Cards Are My Life / 花札渡世 / Hana fuda tosei (‘The Flower Card Business’, aka ‘Flower Cards Chivalry’, 1967)

Obscure Japanese Film #171

L-R: Chitose Kobayashi, Tatsuo Endo, Toru Abe, Tatsuo Umemiya

 

The early Showa period (1930s). Ryuichi Kitagawa (Tatsuo Umemiya) is a yakuza whose particular skill is gambling with hanafuda (‘flower cards’). His boss, Kasugai (Tatsuo Endo), has political ambitions and is in cahoots with Akiba (Ko Nishimura), a corrupt police detective. Kasugai has an adopted daughter, Hisae (Chitose Kobayashi), who is also his lover, but she has the hots for Ryuichi. However, Ryuichi is smitten with Umeko (Haruko Wanibuchi), a female card cheat, but she has an asthmatic husband, ‘Blind Stone’ Moto (Junzaburo Ban). Worse still, she attracts the attention of Kasugai, who decides he wants her for himself. 

Junzaburo Ban

 

Kasugai orders Ryuichi to gamble against Moto over the fate of Umeko – if Ryuichi wins, Kasugai can do what he wants with her. It’s the ultimate giri versus ninjo (obligation versus inclination) dilemma – Ryuichi could lose on purpose, of course, but this would go against his precious yakuza code of honour…

Tatsuo Umemiya

 

I only watch the occasional yakuza film, and so wasn’t too familiar with the star of this one, Tatsuo Umemiya (1938-2019), whose favourite own film it apparently was. I found him rather bland and it seems he had a career based mainly on his physique rather than acting ability. Signed to Toei as a ‘new face’ in 1958, he tootled around in mostly minor parts for a few years until the yakuza genre exploded around 1964, when Toei decided they might be milking their two main tough guy stars Koji Tsuruta and Ken Takakura a little too much and needed a third, so promoted Umemiya. According to Japanese Wikipedia, ‘His four goals in becoming an actor were to sleep with a good woman, drink good alcohol, drive a good car, and have a house in a prime location with a beautiful sea view.’  Fair enough, I suppose, but he obviously wasn’t exactly Mr Deep. He later became a Hideo Gosha regular, and actually  really did lust after Haruko Wanibuchi, but her controlling mother made sure she kept him at arm’s length. 

Haruko Wanibuchi

 

The film was also significant for Wanibuchi, who had previously played young and innocent types and was appearing as a sexy sophisticate for the first time here. However, despite her success in the role, she got married in 1968 and disappeared from the screen for a few years. Really, though, the acting honours here belong to the older members of the cast, including that inveterate scene-stealer, Ko Nishimura, Junzaburo Ban (from A Fugitive from the Past and Dodes’ka-den) and – all too briefly – the always excellent Sadako Sawamura, who has one scene here in which she puts the incredibly nasty young woman Hisae firmly in her place. 

Hisae (Chitose Kobayashi)

 

Perhaps the main reason this film is so little-known is that it was effectively lost until 2018, when it was finally found and restored. It’s both written and directed by Masashige Narusawa (1925-2021), who was known mainly as a screenwriter (notably for Mizoguchi) and only directed five films, of which this was the third. He brings considerable style to this and has a great deal of fun with tracking shots, unusual camera angles and screens within screens.   

 

The card playing scenes are reminiscent of Shinoda’s Pale Flower (1964), while the influence of Kurosawa makes itself felt in the excellent slice-‘em-up scene near the end. Incidentally, I loved the hails of sparks from the clashing swords and don’t remember having seen that before. Of course, it was Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (1961) that sparked the spaghetti western, so there’s also a certain irony in the fact that the mandolins and trumpets featured in this film’s score strongly suggest the influence of those Italian westerns that had been made in the intervening years.

 

Overall, this film is better than it had any right to be, perhaps partly because the use of black and white seems to lend it a touch of class, but also probably because Narusawa was determined to make the most of one of his rare opportunities to direct.  The result is a film interesting enough to satisfy both yakuza fans and those like me who are a little wary of the genre, not so much for its violent content as for its repetition of formula.

