Obscure Japanese Film #29
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| Ayako Wakao |
Ayako Wakao’s fourth film for director Yasuzo Masumura is the sort of soapy drama that would soon disappear from cinema screens in Japan and be produced for TV instead. Nevertheless, it has a very strong cast and some depths which may not be immediately apparent.
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| Haruko Sugimura |
Fusa (Haruko Sugimura) is a widow who owns an orchid farm near Tokyo which has been the family business for 150 years but is now struggling financially. Another difficulty is the fact that her two grown daughters have other ideas about what they want to do with their lives. The eldest, Kikue (Fujiko Yamamoto), wants to be a dancer. She is the protégé of dancer and teacher Kanzo (Shintaro Katsu), and the two become romantically involved with the result that Kanzo’s patroness and former mistress, restaurant owner Okume (Chieko Murata), throws them out in a jealous rage. The two are forced to move into a small apartment and dance at parties to make ends meet.
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| Fujiko Yamamoto |
Meanwhile, Kikue’s younger half-sister Keiko (Ayako Wakao) becomes an air stewardess and abandons her childhood sweetheart Tadao (Hiroshi Kawaguchi), who is employed on her mother’s farm. Keiko begins running with a more sophisticated, urban crowd but narrowly escapes being raped by a smooth-talking embezzler she meets at a party.
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| Hiroshi Kawaguchi |
Tadao’s younger sister, Kaoru (Hitomi Nozoe), is a deaf-mute who also works on the farm and is treated by Fusa as a third daughter. She has a crush on orchid expert Shusaku (Keizo Kawasaki), but unfortunately he is in love with Kikue (and unaware she is already in a relationship with Kanzo).
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| Hitomi Nozoe |
Beauty is Guilty is about coming to terms with a changing world. Kikue, played by an actress said to have embodied the ideal of Japanese beauty, studies and performs classical Japanese dance and represents traditional values. In contrast, Keiko (played by an actress with more contemporary-looking features) clearly has her eye on the future in going to work for an airline and represents modern values (Ayako Wakao even speaks English a couple of times here).
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| Shintaro Katsu |
Kaoru, continually having her hair stroked or being patted on the head by those around her, is a less convincing character (through no fault of Nozoe) as I doubt someone in her position would, in reality, appreciate being treated as if she were a puppy. Playing a dancer, Shintaro Katsu is so well-groomed he may be unrecognisable to anyone who has only seen him as Zatoichi. As the kind but somewhat resigned matriarch, Haruko Sugimura gives her usual quietly impressive performance and the spontaneous dance she performs with Fujiko Yamamoto is a strangely moving highlight.
Beauty is Guilty was based on a novel[1] by Matsutaro Kawaguchi (1899-1985), who frequently wrote for Kenji Mizoguchi and was the father of Hiroshi Kawaguchi, who appears here as Tadao. The novel was adapted by Sumie Tanaka (1908-2000), a female playwright who later became a screenwriter, notably for directors Mikio Naruse and Kinuyo Tanaka (no relation).
I would be surprised to see a DVD release of this one in the West as it fails to tick any of the cult boxes of those Masumura films which have surfaced over here.
Watched without subtitles.[1] I haven’t been able to find any details of the novel even in Japanese, so it may actually have been a short story or published under a different title.
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