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.

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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

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Tobira o hiraku onna / 扉を開く女 (1946)

Obscure Japanese Film #270

Yumeji Tsukioka

Yokohama c.1880. Okinu (Yumeji Tsukioka) is a young woman who sings and plays the gekkin (aka yueqin or ‘moon lute’) in restaurants to earn a living. She’s in love with Shinkichi (Kanji Koshiba), a carriage driver studying to be a lawyer under windbag Professor Naito (Mitsusaburo Ramon).

Kanji Koshiba

Her neighbour, Kikue (Yaeko Mizutani I, frequently confused with her daughter, Yaeko Mizutani II), is a widowed sewing instructor who was forced to endure an unhappy marriage. As a young woman, she had been in love with Takano, but unable to marry him as he was an ashigaru (samurai of the lowest rank). Instead, she was made to recite the ‘Three Obediences of a Woman’ – which are first to her parents, second to her husband and finally to her children – until it nearly drove her mad and then had to marry a man who had no feelings for her.

Yaeko Mizutani

When the supposedly liberal Professor Naito proves objects strongly to Shinkichi’s intention to marry Okinu, Kikue is determined that Okinu not suffer the same fate, so she takes matters into her own hands and visits the professor herself…

Misusaburo Ramon (supposedly!)

Produced by Daiei at their Kyoto studios, this was supposedly based on an original screenplay by Yoshikata Yoda. However, Yoda clearly stole the plot from Kyoka Izumi’s 1907 novel Onna keizu, the multiple film versions of which include Teinosuke Kinugasa’s The Romance of Yushima and Kenji Misumi’s 1962 version (the latter of which had a screenplay by Yoda).

This was director Keigo Kimura’s first post-war film and the conditions he had to work under would have been quite restrictive this early on during the occupation, when the authorities would only give the green light to pictures that promoted democracy and were against feudalism. This one is not terribly subtle in its approach and contains dialogue such as, “I despise such feudalistic thinking! Japan still hasn’t managed to break free from it…”, etc etc.

Yaeko Mizutani

The acting is not terribly interesting either, with Yaeko Mizutani’s theatrical origins being all too obvious and her decision to speak like Minnie Mouse when playing the young Kikue in the flashbacks especially regrettable. Director Kimura manages some nice moments here and there, but overall this is a contrived and sentimental affair which has not aged well.

A note on the title:

A few slightly different variations are possible but, because the title seems to refer to Kikue, who opens a (metaphorical) door for Okinu – and potentially for other women in similar positions – the most apt translation is perhaps ‘The Woman Who Opened Doors’.

Thanks to A.K.

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Yutaro kodan / 遊太郎巷談 (1959)

Obscure Japanese Film #269

Raizo Ichikawa

Yutaro (Raizo Ichikawa), a prince whose father (also played by Ichikawa) was forced to commit suicide, masquerades as a ronin and uses his formidable skill with a sword to right a few wrongs he sees being perpetrated on his wanderings. One day, he takes an ornate box stolen by a pickpocket away from the thief and discovers that it contains a MacGuffin in the shape of a map. A disgraced clan are attempting to restore their fortunes but need the map to do it, so they enlist the help of the famous swordsman Hirate Miki (Kenjiro Uemura) to slay Yutaro. Meanwhile, Oyu (Masako Kishi) and Sayuri (Yoko Uraji) compete for Yutaro’s affections, but he seems more interested in Princess Tsu (Atsuko Kindaichi) even though she’s involved with the baddies…

This Daiei production was based on a novel by Renzaburo Shibata (1917-78), creator of the Nemuri Kyoshiro (or Sleepy Eyes of Death) series, the films of which also starred Raizo Ichikawa. The plot is pure hokum, but the film is well made, fast-paced and entertaining and looks a treat thanks largely to the superb widescreen black and white cinematography of veteran Kohei Sugiyama, who had shot such classics as A Page of Madness (1926) and Gate of Hell (1953). This was one of his final films before he passed away in 1960.

It’s difficult to think of anyone who looks more the part of the heroic samurai than Raizo Ichikawa does in this movie and the supporting cast also give a good account of themselves, especially Kenjiro Uemura, who manages to be even more dour than Shin Saburi in Hirate Miki (1951). 

