Obscure Japanese Film #77
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| Chiezo Kataoka |
The year is 1671. Akanishi Kakita (Chiezo Kataoka) is a low-ranking samurai retainer described in the following way in Naoya Shiga’s original story: ‘His features were of the so-called ugly man type, and he had an uncouth accent. In every respect, he seemed the typical back-country samurai.’ He also likes to play shogi (Japanese chess) on his own and prefers eating sweets to drinking saké. These quirks, together with his unremarkable appearance, mean that his fellow samurai view him as a no-account oddball. However, his apparent defects serve him well as he is the last person anyone would suspect of being a spy – which is what he actually is. Though he apparently serves the daimyo Daté Hyobu (Michisaburo Segawa), his real master is the lord of Shiroishi, who has ordered him to infiltrate Hyobu’s household in order to gather information on the Daté clan’s intentions, especially those of their senior retainer, the evil-tempered Kai Harada (also played by Chiezo Kataoka), as they suspect Harada of planning an attack.*
Kataoka as Kai Harada
At one point, Kakita’s mission is endangered when he falls ill, suffering from severe stomach pain, which he believes is caused by his intestines having become twisted into a knot. He slices his own stomach open, unravels his guts, and sews himself back up again (this occurs off-screen for some reason). Having recovered a few days later, he then faces another problem – he needs to return to his real master to deliver his report, but how can he quit the Daté household without arousing suspicion? At the suggestion of his friend and fellow spy, Masujiro (Kensaku Hara), he writes a love letter to a beautiful young woman, Sazanami (Mineko Mori). When she rejects him, his apparent embarrassment will provide a plausible reason for his abrupt departure. However, she turns out to be a perceptive woman who has noticed his finer qualities…
Akanishi Kakita is based on a 1917 short story of the same name by Naoya Shiga (1883-1971), a major literary figure in Japan. The story can be found in English translation in The Paper Door and Other Stories; as it’s only 17 pages long, writer-director Mansaku Itami (1900-1946) had to add some material in order to create a feature-length movie. Itami was the mentor to the great screenwriter Shinobu Hashimoto. In his book Compound Cinematics: Akira Kurosawa and I, Hashimoto paints a picture of Itami as a remarkable cinematic talent whose career was cut short when he contracted tuberculosis, which eventually led to his early death. Intriguingly, Mansaku Itami was also the father of another ill-fated director, Juzo Itami (1933-1997).
Mansaku Itami made his debut as director in 1928 and directed 22 films, only six of which survive in more or less complete form. These include Atarashiki tsuchi (The Samurai’s Daughter, 1937), a German-Japanese co-production co-directed by Arnold Fanck, and Kyojinden (The Giant, 1938), a version of Les Misérables and his last film as director. He also wrote the screenplay for Hiroshi Inagaki’s The Life of Matsu the Untamed (1943), remade several times, most notably by Inagaki himself as The Rickshaw Man (1958), starring Toshiro Mifune and Hideko Takamine.
The young Takashi Shimura
I’m not quite sure that Akanishi Kakita holds up as a forgotten masterpiece. The film is not very well-paced, and the use of western-style music for the soundtrack feels out of place at times, although it should be remembered that Japan had only just abandoned the silent film in 1936. However, there is some occasionally striking camerawork, such as the overhead shot of the two samurai walking in the rain with umbrellas at the beginning and a later tracking shot of a line of samurai sitting down in the seiza position. Itami also makes excellent use of repetition for comic effect when Kakita and his neighbour, a fellow retainer (Takashi Shimura) go back and forth trying to get rid of a noisy cat that’s keeping them both awake, and in a later scene when a senior samurai keeps bribing his servant with saké to go out in foul weather to gather information. These scenes are not present in the original, nor is the scene in which Kakita disguises himself as a monk in order to give his pursuers the slip, and they show real inventiveness on the part of Itami while being perfectly in keeping with the comic tone of the original story. No wonder, then, that Naoya Shiga himself was pleased when he saw the final film.
The star of this film, Chiezo Kataoka (1903-83), is best-remembered for his leading roles in 13 Assassins (1963) and two Tomu Uchida films, Bloody Spear at Mount Fuji (1955) and Hero of the Red Light District, aka A Killing in Yoshiwara (1960). Kataoka was clearly an extremely versatile actor, and he’s so good in his two opposing roles here that you could easily watch this film and not realise that it’s the same man playing Kakita and Harada, and not just because he’s made up with bushy eyebrows and pimple on his nose as Kakita – the voices of the two characters are also entirely different.
Akanishi Kakita was named by Akira Kurosawa as one of his favourite films and later remade for television from Itami’s original script by Kon Ichikawa, who had worked as an assistant director to Itami as a young man.
The print I saw looks like a VHS transfer and there are missing frames in one scene where intertitles have been used to fill in the gaps. It’s not great quality, although it does improve as the film goes on. However, surely Akanishi Kakita has sufficient cultural value to be worth a proper restoration. Why anyone thought it necessary to give this film the English title of Capricious Young Man is something of a mystery though.
*Kai Harada was later portrayed sympathetically by Tatsuya Nakadai in The Fir Tree Remains.
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