The Girl Who Tamed Beasts / 猛獣使いの少女 / Mōjūzukai no shōjo (1952)

Obscure Japanese Film #60

Chiemi Eri

 

This Daiei production stars the 15-year-old Chiemi Eri as Mayumi, a teenage circus performer employed by an American circus company visiting Japan. She is the child of a Japanese father and an American mother; when the war between the two countries began, her father was sent back to Japan not knowing that his wife was pregnant. Mayumi’s mother died not long after giving birth to her and she was she was brought up by the kindly Kosuke (Minoru Chiaki), who works as a clown in the same circus. In an interview for a Japanese newspaper, Mayumi mentions that she hopes one day to find her real father, Sokichi (Joji Oka). Fate brings them together, but Sokichi is ashamed of his humble status as a street musician and struggles with the question of whether he should reveal his identity to his daughter… 

Minoru Chiaki

This is definitely a film for circus buffs, featuring as it does plentiful footage of the real-life E.K. Fernandez All American Circus (founded in 1903 in Hawaii) which travelled internationally. Presumably, some bright spark at Daiei learned that the circus were visiting Japan and saw an opportunity to create a vehicle for teenage singing sensation Chiemi Eri, whose first film this was. Eri proved that she could act a bit too and immediately became a hugely popular film star as well.

Jun Negami and Ayako Wakao

 

Appearing here in her second film is Ayako Wakao, then just 18. She plays a rather wholesome barmaid in a few scenes and is given nothing very interesting to do here, so there’s no indication that she would be a star only one year later.

 

Joji Oka

 

The simple story cooked up by screenwriters Toshiro Ide and Umetsugu Inoue feels overstretched and the lion-taming climax is unconvincing (poorly-edited shots of a real tiger combined with shots of a stuffed animal), but otherwise this is a well-made film of some charm. What really saves it is the excellent performances of Joji Oka (star of Ozu’s Dragnet Girl) and Kurosawa favourite Minoru Chiaki as the two fathers – they actually manage to bring some gravitas to the lightweight material. The same cannot be said of the American who plays the circus manager, unfortunately – he gives quite the most wooden performance I’ve ever seen.

 

Wooden American guy

 

The Girl Who Tamed Beasts was directed by Kozo Saeki (1912-72), a Daiei contract director who helmed over a 100 films between 1937 and 1966, all of which appear to have fallen into obscurity.

 

 

For further information on the career of Chiemi Eri, and how her singing style was shaped by the post-war American occupation of Japan, see Michael Furmanovsky's article 'From Occupation Base Clubs to the Pop Charts: Eri Chiemi, Yukimura Izumi, and the Birth of Japan's Postwar Popular Music Industry'.

Women of Tokyo / 東京の女性 / Tokyo no josei (1939)

Obscure Japanese Film #59

Setsuko Hara

 

Women of Tokyo stars Setsuko Hara as the conveniently-named Setsuko, who works as a typist for an automobile company. She has eyes for Kohata (Akira Tatematsu), a salesman for the same company, but is put off when she sees him get into a fist-fight with another salesman, Takayama (Taizo Fukami), who has accused Kohata of stealing a contract from him then begged for it back on the grounds that he needs the money for his sick wife and children. However, when Kohata explains to Setsuko that he knows for a fact that Takayama’s wife is not sick and he’s just an unscrupulous character who will say anything to get a contract, they become friends again. 

Akira Tatematsu

When Setsuko’s father (Kinji Fujiwa) falls ill, the family need money for his hospital bills, so Setsuko asks Kohata to help her join the sales department and become the company’s first female salesperson. Kohata is reluctant to do so and warns her of the unpleasantness she is likely to face from his aggressively competitive colleagues, but she is undeterred and he relents. After a slow start, she begins to have success in her new career, but her burgeoning self-confidence makes Kohata uneasy and he becomes interested in her cute younger sister Mizuyo (Kazuko Enami) instead… 

Kazuko Enami

 

This Toho production was tailor-made as a vehicle for their 19-year-old star Setsuko Hara who, despite her youth, was already something of a veteran, having made 26 films before this one. Hara is seen in a rather implausible range of attractive outfits for a character supposedly in desperate financial straits for most of the running time, but fortunately her performance is quite natural and convincing.

 

Based on a novel published the same year and said to have been written for Hara by the prolific Fumio Niwa (a male), this has a surprisingly strong feminist perspective for its time. There may even be a hint of lesbianism in Setsuko's relationship with her best friend, Takiko (Reiko Mizukami), and the rather mannish Western clothes in which they sometimes both sometimes dress. Films such as this which endorsed Western culture and values were shortly to be suppressed by the Japanese authorities until the end of the war.

