The Precipice / 氷壁 / Hyoheki (1958)

Obscure Japanese Film #119

Kenji Sugawara

When salaryman Uoza (Kenji Sugawara) returns from a mountaineering trip and encounters his friend and former climbing partner Kosaka (Keizo Kawasaki) in a restaurant, he’s astonished to find that Kosaka is there to meet a married woman, Minako (Fujiko Yamamoto). 

 

Keizo Kawasaki and Fujiko Yamamoto

Feeling awkward, Uoza makes his excuses and leaves, but Minako catches up with him outside and asks if she can speak to him. Uoza learns that the relationship between Kosaka and Minako has been going on for a while although they’ve only slept together once. She regards the event as a moment of madness on her part and has been trying to break if off, but Kosaka has fallen head over heels for her and won’t accept this, so Minako wants to enlist Uoza’s help in order to make Kosaka see sense. Minako’s anxiety may also be partly due to the fact that her older husband, Yashiro (Ken Uehara with white hair), is a man not easily deceived.

Ken Uehara

 

Uoza decides to take Kosaka with him on his next trip to the mountains, where they attempt a difficult climb which Uoza hopes will take his friend’s mind off his emotional troubles. He also takes the opportunity to try and talk some sense into Kosaka, who finally seems to be resigning himself to a life without Minako. However, when they continue the last stage of their climb, Kosaka’s supposedly unbreakable nylon rope breaks and Uoza can only watch in horror as his friend falls down the mountainside…

 

Yasuzo Masumura’s fourth film as director covers similar territory to his better-known picture A Wife Confesses (1961). Kaneto Shindo’s screenplay was based on a novel published the previous year by the prolific Yasushi Inoue, who would go on to become one of Japan’s most respected authors but had yet to acquire that status. At the time, Inoue’s story was a topical one as he had based it on a couple of recent mountain accidents involving a new type of nylon rope. 

 

In the lead, actor Kenji Sugawara is a little on the stolid side, but was probably selected as much for his physical toughness – he was a 3rd dan in judo – as his acting ability. The film’s location photography is impressive and it certainly appears as if at least some of the climbing sequences were shot on location at Mount Hotaka in challenging conditions. 

Hitomi Nozoe

 

In the latter half of the film, Hitomi Nozoe has an important part as Kosaka’s sister. Any appearance by Nozoe is welcome in my view as she was an underrated actor, and her brilliant comic performance in Masumura’s Giants and Toys made that movie (and as we can see here, there was nothing wrong with her teeth!). Another actor who makes an impression is Kyu Sazanka, who uses every trick in the book to steal all of his scenes as Uoza’s boss. 

Kyu Sazanka

 

The Precipice was shot in Daiei’s briefly-adopted VistaVision process, with an aspect ratio of 1.85:1, so it’s a little unusual in that respect as it was the 2.35:1 format that rapidly became standard in Japan around this time, replacing the old academy ratio of 1.33:1. Masumura and his cameraman Hiroshi Murai (who later shot Sword of Doom) use the VistaVision format to good effect here, pinning the characters down with clever blocking of scenes, with the camera closely following their every movement, and managing to squeeze in two or even three of the main characters at once when appropriate. 

 

The plot has its flaws, with one unlikely coincidence feeling especially unnecessary, but it’s such a well-made film that it remains worth watching, and the moving music by Akira Ifukube is a major asset. Inoue's story has proved a popular one in Japan and been remade for TV on a number of occasions.

Note on the title: The Japanese title translates as ‘Ice Wall’.

 

A Dangerous Age / 続十代の性典 / Zoku judai no seiten (1953)

Obscure Japanese Film #118

 

Ayako Wakao

The Japanese title of this film (which translates as ‘Teenage Sex Diary Sequel’) is somewhat misleading as this is a separate story from Judai no seiten and, while it again features Yoko Minamida, Ayako Wakao and Miki Odagiri, they are playing new characters.

Yoko Minamida

 

Akiko (Minamida) is an 18-year-old high school student at a single-sex (possibly Catholic) school. One day, seeing Yoda (Ken Hasebe), a male student, drop a watch in the street, she picks it up and runs after him to return it, but he jumps onto a train before she can do so. She manages to find him at the station the next day, when he treats her to coffee and cake before inviting her to see his flat. Akiko naively accepts, but flees the place after he makes a pass. As she leaves, Yoda calls after her, saying that she is welcome to visit anytime. 

Jun Negami

 

Meanwhile, Akiko’s best friend, Natsuko (Wakao), accepts an invitation from Toshio (Yosuke Irie) to a party but is forced to stay home by her mother, who wants her to study maths at home with the new tutor she’s hired, a medical student named Masato (Jun Negami). Feeling guilty at standing up Toshio, Akiko pays him a visit the next day to apologise. However, when she failed to appear, he had ended up being seduced by an older woman (Murasaki Fujima) and losing his virginity. Natsuko has no knowledge of this, so she’s shocked to find that the sweet, gentle boy she had known has changed overnight and now thinks that he’s Dan Duryea. When Toshio tries to force himself on her, she gives him a few slaps and a good telling off, and decides not to see him again. Despite her annoyance, Natsuko takes the incident in her stride, forgets about him and moves on.

