The Woman Who Touched Legs / 足にさわった女 / Ashi ni sawatta onna (1952 and 1960)

Obscure Japanese Film #183 and #184

Fubiki Koshiji

 

 

Machiko Kyo

The romantic comedy Ashi ni sawatta onna began life as a magazine serial by the now-forgotten Nadematsu (or Nadeshiko? or Bumatsu?) Sawada (male, 1871-1927) and was first filmed in 1926 (the year of publication) by director Yutaka Abe. The story (in the two existing film versions anyway) tells of Saya, a pickpocket in Osaka who uses her good looks to get close to men in order to steal their wallets. She’s just served three months in prison and is on her way by train back to her home village for the first time in many years. However, she’s not the usual criminal type, and it emerges that her father was suspected of being a spy and committed suicide, so she has been stealing in order to hold an expensive memorial service for him and thereby get revenge on the villagers who ostracised him. Also on the train are Saya’s grown-up but childlike younger brother, a bumbling detective (who previously arrested Saya but is now on vacation), and a pretentious, slightly-effeminate best-selling crime writer who learns about Saya and wants to use her as the basis for his next novel.  

Tokihiko Okada, Yoko Umemura and Koji Shima

 

In the 1926 film – which won the first ever Kinema Junpo Award for Best Japanese Film – the leading roles of the female pickpocket, the crime writer and the detective were played, respectively, by Yoko Umemura, Tokihiko Okada and future director Koji Shima. The former two died tragically young – Yoko Umemura (a favourite of director Kenji Mizoguchi) died at 40 following complications from appendicitis while working on Mizoguchi’s Danjuro Sandai (1944); Tokihiko Okada (the father of Mariko Okada) died at 30 from tuberculosis in 1934. Like the vast majority of Japanese silent films, that version is long lost and it’s unlikely that it still existed when Kon Ichikawa made the first remake for Toho in 1952, although he may well have seen it in his youth. Incidentally, according to Donald Richie in A Hundred Years of Japanese Film, rather than featuring a motley bunch of characters and having the bulk of the story set on a train, ‘The original Abe movie was about the upper-middle class in a hot spring resort.’ When he made the film, Abe had actually not long returned from a decade in America, during which time he had acted in a number of Hollywood films, so there’s little doubt that his work was heavily influenced by this experience.

Ryo Ikebe

 

Ichikawa modelled his version on Hollywood’s screwball comedies of the 1930s, and top-billed Ryo Ikebe as the detective appears to be attempting to emulate Cary Grant. It’s certainly the most animated I’ve ever seen Ikebe on screen, but not his most successful performance in my view. On the other hand, Fubuki Koshiji, who plays Saya, is a natural comedienne and is in her element here. It’s a little surprising to see So Yamamura mincing his way through his performance as the presumably gay writer, but he stops short of full-on caricature, thankfully. One nice touch is that his character’s niece is played by Mariko Okada, whose father had played Yamamura’s role in the 1926 original. 

 

So Yamamura and Mariko Okada

Sadako Sawamura and Yunosuke Ito

Eiko Miyoshi

A terrific supporting cast also features Yunosuke ‘why the long face?’ Ito, Sadako Sawamura, Sawamura’s brother Daisuke Kato and ex-husband Kamatari Fujiwara, and decrepit old lady specialist Eiko Miyoshi. It’s a jolly ride which zips by in a fast-paced and entertaining fashion, although some of the one-liners were no doubt lost in the subtitles I auto-translated from Japanese. 

 

Kyo with Hajime Hana

 

Daiei produced a colour remake a mere eight years later, directed by Yasuzo Masumura. Although Kon Ichikawa and his wife Natto Wada are again credited with the screenplay, it appears to have been revised – whether by Ichikawa and Wada or by Masumura I have no idea, but in neither version does the story make a great deal of sense. In any case, the 1960 version seems more calculated as a vehicle for a particular star – in this case, Machiko Kyo, who plays Saya in a more blatantly sexy manner than Fubuki Koshiji, although she’s arguably less of a natural for comedy. The detective is played as a much more slow-witted character by the far less well-known Hajime Hana, but I found him more amusing than Ryo Ikebe, while Eiji Funakoshi is slightly less effeminate as the writer than So Yamamura had been. 

