The Hole / 穴 / Ana (1957)

Obscure Japanese Film #55

Machiko Kyo

 

In their first film together, a comedy thriller made for the Daiei company, director Kon Ichikawa gives star Machiko Kyo one of her best roles as a resourceful heroine who outsmarts all the scheming men surrounding her. She plays Nagako, a reporter who is fired from her job after writing an article exposing police corruption. 

Tanie Kitabayashi

 

Her flatmate, Suga (old lady specialist Tanie Kitabayashi looking young for a change), inspired by stories of people mysteriously going missing in Japan, suggests an idea she can pitch to a magazine: Nagako will ‘go missing’ herself for a month while the magazine offers a 500,000 yen reward to any reader who can find her. 

So Yamamura

 

However, when the magazine editor refuses to give her an advance, Nagako approaches dodgy bank manager Shirasu (So Yamamura) for a loan to cover her expenses, but he conspires with a senior clerk, Chigi (Eiji Funakoshi), to win the prize money for himself, after which things become increasingly complicated to the point of (clearly intentional) absurdity.

Eiji Funakoshi

 

Machiko Kyo, appearing in a number of guises and showing a real flair for comedy here, is in almost every scene and provides reason enough for watching. 

 

Machiko Kyo

Feminists will enjoy watching her run rings around the men, and one also has to admire her willingness to look entirely unglamorous in a number of scenes. Although it’s Kyo who carries the film, The Hole is also a fast-paced and fun movie with a strong supporting cast packed with Ichikawa regulars, including the wonderful Jun Hamamura as an eccentric cab driver. 

 

Jun Hamamura with Machiko Kyo

The director even throws in a self-mocking cameo from Shintaro Ishihara, who says at one point, ‘I found novel writing boring. I sing now.’ (Ishihara, who began as a writer, was known for dabbling in acting and various other pursuits; he later became a right-wing politician and was Governer of Tokyo from 1999-2012). 

Shintaro Ishihara

 

The screenplay was written by Ichikawa and his wife Natto Wada under their pseudonym ‘Kurisutei’, a nod to Agatha Christie. However, they failed to credit William Pearson, the American author upon whose 1954 novel The Beautiful Frame the central idea was lifted. Having said that, it should be noted that the novel featured a male protagonist and seems to have been a fairly straight piece of pulp fiction which Ichikawa and Wada turned into something far more original. 

Machiko Kyo

 

Mikkokusha /密告者 (‘The Informer’) 1965

Obscure Japanese Film #54

 

Jiro Tamiya

 

This Daiei thriller stars Jiro Tamiya as Segawa, a bankrupt stockbroker now reduced to working as a salesman. He has a huge debt to pay off, but unfortunately he’s been unable to sell a single one of the ‘electric massagers’ he’s supposed to be flogging, so he decides to ask his boss, Sawai (Yusuke Takita), if he can try selling something else instead. Sawai confesses that the massagers are just a front for an industrial espionage agency he’s running, then offers Segawa some well-paid work spying on a pharmaceutical company run by Ogino (Akira Natsuki), also confessing that this was the real reason he had recruited Segawa in the first place and that he has been waiting for the right moment to tell him. Sawai knows that Segawa used to be engaged to Ogino’s wife, Eiko (Kaoru Izumi), and hopes that this connection will give Segawa a valuable ‘in’ through which he can begin gathering information. Segawa finds the task easier than expected and soon begins getting results, but it all goes wrong when he finds himself the prime suspect in a murder case. However,  Eiko’s sister, Toshiko (Shiho Fujimura), seems convinced of his innocence and willing to do anything she can to help him…

Shiho Fujimura

Mikkokusha sees Jiro Tamiya in a typical role as an ambitious womaniser who’s not too big in the morals department – see also Black Test Car, Stolen Pleasure and, most notably, The Great White Tower (among others). Tamiya excelled at playing such characters, and was also an athletic type and proficient in karate – a useful skill when called upon to perform in action scenes, of which this film has a number of good ones in the second half. Unfortunately, his film career would soon go off the rails. In 1968, he complained to the bosses at Daiei studios about having been relegated to fourth billing on the posters for Tadashi Imai’s The Time of Reckoning (1968) below Ayako Wakao, Mariko Kaga and Mariko Okada despite having the lead role. Daiei changed the billing but fired him. Due to an arrangement between the five big film companies in Japan, this meant that none of the other studios would sign him and he had to make do with TV work and roles in occasional independent films (something similar had happened to Fujiko Yamamoto in 1963). In the following years, Tamiya embarked on a number of unsuccessful business ventures and suffered from health issues culminating in depression and a mental breakdown. He committed suicide with a hunting rifle in 1978 aged just 43.