 

Reiko Minakami

The film also criticises the culture of unchecked capitalism in which the salespeople become little better than hungry wolves fighting over a scrap of meat, while another interesting aspect is the ending, which plays with audience expectations in quite a clever way. 

 

I was also struck by the way director Osamu Fushimizu filmed two scenes in particular. The dialogue between Kohata and Mizuyo shot through the window of a moving car must have been difficult to achieve in 1939, and even 20 years later such scenes were usually filmed in a studio with unconvincing back projection. The other scene which stood out for me was the one in which Setsuko is assaulted in the street by the villain of the piece, Takayama – a sequence which Fushimizu makes more threatening through his use of background noise and the odd reflections on Takayama’s face.

 

As much of the film is less remarkable, it’s difficult to assess the extent of Fushimizu’s talent on this picture alone, but he has an intriguing Kurosawa connection, having employed Kurosawa as an assistant director on his 1936 film Tokyo Rhapsody and later made Current of Youth (1942) from a Kurosawa script. Fushimizu made 15 films before his death at the premature age of 31 in 1942 (the cause is not known to me, but I would be interested to hear it if anyone knows). Another ill-fated contributor to this film was actress Kazuko Enami, who succumbed to tuberculosis in 1947 and was the mother of Kyoko ‘Woman Gambler’ Enami. Women of Tokyo was remade in 1960 by Shigeo Tanaka with Fujiko Yamamoto starring.
 

Thanks to Japana Kino for making Women of Tokyo available with English subtitles on YouTube here.

 

Wild Detective / Outlaw Cop / やさぐれ刑事 / Yasagure keiji (1976)

Obscure Japanese Film #58

 

Yoshio Harada

 

Based on a 1975 novel of the same name by Giichi Fujimoto (1933-2012), this Shochiku production stars an impressively-sideburned Yoshio Harada as Nishino, a police detective based in Hokkaido’s capital, Sapporo. When he learns that members of an Osaka-based yakuza gang, the Jumonji-gumi, are flying in to organise a drug-trafficking network with the local mob, he goes to the airport to check them out and discovers that their leader is none other than Sugitani (Etsushi Takahashi), a criminal he had arrested and sent to prison seven years earlier. Naturally, there’s no love lost between these two and Nishino also wants to prevent the gang establishing themselves on his turf, so he and his colleagues begin harassing them at every opportunity. Sugitani decides he’s not going to take this lying down, so he poses as a car salesman and seduces Nishino’s wife, Maho (Naoko Otani). This proves to be easy as Nishino is so wrapped up in his job that he pays her little attention. Sugitani even talks her into running away with him and, by the time she learns his true identity and motivation, they’re already on a boat speeding away from Hokkaido to Honshu and there’s no going back. When Nishino learns about this, he’s so incensed that he decks a colleague, quits the force and goes after Sugitano, tracking him first to Aomori, where he discovers that Maho has been forced into prostitution. Maho becomes her husband’s spy, feeding him information about Sugitano’s movements, but Nishino will have to pursue his enemy to the other end of the country before he finally catches up with him.

Naoko Otani

 

Yusuke Watanabe was a prolific director and screenwriter who directed 64 films and numerous television dramas between 1957 and his death in 1985 at the age of 58. He led a rather schizophrenic career, pioneering Toei’s early ventures into eroticism as a means to compete with TV with films like Two Bitches (1964), later making a series of movie vehicles for pop band The Drifters as well as comedies, dramas and seemingly just about everything else, including episodes of Monkey (1978-80). While little of Watanabe's work is accessible outside Japan, at least with subtitles, he has done a good job here on the whole and keeps things moving at a relentlessly fast pace. The film is also well-shot, mostly on location, by Keiji Maruyama, and features an effective music score by Hajime Kaburagi. 

Etsushi Takahashi

 

Watanabe’s film has one of the longest pre-credits sequences I’ve ever seen – it’s not until 18 minutes in, after Nishino quits the force, that the main title suddenly pops up on the screen. Wild Detective also features one of the most unsympathetic ‘heroes’ I can recall in a film – Nishino treats his nice wife like a doormat and, although the fact that she leaves him is entirely his own fault, the first thing he does when they are reunited is to slap her around. In fact, there’s really nothing he does in the whole film which elicits any sympathy, so if you’re looking for a film with someone to root for, look elsewhere! 

Although Ken Takakura is listed among the cast credits on IMDb, he’s not in it. However, it was nice to see Hideji Otaki appear briefly as a shadowy Mr Big, as he also did for director Kei Kumai in both A Chain of Islands (1965) and Wilful Murder (1981).

