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