Obscure Japanese Film #62
This Toho B-movie features Kurosawa favourite Kamatari Fujiwara in a rare leading role as Hikoichi, a meek and mild provincial who goes to Tokyo for the first time in 20 years in order to seek out cheap goods to sell in his store and also see his daughter, Yuko (Kyoko Anzai), who works in an office there and has been sending money home regularly. He is accompanied on his visit by Kiyama (Eijiro Tono), a fellow store owner who is more experienced and successful but has a less wholesome reason for visiting the capital. Hikoichi enjoys spending a day with his apparently unchanged daughter and the business side of his trip is also successful. When Kiyama insists that he join him on a visit to a brothel one evening, Hikoichi reluctantly agrees, although he declines to sleep with any of the young women available. However, while there he learns something that causes him a terrible shock and turns his life upside down…
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| Kamatari Fujiwara and Kyoko Anzai |
Adapted by the great screenwriter Shinobu Hashimoto from a short story by Yojiro Ishizaka, this is an effective little film with a cruelly ironic and rather unpleasant twist. While some of the early scenes may be on the bland side, this only serves to make the last third more unsettling. These latter scenes contain a number of memorable images, mainly involving the use of masks, and Fujiwara’s performance is especially good when Hikoichi finally turns from mild-mannered rube to violent avenger.
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| Kamatari Fujiwara |
Kamatari Fujiwara (1905-85) remains best known as the untrusting farmer Manzo in Seven Samurai and the drunken kabuki actor in The Lower Depths. Aside from Hateful Thing, the only other film I'm aware of in which he had the leading role is Mikio Naruse's charming comedy Tabi yakusha (1940), where he was a pompous itinerant kabuki actor cast as the front half of a horse. Although diminutive in stature, he is said to have had considerable martial art skills, which he once used to knock Toshiro Mifune to the ground during an argument when filming The Hidden Fortress. He later found himself in America appearing in Arthur Penn’s 1965 film Mickey One.
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| Fujiwara with Eijiro Tono |
Eijiro Tono (another member of the Kurosawa-gumi) is one of those actors who appeared to enjoy playing repellent types and was very good at it, having the ability to speak as he does here in an incredibly grating voice. One particularly nice touch is when Hikoichi gets drunk after the shocking revelation and starts talking like Kiyama! Was this an imitation by Kamatari Fujiwara or was he dubbed by Tono? I would love to know. The cast of Kurosawa regulars is rounded out by Noriko Sengoku as a maid and Seiji Miyaguchi as a detective.
Director Seiji Maruyama would go on to be better known for his World War II films such as Admiral Yamamoto (1968) and Battle of the Japan Sea (1969).
Hateful Thing was the fourth in the ‘Toho Diamond’ series – these were stand-alone B-movies adapted from various literary works with running times of around an hour.
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