Hideji Otaki

Darkness at Noon /真昼の暗黒 / Mahiru no ankoku

Obscure Japanese Film #57

Teruo Matsuyama

 

Perhaps the first thing to note about this independent production is that it has nothing whatever to do with the famous Arthur Koestler novel of the same name, although it does have certain themes in common – namely, incarceration and interrogation. However, the techniques employed by the interrogators in this film are considerably less subtle than the more psychological methods detailed in Koestler’s book. 

In a brief pre-credits sequence, we see the bodies of an elderly couple being discovered by the police. The man has been killed with an axe, while the woman is found hanging in the doorway, but this is no whodunit – once the credits roll, the cops waste no time tracking down the murderer and soon arrest Kojima (Teruo Matsuyama), a juvenile delinquent. He cracks easily and confesses that he had sneaked into the couple’s house to steal money to pay off his debts. When the old man woke up, he panicked and killed him, then decided to murder the wife as well, hoping that the police would think she had done her husband in, then committed suicide in a fit of remorse. Unfortunately, the police don’t believe the crime could be the work of one person, so they put pressure on Kojima to name his accomplices, telling him that he’s sure to get the death penalty if he insists he acted alone. Kojima tells them what they want to hear, saying there were four others involved and the whole thing was masterminded by Uemura (Kojiro Kusanagi). The police arrest Uemura, dragging him away from his fiancee (Sachiko Hidari), and proceed to beat the living crap out of him in the hope of extracting a confession…

Kojiro Kusanagi

 

Shinobu Hashimoto’s screenplay is based on a best-selling non-fiction book by former lawyer Masaki Hiroshi (1896-1975) which told the story of a case known as the Hakkai Incident (although Hashimoto apparently made little use of the book and conducted his own research). The original crime took place in 1951, and the events which followed were widely reported in the press and stirred up a great deal of public interest. As the film was released while the first Supreme Court appeal was pending, Hashimoto had to change the names of the accused men, but otherwise appears to have stuck to the facts as far as possible. Like Satsuo Yamamoto, director Tadashi Imai was a left-wing filmmaker who specialised in making pictures dealing with social issues – in this case how a miscarriage of justice is brought about as a direct result of police brutality. This theme seems rather old hat now, but it was one of the first Japanese films to tackle such a subject and was viewed as an important picture at the time, scoring a hit at the box office and winning a number of awards. In terms of directing, the most striking thing that Imai does here is use both slow motion and speeded-up film in the courtroom sequence to illustrate the events described by Kojima and demonstrate how they could not have happened within the time period he claims they did.

It’s debatable how much of an influence the film had on the fates of those wrongly convicted as the real case was to drag on for many more years. After a series of U-turns, a third Supreme Court appeal finally decided that ‘Kojima’ had acted alone, and acquitted the others, most of whom had already spent many years in prison by then. ‘Kojima’ himself was released on parole in 1971 after having served 20 years, but was arrested 5 years later on suspicion of a new murder. He died of natural causes while the trial was in progress. 

Sachiko Hidari

 

Darkness at Noon has no real ‘stars’ as such – the producers probably felt that the publicity already generated by the case would be enough to put bums on seats, and proved to be right, while Imai deliberately cast an unknown, Teruo Matsuyama, in the central role of Kojima. Matsuyama's film career never really took off, but he went on to enjoy a long career on stage and television, popping up in the occasional movie along the way. The best-known cast member is probably Sachiko ‘Insect Woman’ Hidari; it has been said that this was the role which led to her being taken seriously as a dramatic actor. However, in this case she’s really just part of an ensemble which includes such familiar faces as Tanie Kitabayashi, Taiji Tonoyama and So Yamamura. 

On the whole, it’s a fairly interesting, well-made film, but one that’s not quite distinguished enough in its treatment to hold up as a forgotten classic. The choral singing on the soundtrack at the end in particular has not dated well and the relevance of the picture has inevitably faded.

