Deep River Melody / 風流深川唄 / Furyu Fukagawa uta (‘Elegant Fukagawa Song’, 1960)

Obscure Japanese Film #176

Hibari Misora

 

Fukagawa, Tokyo, c.1925. Daughter (Hibari Misora) wants to marry childhood sweetheart (Koji Tsuruta), but he’s got no dosh. Family business runs into financial difficulties. Only way to save it is for daughter to marry repulsive rich dude (Masahiko Naruse).

(For a proper synopsis, see Hayley Scanlon’s review at Windows on Worlds here.)

When boiled down to its bare bones, the plot of this Toei production is not only the same as that of the previous film I reviewed, Golden Demon, but is basically a formula that has been used ad infinitum in Japanese literature and film. However, while in a Hollywood movie you could be almost certain that the childhood sweetheart character would win the girl in the end, in Japanese films it could go either way as audiences there have generally been much more willing to accept an unhappy ending. I’ll leave it to you to guess the outcome in this one.

 

Koji Tsuruta

 

The film was based on a 1935 novel of the same name by Matsutaro Kawaguchi, who was the senior managing director at Daiei when it was made, so it’s a little surprising that a rival studio chose to adapt it. Kawaguchi actually won the first Naoki Prize for the book and went on to write many others, but as far as I’m aware, the only work of his to have been translated into English is Mistress Oriku – Tales from a Tokyo Teahouse. I’ve read a little of that and found it to be literature of a very lightweight and middlebrow variety, so was a little surprised that it had been selected for translation. 

 

So Yamamura

 

Deep River Melody the film is well-made by actor-turned-director So Yamamura, but it’s not as interesting as his earlier picture, The Crab Cannery Ship, which was based on a book by a communist author who fell foul of the authorities and was killed as a result. Perhaps in tribute, Yamamura gives himself a minor role here as a communist who also gets into trouble with the police. Incidentally, Japan’s relationship with communism is an interesting one – the Japanese Communist Party was founded in 1922, outlawed in 1925, then legalised by the occupation forces in 1945. In fact, it was almost encouraged by the Americans for a year or two as an antidote to feudalism before they did a U-turn and began discouraging it but ultimately decided not to ban it… 

 

 

Anyway, back to the film. Despite its rather hackneyed plot, it might have worked well with Ayako Wakao and Toshiro Mifune in the leads, but here we get Hibari Misora and Koji Tsuruta. Hibari was, of course, a huge singing star who mainly appeared in musicals, but even though the Japanese title contains the word for ‘song’, she doesn’t get one in this film and the material tends to expose her limitations as an actress. She had some ability in that department, but unfortunately she just did not have a very expressive face and that’s something that would have been very handy in this type of role. As for Tsuruta, well, he’s just not terribly interesting or charismatic here. 

 

Hibari with Isuzu Yamada

 

Weirdly, it turns out to be Isuzu Yamada who gets to sing a song here, which she does while accompanying herself on the shamisen. She also gives what’s easily the best performance in the film as Hibari’s widowed father’s forthright and not-to-be-messed-with mistress, who at one point actually attacks Hibari's dad for discouraging his daughter from marrying the one she loves. In my view, Yamada was the most versatile character actress in Japanese cinema and the shortcomings of the leads are even more obvious in contrast with her remarkable talents. If she’d had a larger role, I’d recommend watching the film for Yamada alone, but her screen time’s quite limited, so it’s probably not worth suffering through the misguided star pairing of Hibari and Tsuruta, which is to this film what that big lump of ice was to the Titanic. In terms of So Yamamura films, this one’s just… so-so (sorry!).