Obscure Japanese Film #39
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| Ramon Mitsusaburo |
A samurai horror film from 1937, no less! Although clearly a minor work, this is certainly a fascinating curio, albeit one with a slightly misleading title – the picture has nothing to do with the famous Japanese mystery writer Edogawa Rampo (1894-1965), but the choice of the protagonist’s name was probably intended to make audiences believe that it did.
As the film begins, we see a man’s body being carried to an isolated house by an old geezer with a long beard and fingernails that would make Fu Manchu green with envy. He lays the body out on a table and performs a black magic ritual which revives the dead man. A turning waterwheel introduces a flashback sequence revealing that the man is a samurai named Edogawa Ranzan who was assassinated by henchmen of the local Mr Big. Needless to say, Ed wakes up in a foul mood and sets about revenging himself on those responsible, indulging in a blood-curdling laugh every time he dispatches another victim.
The story may be nothing to write home about, but there are some nice visual flourishes, such as a shot of a spider’s web which is refocused to resolve into a shot of Ed’s weeping fiancée, who has been abducted by Mr Big. Other visual elements such as shadows, swirling fog and tilting gravestones and streetlamps lend a suitably spooky atmosphere and suggest the influence of the Universal horror films of the early 1930s. However, the film does not quite live up to its opening and gets rather talky in the middle before recovering a bit in a couple of the later scenes, in which Ed makes a surprise attack through a ceiling and emerges from a swamp. The climax, though, feels somewhat fumbled and thrown away as if the filmmakers were running out of time and money, which perhaps they were.
While the picture quality remains surprisingly good, the same cannot be said of the crackly soundtrack. There were also a couple of abrupt and confusing cuts which made me wonder if the extant print could be missing a couple of scenes.
So, was this film a one-off or were other similar films produced in Japan at the time? Rather disappointingly, star Ramon Mitsusaburo (1901-76) proves not to have been the Japanese Boris Karloff, but a star of silent chambara (sword-fighting) films who by this stage in his career was a little down on his luck. The film was made for the short-lived Imai Eiga company, which cranked out a number of B-movies during its two years of existence (1937-8), many of them starring Mitsusaburo. However, judging by the titles, none of the others were horror films.
The film was written and directed by Kenji Shimomura (1902-93), a cinematographer-turned-director whose feature film career ended soon after this work, although he continued to make short documentaries into the 1970s. He deserves credit for bringing more visual flair to The Mysterious Edogawa Ranzan than is usually seen in such a low-budget programmer and even for venturing into the horror genre in the first place – this type of film only became popular in Japan around the mid-1950s and earlier examples are rare (with the exception of the many versions of The Ghost of Yotsuya).
Given the timing of the film's release, it's tempting to conclude that the story was intended as a metaphor about the need to revive Japan's warrior spirit. But then again, perhaps it's just a horror movie after all...
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