 

Akiko, on the other hand, proves less able to handle this kind of situation. Natsuko’s new tutor is actually Akiko’s cousin, whom she has feelings for, so she begins to feel jealous as she sees Masato taking an interest in his new pupil, even though this jealousy proves groundless. Masato is actually so much in love with his cousin that his thesis is on the viability of incestuous marriage. Nevertheless, Akiko’s feelings of insecurity are compounded when she discovers that her widowed mother (Kuniko Miyake) has been having a clandestine relationship with a businessman, Ueda (Nobuo Nakamura). Believing herself unwanted, she remembers her open invitation to Yoda’s apartment and foolishly goes there, where she is not only raped but impregnated. When she misses her period, her bitchy classmate (Miki Odagiri) begins to suspect the truth and starts spreading rumours. Things come to a head when the pregnant Akiko finds herself cast as that icon of purity, Joan of Arc, in the school play… 

Miki Odagiri

 

Ayako Wakao, Yoko Minamida and Michiko Saga

This is a slight improvement on Judai no seiten as it’s not quite as risible despite some daft moments. Director Koji Shima has been replaced by the younger Kozo Saeki (1912-72), who also made The Girl Who Tamed Beasts. At first, I thought that the Christian propaganda featured in the first film had been scrapped until I noticed that Michiko Saga (in one of her first film appearances, here playing another classmate of Akiko’s) was wearing a crucifix, and then Ayako Wakao appeared playing a bishop in the school’s Joan of Arc play. I’m unsure how to account for the Christian theme, but perhaps screenwriter Katsuya Susaki or producer Itsuo Doi (both of whom worked on all four films in this series) were Christians, or perhaps it was normal during this period for reasonably wealthy Japanese families to send their daughters to Catholic schools. In any case, although we may laugh at certain aspects of these movies today, it’s not difficult to see how they might have served a valuable function at the time in encouraging discussion of awkward subjects.

 

The Third Will / 女系家族 / Nyokei kazoku (1963)

Obscure Japanese Film #117

Ayako Wakao

 

This Daiei production was an attempt to repeat the success of the company’s 1961 film, A Woman’s Medal, and reunites stars Machiko Kyo, Ayako Wakao and Jiro Tamiya in another adaptation of a Toyoko Yamasaki novel (which had just been published as a magazine serial when the film went into production). Like the earlier picture, The Third Will is also a very talky affair involving a variety of scheming characters, although it perhaps also owes something to Masaki Kobayashi’s The Inheritance (1962).

Yachiyo Otori, Machiko Kyo and Chieko Naniwa

 

When Kazo Yajima (the president of a cotton wholesale company in Osaka) dies, his three daughters assume they will inherit everything between them. The domineering eldest daughter, Fujishiro (Machiko Kyo), tries to take control, but faces rebellion from her younger sisters, Chizu (Yachiyo Otori) and Hinako (Miwa Tanako), and the squabbles begin. Fujishiro seeks advice from her younger dance teacher (Jiro Tamiya), who subsequently seduces her, hoping he can marry Fujishiro for her money. Another family member, Auntie Yoshiko (Chieko Naniwa), comes up with a plan to adopt Hinako, hoping that this will enable her to grab a slice of the pie for herself. Meanwhile, Uichi (Ganjiro Nakamura), the head clerk who has been appointed executor of the will and has a few schemes of his own going, reveals to their dismay that Kazo had secretly been keeping a mistress, Fumino (Ayako Wakao), a former geisha. Although no specific inheritance has been granted to her in the will – which mentions only that she should be treated with generosity – the family conspire to ensure that Fumino is sent packing with nothing. However, this proves to be their undoing, and the story concludes in a satisfying (if predictable) manner.

 

The Yajima family are an appalling bunch of arrogant, entitled snobs, and your sympathy will be entirely with Fumino here. The acting by the principals is excellent (as one would expect from this cast), and there’s also a notable performance by Chieko Naniwa as the auntie who turns out to be the nastiest of a very nasty lot who treat their servants like dirt and neglect the rental properties that their long-suffering tenants are unfortunate enough to live in. 

Jiro Tamiya

 

The film itself is very similar to A Woman’s Medal in many ways, despite being made by a different director. Kozaburo Yoshimura directed the earlier film rather indifferently, and I suspect that he would not have been a huge fan of a non-literary writer like Yamasaki and that A Woman’s Medal was a project assigned to him by the studio (though this is speculation on my part). This would explain the change of director here,* which in the case of The Third Will is Kenji Misumi, a filmmaker who would become known for his stylish Zatoichi and Lone Wolf and Cub movies but at this stage was still regarded as a jobbing director. This is not the kind of film one associates with Misumi, but he seems to have been a little more engaged than Yoshimura and brings what style he can to the dialogue-heavy scenes. The way he uses the sound of cicadas screaming in the climactic scene is particularly memorable.  

Ganjiro Nakamura

 

The film’s scathing portrayal of the moneyed class and lapses into melodrama have led some to interpret it as a satire, which is not unreasonable. However, if it is intended as satire, I doubt this came from Toyoko Yamasaki, as her formula seldom varied and consisted of straight social commentary intended to expose the hypocrisy and corruption existing behind the scenes in various hallowed institutions. 

 

Given the soap-operatic nature of the plot, it’s understandable that, despite being another success for Daiei, The Third Will has not been remade for the big screen; more appropriately, it has spawned no fewer than eight TV versions in Japan. 

 

*The cerebral haemorrhage that Yoshimura suffered in 1963 is probably not the reason for the change as The Third Will was released in March of that year and Yoshimura’s Bamboo Doll of Echizen (his final film before his 3-year hiatus) was released in October.

Note on the title: The Japanese title translates as ‘Matrilineal Family’, a theme also covered by Toyoko Yamasaki’s earlier novel Bonchi, filmed by Daiei in 1960.