The Tycoon / 傷だらけの山河 / Kizudarake no sanga (1964)

Obscure Japanese Film #144

Ayako Wakao and So Yamamura

Having delivered a mega-hit for Daiei studios with Shinobi no mono (1962) and also directed its first sequel the following year, director and lifelong Communist Party member Satsuo Yamamoto was in a strong position to make what he wanted, and so chose the latest novel by Tatsuzo Ishikawa, a writer who shared his political sympathies and had previously provided the source material for Yamamoto’s The Human Wall (1959). 

 

Adapted by one-man scriptwriting machine Kaneto Shindo, The Tycoon stars So Yamamura as the titular character, Kappei Arima, a business magnate with his fingers in numerous pies who has plans to build a new railway line and buy up as much land as possible around the proposed locations of the rail stations. Protests by residents are dealt with through bribery or intimidation. Although married, Arima also has two mistresses, and his wife and both mistresses each have a grown-up son. However, he feels that these women are all past their prime so, when he notices an attractive young woman, Mitsuko (Ayako Wakao), working in his office as a poorly-paid bean counter, he hatches a plan to make her his new mistress. 

Keizo Kawasaki

 

Mitsuko is living with Sakai (Keizo Kawasaki), a struggling artist who believes that he could be successful if he could only study in Paris. She is largely supporting him on her meagre salary, and is thoroughly fed up with living in poverty. One day, she finds herself unexpectedly summoned to Arima’s office and receives a shocking proposal: Arima offers to pay to send Sakai off to France for three years and provide Mitsuko with an apartment and an ample allowance if she will be his mistress while Sakai’s away. Understandably shocked, she initially refuses, but, after talking it over with Sakai, thoughts of the money encourage them to take a more pragmatic view, and they decide to accept the offer. Meanwhile, Arima’s illegitimate sons have both become dissatisfied with their status and decide in their different ways to do something about it…   

Mitsuko makes her Faustian pact

 

Arima’s avarice and selfishness leave a trail of broken lives in his wake, which explains why the Japanese title translates as something like ‘Mountains and Rivers of Wounds’. The character was loosely based on the real-life Yasujiro Tsutsumi, who passed away at the age of 75 just three weeks after this film was released. Oddly, opera singer Yoshie Fujiwara (1898-1976) was originally cast as Arima at the suggestion of producer Masaichi Nagata. According to Satsuo Yamamoto in his autobiography, it quickly became apparent that Fujiwara could not act, so he was replaced by So Yamamura – who had actually been Yamamoto’s first choice but was unavailable, then luckily became available again. Yamamura proved to be the perfect choice and won a Kinema Junpo Best Actor Award for his performance. The strength of his portrait is the way in which it shows Arima not as a mere bully, but as a charismatic man of some humour and charm who knows how to persuade people to come round to his way of thinking, as he does very effectively with Mitsuko. 

 

Like many Yamamoto films, The Tycoon is rather long (152 minutes), and in this case it feels it. There’s no real development of the main protagonist – Arima is a greedy capitalist bastard at the beginning of the film, and he’s still a greedy capitalist bastard at the end – and it all gets a bit repetitive as he lights another big cigar and steamrollers the opposition in yet another board meeting. The sons do not make for very compelling characters, and Mitsuko’s chance meeting with Arima’s only legitimate son, Akihiko (Koji Takahashi), which leads to an affair, just seems like a clumsily contrived excuse to pile on the melodrama. That’s not the silliest part, though – that prize must be reserved for the scene in which Sakai explains to Mitsuko that he has been visited by a private detective wanting to investigate the two of them without saying why and Sakai has told him everything he wanted to know instead of telling him to sod off as any sane person would do. 

 

Yamamoto was a good (but in my opinion not great) director, and this is a well-made film, but sometimes his ideological stance veers too close to communist propaganda, and I feel that The Tycoon is a case in point. It’s certainly true that people like Arima exist, but it’s not clear what the film has to tell us other than that greed is bad, so the two-and-a-half-hour running time feels unwarranted. Wakao manages to give her part more depth than most would have managed, and we can see how conflicted Mitsuko is, but still, it’s a supporting role and the focus is not on her for the most part. However, despite its flaws, the film was well-received at the time and ranked 7^th on Kinema Junpo’s best films of the year list. 

Yatsuko Tan'ami as one of Arima's mistresses, with a Noh mask of Ko-omote perhaps representing her long-lost innocence

 

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

DVD at Amazon Japan.