The Song Lantern / 歌行燈 / Uta andon (1943)

Obscure Japanese Film #56

 

Isuzu Yamada

This film adaptation of a Japanese literary classic tells the story of Kitahachi (Shotaro Hanayagi), the son of a famous Noh actor, Genzaburo Onchi (Ichijiro Oya). Kitahachi is angered by stories of 'So-zan' (Masao Murata), a provincial amateur who has been bragging that he can perform Noh songs better than 'those guys in Tokyo.' He decides to pay a visit to So-zan to find out how good he really is. So-zan is a blind masseur turned restaurant owner said to be keeping three concubines, the thought of which Kitahachi finds distasteful and only angers him further. Unimpressed by So-zan's singing, he takes him down a peg or two, humiliating the braggart by beating out the correct rhythm to the song, causing So-zan to falter in his performance and lose face. Kitahachi follows this victory by openly insulting him, then walks out. So-zan sends O-Sode  (Isuzu Yamada) – the young woman who had ushered him in to see So-zan and whom Kitahachi takes to be one of the concubines – to go after Kitahachi and bring him back, but he rebuffs her. The following day, he learns that So-zan has committed suicide. When Kitahachi's father hears what has transpired, he is furious and disowns Kitahachi, who is soon reduced to becoming a wandering samisen player. One day, he encounters O-Sode, whom he has by this time learned was actually So-zan's daughter. (This is significant as he would never have been so harsh towards her father had he known this at the time.) She is now working as a geisha but is in danger of losing her job as she's unable to play the shamisen despite having made a great effort to learn the instrument. Stricken by guilt, Kitahachi sees a way of making amends and decides to help her. As she clearly has no talent for the shamisen, he teaches her a Noh dance instead…

 

Shotaro Hanayagi

The Song Lantern was based on a 1910 novella by Kyoka Izumi (1873-1939). Izumi was held in high esteem by a number of more famous Japanese writers, including Yukio Mishima, Junichiro Tanizaki and Yasunari Kawabata, while his work has formed the basis of films by directors such as Kenji Mizoguchi, Masahiro Shinoda and Kon Ichikawa. The original, which has been published in English as ‘A Song by Lantern Light’, is regarded as one of its author’s masterworks. Unravelling in a clever flashback structure which flits between the past and present in a way that is ahead of its time, and containing some nice humour mixed in with the tragedy, it stands up very well indeed. This film version uses a more conventional narrative structure but otherwise remains remarkably faithful for the most part, although the ending is less enigmatic and more upbeat. Another difference is that So-zan reappears as a ghost in the film – though, like the ghost of Banquo in Macbeth, it’s left ambiguous as to whether this is a ‘real’ ghost or, a hallucination brought on by a guilty conscience. Many of Izumi’s stories do feature ghosts, but not ‘A Song by Lantern Light’.

 

Masao Murata

The screenplay was written by Mantaro Kubota (1889-1963), a writer of novels, plays and haiku with four screenplay credits, three of which are for adaptations of Izumi stories. His screenplay for The Song Lantern was apparently finished in 1940, but when production of the film was delayed, it was instead staged at Tokyo’s Meijiza theatre in July of that year with Shotaro Hanayagi (star of the film version) in the lead. Hanayagi (1894-1965), who somewhat resembles Kazuo Hasegawa, was a kabuki actor specialising in female roles who had starred in a stage version of Izumi’s novel Nihonbashi (Bridge of Japan) back in 1915. He only made a handful of films, most notable of which was his leading role for Kenji Mizoguchi in The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums (1939), but he went on to be awarded the title of ‘Living National Treasure’.

 

Isuzu Yamada

Another cast member with an affinity for the work of Kyoka Izumi is Isuzu Yamada, a striking, skilful and versatile actress who will always be remembered for her ‘Lady Macbeth’ in Throne of Blood, but deserves to be remembered for lot more. She had also starred in Mizoguchi’s The Downfall of Osen (1934), and Masahiro Makino’s two-part Onna Keizu (1942), all of which were based on Izumi stories.

13 years into his directorial career at this point, Mikio Naruse was not yet considered one of the grand masters of Japanese cinema, but certainly had an excellent reputation as a maker of intelligent, sensitive, literary dramas. As this film was made during the war years, Naruse would have been working with limited resources and interference from the authorities, so it is to his credit that he managed to avoid making military propaganda and was able to produce such a high quality film under these circumstances. In my opinion, this is one Naruse film which deserves a little more love. Although some lengthy scenes of Noh performance may stretch the patience of some viewers, it has a strong story which draws you in, fine performances and some notably well-shot sequences, such as the ones in which Kitahachi teaches O-Mie the Noh dance in the forest. As far as I can tell, the film is only available in a rather faded VHS transfer – a pity, as it’s certainly worthy of restoration.

The Song Lantern was remade in 1960 by Teinosuke Kinugasa (working from a new script), who cast Raizo Ichikawa and Fujiko Yamamoto in the leads.

The original story can be found in In Light of Shadows: More Gothic Tales by Izumi Kyoka translated by Charles Shiro Inouye (University of Hawaii Press, 2005)