Obscure Japanese Film #20
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| Rentaro Mikuni and Kaneko Iwasaki |
Rentaro Mikuni, star of my previous post’s film, appears here on the other side of the law, but in a smaller role, as this Nikkatsu production is an ensemble piece featuring a cast of well-known actors, each of whom has limited screen time. Here, Mikuni is a naïve country policeman who falls for a young woman (Kaneko Iwasaki) he rescues from the clutches of a people trafficker played by Haruko Sugimura.
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| Haruko Sugimura |
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| Masao Mishima |
Masao Mishima plays Mikuni’s boss, while Taiji Tonoyama and Hisaya Morishige appear as his colleagues. In this world, a long way from the yakuza and seedy bars of Tokyo, the cops are all good-natured types who prefer to help people rather than lock them up. However, life remains far from ideal, and we see many signs of economic hardship and lives shattered by the war. The strand which receives the most attention focuses on Police Sergeant Yoshii (Morishige); lumbered with a young girl and her baby brother who have been abandoned on a train by their mother, he finds a temporary home for the baby and takes the girl into his own house as he already has five kids and figures one more will make no difference.
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| Taiji Tonoyama, Hisaya Morishige, Terumi Niki and Joe Shishido |
A number of familiar faces pop up in Policeman’s Diary, many of whom will be recognisable from the films of Kurosawa...
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| Noriko Sengoku |
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| Bokuzen Hidari (centre) |
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| Miki Odagiri and Yunosuke Ito (centre) |
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| Eijiro Tono |
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| Terumi Niki |
Noriko Sengoku portrays a woman abandoned by her husband who resorts to shoplifting in order to feed her children. Bokuzen Hidari plays a poor farmer, while Yunosuke Ito is an equally poor cart-puller who has been dumped by his fiancé but finds he is loved by barmaid Miki Odagiri (the cheerful young colleague of Takashi Shimura in Ikiru). Eijiro Tono, the tavern-keeper in Yojimbo, here plays a primary school teacher who lost his mind when his children were killed during the war, which he believes is still in progress. The little girl taken in by Sergeant Yoshii is played by Terumi Niki, making her official film debut at the tender age of 6, although she had appeared briefly in Seven Samurai at the age of 3. She continued acting throughout her childhood, adolescence and adulthood, appearing most memorably as the traumatised young patient who repeatedly refuses the medicine offered by Toshiro Mifune in Redbeard. Another notable actor making a debut here is Joe Shishido, who appears as a young policeman but is not immediately recognisable as this was prior to his bizarre cheek-expansion surgery.
Based on an untranslated 1952 novel by Einosuke Ito and adapted by Mikio Naruse’s regular collaborator, Toshiro Ide, Policeman’s Diary is well-directed by Seiji Hisamatsu (1912-1990), a prolific filmmaker who seems to be entirely unknown in the West. He directed his first film in 1934 for Shinko Kinema, with whom he remained until the war, during which Shinko was swallowed up in a merger, becoming part of Daiei. Hisamatsu then worked at Daiei before going freelance in 1954, when he was mainly employed by Nikkatsu, Toho and Tokyo Eiga. Like many Japanese directors, he ended his career in television after film work dried up in the late ‘60s. His filmography is full of quality dramas featuring the top actors of the day, so why this is the only film accessible outside Japan of the 101 that he directed remains a mystery. Given that his 1954 picture Onna no koyomi (Women’s Calendar) was screened in competition at Cannes, he won the Japanese Art Award in 1956 and his 1961 film Chi no hate ni ikiru mono (aka The Angry Sea) was nominated for Best Film at the Mar del Plata Film Festival in Argentina, Hisamatsu was clearly no hack.
Despite all the Kurosawa regulars among the cast, Policeman’s Diary is more reminiscent of the films of Keisuke Kinoshita, partly due to its setting in a rural community. I found it to be a charming, bittersweet comic drama from a more innocent age, and it was clearly popular as Nikkatsu produced a sequel the following year.
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