Obscure Japanese Film #122
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| Shuji Sano |
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| Isuzu Yamada |
Yosaku (Shuji Sano) is a low-ranking samurai employed at Yurugi Castle in Tanba Province. He has a secret affair with Shigeno (Isuzu Yamada), the daughter of senior retainer Inaba Kotayu (Kenji Usuda). When she becomes pregnant, he is banished from the castle, while she gives birth to a baby boy, but is not allowed to keep him and has to watch helplessly as he is taken away. Shigeno is then assigned to act as wet nurse and carer for another infant – a new-born princess.
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| Motoharu Ueki |
Ten years pass, and Yosaku has become a wandering ronin. While travelling, he hires a horse from Sankichi (Motoharu Ueki), a precocious urchin who gambles and smokes a pipe. Looking for somewhere to rest up, Yosaku is taken to an inn next to the little shack in which Sankichi lives. Yosaku becomes friendly with the boy as well as with Koman (Shinobu Chihara), a young woman who works at the inn.
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| Shinobu Chihara with Ueki an Sano |
When a procession from Yurugi Castle passes through, it gets delayed when the young princess has a tantrum and jumps out of her palanquin. Shigeno fails to persuade her to get back in so they can continue her journey, but the princess discovers Sankichi gambling by the side of the road and is drawn to him, with the result that Sankichi is asked to accompany the retinue to the castle. Shigeno is shocked to discover that Sankichi is in possession of the omamori (amulet) she had tied around her son’s neck when forced to let him be taken from her all those years before…
The screenplay was adapted by Yoshikata Yoda (best known for his many screenplays for Kenji Mizoguchi) from a jurori* entitled The Night Song of Yosaku from Tamba (Tamba Yosaku machiyo no komurobushi) by Monzaemon Chikamatsu (1653-1725), the dramatist later portrayed by Chiezo Kataoka in Chikamatsu’s Love in Osaka (1959). That film was, of course, directed by Tomu Uchida, as was The Horse Boy.
With a new emphasis placed on the character of Sankichi, this Toei production seems to have been intended mainly as a vehicle for child actor Motoharu Ueki, who was the eldest son of Chiezo Kataoka, a legendary actor and great favourite of Tomu Uchida. Kataoka had been the star of Uchida’s first post-war film, Bloody Spear at Mount Fuji (1955), and went on to appear in a further nine films for him, while Ueki had also appeared in that film as well as Uchida’s The Kuroda Incident (1956) and Rebellion from Below (1956) and would also be featured in The Eleventh Hour (1957).
Shigeno lives in a world of extremely refined manners in which etiquette dominates behaviour and rebellion is unthinkable, while the abandoned Sankichi has no manners at all and does what he likes. Uchida makes much of this contrast between the two very different worlds they inhabit. Unfortunately, my personal reaction was that Sankichi’s rude behaviour did not endear him to me at all, and for this reason I was never as moved as I felt I was probably supposed to be by this film, which I would definitely consider a minor work in Uchida’s filmography. I felt that Uchida saved his best bit of direction for a scene which occurs late in the film and takes place on a quiet road at night when a confrontation between Yosaku and the local moneylender (Eitaro Shindo) turns violent. Incidentally, Shindo is the stand-out among the supporting cast and could always be relied upon to play a man-you-love-to-hate effectively.
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| Sano confronts Eitaro Shindo |
It’s worth noting that, while Chikamatsu’s original apparently had a happy ending, Uchida’s film does not, and perhaps this is because he preferred to make it clear that the unforgiving rules of Japan’s former feudal society had ruined a lot of lives.
Note on the title: The Japanese title translates as something like ‘Wild Child of the Road’.
*Wikipedia defines jurori as “a type of sung narrative with shamisen accompaniment, typically found in bunraku, a traditional Japanese puppet theatre”.
Watched without subtitles.
David Baldwin has subsequently written a more detailed analysis of the film which can be found here.
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