Kenjiro Uemura

The female lead, Atsuko Kindaichi, was appearing in a period film for the first time here, having debuted as a Daiei ‘New Face’ in 1957 and been kept very busy since. In 1960 she was cast in Shunkai Mizuho’s Sure-sure, which involved a bed scene with Hiroshi Kawaguchi, so she refused to do it and quit the business. Few would blame for that, although I don’t think it was specifically because it was Kawaguchi…

Atsuko Kindaichi

Director Katsuhiko Tasaka was the younger brother of the better-known Tomotaka Tasaka and seems to have worked almost entirely in the chambara (sword fighting) genre. As this is pre-Yojimbo, there is no spurting blood or slashing sounds, just some rather clichéd music, but on the plus side, Tasaka delivers a memorably weird scene involving a giant talking Buddha statue and a dancing woman with impractically long sleeves.

A note on the title:

I’m not sure the film has an official English title, but it’s sometimes referred to as Yutaro’s Secret Story or Yutaro’s Secret Sword; the former seems to be a reasonable reflection of the Japanese title, in which 巷談 (kodan) is generally translated as ‘rumour’.

DVD at Amazon Japan (no English subtitles)

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My Voiceless Friends / あゝ声なき友 / Aa koe naki tomo (1972)

Obscure Japanese Film #268

Kiyoshi Atsumi

1944. Private Nishiyama (Kiyoshi Atsumi) comes down with a fever while serving in China. He’s sent to hospital to recover, but develops pleurisy, making him unfit for service. When the rest of his platoon hear he’s to be sent home, they all write letters to their loved ones and give them to Nishiyama to deliver. However, Nishiyama has to wait months before he can get a passage on a ship back to Japan, by which time the rest of his platoon have been wiped out. He decides that the least he can do is deliver the letters, but this proves to be no easy task in the turmoil of post-war Japan and he spends the next 8 years travelling the length and breadth of the country trying to track down the recipients…

After reading the 1960 novel Isho haitatsunin (‘Death Letter Delivery Man’) by Red Angel author Yorichika Arima (1918-80), actor Kiyoshi Atsumi – a very popular star thanks to his role as Tora-san in the long-running series – set up his own production company to turn it into this film in collaboration with Shochiku. Naoyuki Suzuki, the award-winning screenwriter of Tomu Uchida’s A Fugitive from the Past (1965) and a specialist in literary adaptation, came on board to write the script, while Tadashi Imai – always passionate about material with an anti-war theme – was hired to direct, shooting on many different locations across Japan.

Chieko Baisho

Aside from the Chieko Baisho segment, which feels rather awkwardly shoehorned in (perhaps to give Atsumi’s regular Tora-san co-star something to do), the episodic structure of the film works quite well, keeping tedium at bay and avoiding much in the way of repetition, while Atsumi’s completely straight, low-key performance is a definite asset and folk singer Hitoshi Komuro’s solo guitar score generally hits the right notes. Given the nature of the story, the film could have been unbearably mawkish, but as we see Atsumi deliver the letters to sundry familiar character actors, there’s not always the big emotional scene one might expect – in some cases the recipients have become quite indifferent by the time he gets round to them. The letters themselves are not always kind either, and one hapless father receives a hate-filled missive from his dead son saying that it should be the old who die, not the young. In other cases, Nishiyama finds himself stirring up trouble rather than bringing closure to the bereaved, and all the while his commitment to his quest means that he misses out on various opportunities in his own life. Is he really helping people or has he just made a rod for his own back due to a bad case of survivor’s guilt? Indeed, the real strength of this film is its questioning nature – there’s no sense of certainty that Nishiyama has done the right thing, and it's quite rightly left for him – and us – to ponder.

DVD at Amazon Japan (no English subtitles)

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Mori no Ishimatsu / 森の石松 (‘Ishimatsu of Mori’, 1949)

Obscure Japanese Film #267

Susumu Fujita

Takashi Shimura 

Ishimatsu (Susumu Fujita, best-known for playing the title role in Kurosawa’s Sanshiro Sugata) is a poor tenant tea farmer fed up with working like a slave for a pittance. After losing the little money he had in a dice game against gambling boss Shimachidori (Takashi Shimura), he resolves – with the encouragement of tea house hostess Oshin (Kyoko Asagiri) – to abandon agriculture and turn to crime despite the objections of his mother (Choko Iida) and best friend Gosaku (Taiji Tonoyama). He finds employment with the famous yakuza Jirocho Shimizu (Komei Minami) but has little success in his new endeavour until, determined to make a name for himself, he shows reckless bravery in a fight but loses an eye in the process. Now with a formidable reputation to live up to, he falls in love with Ofuji (Yukiko Todoroki), but she won’t marry him unless he gives up his life of crime…

Yukiko Todoroki

Mori no Ishimatsu was said to have been a subordinate of the real life Jirocho Shimizu (1820-93), but it’s unclear whether Ishimatsu was, in fact, a real person. In any case, he had already been the subject of at least half a dozen movies by the time this one was made and would go on to inspire many more, most of which seem to be comedies, which is understandable given that Japanese Wikipedia states that he was traditionally portrayed as ‘a lovable character who is a drunken ruffian but has a strong sense of loyalty and compassion, and is somewhat absent-minded.’