Thanks to A.K. 

Tatsuo Endo and Haruko Wanibuchi

 

The Ladder of Success / 夜の素顔 / Yoru no sagao (‘The True Face of the Night’, 1958)

Obscure Japanese Film #170

Machiko Kyo in the moonlight scene

 

1944. Akemi (Machiko Kyo) is a traditional dancer entertaining the troops at a military base in the south of Japan. When an air raid interrupts the performance, she’s escorted to safety by Wakabayashi, a navy pilot (Jun Negami) with whom she ends up having a fling. Three years later, made homeless by the war, Akemi arrives in Tokyo having travelled there in the hope of becoming a disciple to famed dance teacher Shino (Chikako Hosokawa). When her request is denied, she breaks down in tears before leaving, but Shino’s patron, Inokura (Eijiro Yanagi),  who was listening in the room next door, feels sympathetic and urges Shino to change her mind, which she does. The maid is sent to fetch Akemi back and finds her waiting with an expectant smile on her face knowing that her crocodile tears would do the trick…

Chikako Hosokawa

 

1953. Akemi has helped Shino build up a successful dance school with over 50 students. However, after she encourages her mentor to star in a new show, Shino is mocked by the press for being too old. To add insult to injury, Akemi seduces Inokura and Shino discovers them in flagrante. As a result, Akemi is expelled, but – with the support of Inokura – goes on to start her own dance school, which is soon a great success. However, her most promising pupil, Hisako (Ayako Wakao), turns out to be just as scheming and two-faced as Akemi and it looks like a case of what goes around comes around… 

 

Ayako Wakao and Machiko Kyo

 

This Daiei production makes a great star vehicle for Machiko Kyo, although there’s surprisingly little dancing considering that Kyo was herself a trained dancer. In any case, she gives a rich and varied performance as a character who turns out to be less one-dimensional than she first appears. The first indication that there’s more to Akemi than meets the eye is during a memorable scene (perhaps the film’s best) in which she has a moving moonlit encounter with an elderly female shamisen player reduced to busking door-to-door (played by Hisako Takihana, a former star of the silent screen and wife of film director Tomotaka Tasaka). The old lady sings the song which gives the film its Japanese title and, for Akemi, she’s something of a Ghost of Christmas Future. 

Wakao and Kyo

 

The film is a little less rewarding for Ayako Wakao fans as, while her role is an important one, she has considerably less screen time than Kyo as well as a less multifaceted character to portray. Having said that, she certainly has her moments here and, if you’ve ever wanted to see a catfight between Machiko Kyo and Ayako Wakao (albeit a rather one-sided one), this is the film for you. For their part, the men are pretty forgettable, although Eiji Funakoshi’s role as an avant-garde composer who collaborates with Akemi’s dance troupe provides the film’s composer, Sei Ikeno, with an excuse to conjure up some interesting sounds for the soundtrack, including a musical saw. 

 

 

The first part of the film is in monochrome but, instead of black and white, a blue filter is used (the same effect which reappears in the later moonlight scene), which just seems odd. My guess is that this was done because the fact that the film was in colour was an important selling point in Japan in 1958, where colour films were not yet as common as in Hollywood. In fact, the film's posters state 'All natural colour' quite prominently. Perhaps the studio felt that, had they used standard black and white for the sequences set in the 1940s, some patrons might assume that the whole film would be like that, or at least feel cheated that part of it was. Another peculiarity of the film is a long split-screen montage of Akemi and her pupils travelling all over rural Japan to give dance performances outdoors. Otherwise, it’s a fairly typical Daiei production, although a little longer than most at two hours. It’s the sort of story one might have expected to come from the pen of Toyoko Yamasaki, but in fact Kaneto Shindo’s screenplay was an original work. The director is Kozaburo Yoshimura, who frequently collaborated with Shindo, and had a reputation for bringing out the best in female stars such as Machiko Kyo – a reputation which this film certainly supports. Even though it lapses into full-on melodrama at the end, Kyo’s performance alone is enough to make this one worth watching. 

 

 

Jun Negami

 

DVD at Amazon Japan (no English subtitles)