Director Shigeo Tanaka (1907-1992) is generally regarded as a journeyman, but it’s an indication of the quality of Japanese cinema during this period that even the so-called hacks were, at the least, highly competent. Tanaka enjoyed a long career, making his first film in 1931, and his last in 1980. He’s probably best remembered for the ‘Woman Gambler’ series starring Kyoko Enami (who apparently replaced Ayako Wakao when the latter had to pull out for health reasons). Enami also appears here as Segawa’s girlfriend, but the plum female role goes to Shiho Fujimura, who is especially effective in her final scene. Yusuke Takita is also memorable as the suave and slippery Sawai.

Yusuke Takita

 

The industrial espionage thriller became a subgenre of its own in 1960s Japanese cinema, although Mikkokusha focuses mainly on the murder mystery aspect of the plot. This is quite convoluted but pretty clever, and overall the film has a lot going for it, including some fine black-and-white ‘scope photography by Fujio Morita, who went on to shoot many of Hideo Gosha’s films. 

The screenplay by Hajime Takaiwa was based on a just-published novel of the same name by Akimitsu Takagi later published in English translation by Soho Press in 2001 as The Informer. Takaiwa's adaptation is pretty faithful; although the aforementioned action scenes are not present in the book, they are a welcome addition as the story would have made for an overly talky film without them. 

Thanks to Coralsundy for the English subtitles, which can be found here.

DVD on Amazon Japan.

All My Children / みんなわが子 / Minna waga ko (1963)

Obscure Japanese Film #53

 

Director Miyoji Ieki (1911-76) made something of a speciality out of films focusing on children; this film, along with Stepbrothers (1957) and The Wayside Pebble (1964), certainly suggests that he had a genuine affinity for the subject and is another sensitive portrayal of the trials and tribulations experienced by those in their formative years. In this case, the children are evacuees suffering from homesickness and hunger in the final days of the war.

Like fellow director Satsuo Yamamoto, Ieki was fired by a major studio in the late 1940s due to his left-wing sympathies and subsequently forced to rely on a combination of independent production and freelancing in order to continue his career. All My Children is an example of the former, which may be one reason for the lack of big names among the cast. However, Hitomi Nakahara (b.1936) was a star who had been under contract to Toei since her debut in 1954 and was here appearing in one of her final film roles for many years before switching to TV in 1964. As the children’s teacher, she has a doe-eyed, Audrey Hepburn-like quality that’s quite appealing. She’s the closest thing to a main character in the film – really it’s an ensemble piece with no plot to speak of. Instead, we have an episodic narrative which encompasses everything from a double suicide to a desperate second evacuation to a mountain village, but it holds the interest throughout thanks to Ieki’s excellent staging and attention to detail. 

Hitomi Nakahara

 

I suspect that this film provides a pretty accurate portrayal of what it must have been like for such children and their teachers at the time, especially as the screenplay by former Kurosawa collaborator Keinosuke Uekasa (One Wonderful Sunday, Drunken Angel) was ‘based on the Gekkohara Elementary School volume of A Record of School Children Evacuations’. Indeed, several moments called to mind Tatsuya Nakadai’s description of his wartime childhood, such as the fact that the children were so hungry that they resorted to eating toothpaste while, early on in the film, we see them being trained how to kill American soldiers with bamboo spears. All My Children provides a sobering spectacle in showing us the extent to which the right-wing military had gained control of the country and been largely successful in brainwashing the citizens, costing countless innocent lives and almost destroying the country in the process. The film avoids cheap sentimentality for the most part and, just when it threatens to end on a maudlin note, Ieki deftly subverts our expectations with a final scene in which the resilience of the children provides a lesson for their teachers.

Finally, the music: Sei Ikeno’s harpsichord soundtrack may be an odd choice, but it works better than you might expect.