Obscure Japanese Film #59
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| 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.
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| 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…
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| 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.
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| 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.
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