Martin Dowsing: 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.