This Shochiku production was based on an original screenplay by Kaneto Shindo and directed by his regular associate Kozaburo Yoshimura. Also frequently comic in tone, with a rather dim-witted hero and the sword fighting scenes emphasising the clumsiness and reluctance of the opponents, their film nevertheless has its serious side and criticises both gangsterism and the exploitation of workers by the old feudal system. Indeed, it was probably these themes that saw it approved by the censors of the Occupation authorities, who prevented many period films from being made at the time (this was Yoshimura’s first) as they felt that such stories often gave tacit approval to feudalism, the mindset of which had allowed the military to take over the government of Japan and lead it into war.

Taiji Tonoyama

As a film, this is no lost masterpiece, but it is a well-made and enjoyable watch which clearly had quite a lot of effort put into it – the period details, for example, look quite authentic, and there is some effective use made of real locations, nifty tracking shots (courtesy of Yoshimura’s regular cinematographer at the time, Toshio Ubukata) and a number of complex, well-staged scenes in which elaborate sets and large numbers of extras are also used. Another asset is the cast, in which Shimura makes a fine villain, while Choko Iida stands out as Ishimatsu’s put upon, sutra-chanting mother. Other notables featured are Koji Mitsui, Sadako Sawamura and an almost unrecognisable Chishu Ryu. 

Choko Iida

Chishu Ryu

Note on the title:

Although it’s often translated as ‘Ishimatsu of the Forest’, there’s no sign of a forest; apparently, the ‘Mori’ of the title actually refers to Mori-machi village, in what was then the Enshu region, and is where Ishimatsu was said to be from.

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River of Forever / 千曲川絶唱 / Chikumakawa zessho (‘The Great Poem of the Chikuma River’, 1967)

Obscure Japanese Film #266

Kinya Kitaoji

Kunie Tanaka

Goshogawa (Kinya Kitaoji) and Yujiro (Kunie Tanaka) are young truck drivers in Toyama. Having to drive to Niigata, they stop off to visit Yujiro’s sister, Yoshiko (Ayumi Ishida), who is in there with tuberculosis. Goshogawa finds himself attracted to a nurse, Nami (Yuriko Hoshi); meanwhile, Yujiro takes the opportunity to tell the doctor (Mikijiro Hira) that Goshogawa has been complaining about his gums bleeding recently. Examining Goshogawa, the doctor discovers that he has leukemia, but doesn’t tell him. However, Goshogawa soon learns the truth, and it emerges that he had been on a fishing boat near Bikini Atoll at the time of the US nuclear bomb test…

Yuriko Hoshi

Mikijiro Hira

This Toho production was based on an original screenplay by Hideko Takamine’s husband, Zenzo Matsuyama, who had a penchant for writing – and sometimes directing – what are somtimes termed ‘issue’ films; in other works, he tackled sensitive subjects such as forced emigration (Mother Country), dementia (The Twilight Years), and disability (The Happiness of Us Alone), some more successfully than others. Unfortunately, this is not an example of his better work, featuring as it does some clumsy – and corny – writing, and being really just a sentimental tearjerker at heart, with realism not on the agenda. (The most idiotic scene is the one in which the shouting policeman lets the cat out of the bag about Goshogawa’s illness).

Yuriko Hoshi

As one would expect from a film directed by Shiro Toyoda and lensed by his frequent collaborator, Kozo Okazaki, it’s very well shot and has some effective scenes – the one in which Goshogawa chases a train in his truck is a technical tour de force – but that’s not enough here, partly due to the deficiencies in the script, but also because there are other issues, too. Kinya Kitaoji and Kunie Tanaka overact shamelessly for the most part, although Kitaoji is effective in some scenes after the diagnosis, while Masaru Sato’s music tries rather too hard to tug at our heartstrings. The women in the cast fare better, but have a tough job given what they have to work with.

The film failed to win any awards, but it was a box office hit, and Kinya Kitaoji and Yuriko Hoshi were re-teamed the following year in Kitahodaka zessho, in which Kitaoji suffers from amnesia instead of leukemia, and again for 1969’s Tsugaru zessho, in which he suffered, I think, from general misfortune. Neither of these cash-ins had any involvement from Matsuyama or Toyoda.

As a footnote, it’s perhaps worth mentioning that, in Japan, it apparently used to be common for doctors not to inform patients if they had a terminal illness, although I believe that this has gradually changed over the last few decades.

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