawa. Under the name Fubo Hayashi, he had created the famous one-eyed, one-armed swordsman Tange Sazen, while Maki was his chosen name for crime and horror stories, of which this last had been finished by Maki’s editor (who knew the intended ending) after the author’s death. However, Maki had spent time in London in the late 1920s, where he’d purchased numerous books of crime and horror stories, and ‘7:03’ is, in fact, closely based on the short story ‘The Old Man’ by the British author Holloway Horn.** Incidentally, Maki’s version of the story is apparently more humorous than the film, which plays it nightmarishly straight throughout. 

Kojima and Nakano

One nice touch is that actor and opera singer Yoyo Kojima plays not merely the old man, but also pops up in four other roles: a driver, the man Miyamoto kills, the disconcerting man who wants to use the phone box, and a racetrack spectator. When Miyamoto walks the deserted streets just before meeting the old man who sells him the paper, there’s also an effective use of sound and shadows to suggest a hidden danger which brings to mind Val Lewton’s later approach to similar material. It’s atmospherically shot by cinematographer Akira Mimura, who would go on to shoot Sanshiro Sugata (1943) for Kurosawa. 

Nakano

This is the only film I’ve seen by director Sotoji Kimura (1903-88), though he made quite a few during his 30-year-plus career. This seems not to have been at all typical of his work, much of which was on musicals and comedies – something I found pretty surprising after watching this! Perhaps the film was a box office flop, but to me it’s a pity he didn’t make more like it.

Leading man Eiji Nakano was a star of contemporary dramas known for his fashion sense, bad boy image and violent temper – his Japanese Wikipedia page states that film critics were afraid to give him a bad review in case he beat them up. In this case, I need not fear his ghost as I thought he gave a fine performance. He appeared in a dozen films for Mizoguchi but more or less retired from the cinema in 1939 to pursue other interests. 

The film was made for PCL Film Productions, which was active from 1933-37 and later became part of Toho. 

*English Wikipedia states that he died of acute bronchial asthma, but Japanese Wikipedia gives the cause as a heart attack. 

**The easiest way to access the original Holloway Horn story is probably via Gav Cross’ likeably eccentric reading on YouTube.

Japanese sources:

https://borderland.txt-nifty.com/weblog_on_the_borderland/2009/03/post-7ed1.html

https://nihoneiga1920-1960.hatenablog.com/entry/2022/11/23/125253

If you’d like to support this blog, you can Buy Me a Coffee.