Bury Me Deep / わたしを深く埋めて / Watashi o fukaku umete (1963)

Obscure Japanese Film #133

Jiro Tamiya

 

Nakabe (Jiro Tamiya) is a lawyer returning to Tokyo after a long holiday in Kyushu. In his absence, he lent his apartment to his best friend, Akutagawa (Keizo Kawasaki), whose marriage to Chizu (Ayako Wakao) is falling apart. Arriving back at his apartment, Nakabe is astonished to find a random drunk woman on his sofa who immediately tries to seduce him. However, she’s so drunk that she falls asleep in the process, enabling Nakabe to get rid of her in a taxi (not sure that a taxi driver would accept an unconscious passenger with no address, but plausibility is not high on the agenda here). When the woman dies in the back of the cab, the cops come looking for Nakabe, who then has to track down Akutagawa to prove his innocence and ends up becoming involved with Chizu…

Ayako Wakao

 

This Daiei mystery was based on a 1947 novel of the same name by American writer Harold Q. Masur, the first in his long series of books featuring a Perry Mason-like lawyer, Scott Jordan. Surprisingly, this appears to have been the only film to have resulted from this series, although perhaps it’s not so strange considering that American pulp fiction became very popular in Japan during the post-war occupation, and a great deal of it was published in translation there. 

Kyoko Enami

 

Unfortunately, Bury Me Deep has a convoluted plot that fails to maintain the interest, and there’s a lot of overacting from the supporting cast, although it’s always good to see Kyoko Enami, even in a daft role like the one she gets here. Tamiya is in virtually every scene and is fine, while Ayako Wakao has significantly less screen time, but it’s a testament to the sincerity of her acting that she almost makes you believe the silly dialogue she has to deliver in her big scene at the end. 

 

Director Umetsugu Inoue had just made a great film called The Third Shadow Warrior immediately before this, so this is quite a let-down in comparison and it’s tempting to say that this film really should be buried deep…

 

Thanks to A.K. and to Coral Sundy for the English subtitles which can be found here.