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'.
No comments:
Post a Comment