 

Jiro Tamiya and Eiji Funakoshi

Shiro Otsuji, Kyo and Haruko Sugimura

Other notables in the cast include Haruko Sugimura in the role formerly played by Sadako Sawamura, and Jiro Tamiya and Kyoko Enami making early appearances in minor roles. Perhaps the most notable difference is that Masumura puts far less emphasis on Saya’s motivation for being a thief and, in fact, drops the memorial ceremony scene entirely – the cynical Masumura would probably have considered this mere sentimentality. Personally, I wouldn’t consider either version a must-see, but I slightly preferred Ichikawa’s on the whole. He was obviously into it anyway, as he also directed a 45-minute TV version in 1960 with Keiko Kishi as Saya, Frankie Sakai as the detective and Tomo’o Nagai as the writer.

 

Note on the title:

The original novel and 1926 film have a slightly different title from the remakes: Ashi ni sa hatta onna (足にさはった女), which could be translated as The Woman with a Scar on Her Leg. Although the remakes are usually referred to in English as The Woman Who Touched Legs (or similar), the 1952 version at some point had the English title of Doubledyed Detective, while the 1960 version has also been known as A Lady Pickpocket in English. Furthermore, it’s not entirely clear what is meant by the Japanese title. Ashi can mean leg, legs, foot or feet and, as there are no articles or possessive pronouns in Japanese, it’s anyone’s guess whether it should be ‘her leg/foot’, ‘the leg/foot’, ‘a leg/foot’, ‘his leg/foot’, ‘their legs/feet’, etc. While it might be necessary to touch somebody else’s leg when stealing a wallet from their trouser pocket, I think the title is intended to refer to Saya’s legs – which she uses to attract men in order to get close enough to pick their pockets – rather than those of her victims, so The Woman Who Used Her Legs would seem a better title. 

 

Thanks to A.K. 

1952 version DVD at Amazon Japan (no English subtitles)

1960 version DVD at Amazon Japan (no English subtitles)

English subtitles for 1960 version courtesy of Coralsundy

Kiri to kage / 霧と影 (‘Fog and Shadow’, 1961)

Obscure Japanese Film #182

Tetsuro Tanba

 

When Kasahara, a teacher from the local school is found dead at the bottom of a cliff on the Noto Peninsula, it’s assumed that he either slipped or committed suicide. However, his old friend Komiya (Tetsuro Tanba), who works as a reporter in Tokyo, smells a rat – he knows that Kasahara was afraid of heights, so he decides to investigate. In the process, he uncovers a complex (but not terribly interesting) web of conspiracy and corruption…

 

 

This Toei production features the type of story more usually associated with Seicho Matsumoto, but which in this case is actually based on a 1959 novel of the same name by Tsutomu Minakami (or Mizukami), known for Bamboo Dolls of Echizen, The Temple of Wild Geese, and Straits of Hunger among others. The Matsumoto resemblance is no coincidence as Minakami himself said that he had been inspired to write the book after reading Matsumoto’s Points and Lines (also known in English as Tokyo Express). It was Minakami’s first big success as a writer, and he soon proved that he was more than a mere Matsumoto imitator. According to Japanese Wikipedia, a critic named Kazushi Shinoda admired Kiri to kage for portraying the ‘anguish of a man cursed by fate, and the depth of the karma of a man who tries to escape his fate but ultimately cannot’.

 

 

It’s a pity, then, that this aspect of the work is absent from Teruo Ishii’s film, which is strictly B-movie stuff. It has been said that Ishii repeatedly attempted to make Naruse-like dramas early in his career, but these projects were all rejected. He later became a cult director, perhaps mainly due to his willingness to make exploitation films with titles such as Horrors of Malformed Men and Inferno of Torture.  Kiri to kage is well-shot but largely routine apart from the odd eccentric touch such as giving one of Komiya’s fellow reporters the gross habit of picking his nose with his pencil. 

 

 

Despite a reputation for turning up late on set without having learned his lines (and often using cue cards), Tetsuro Tanba was a fine actor, but the early leading role he gets here is the type in which the main thing the actor has to do is simply to find a different way to look surprised each time they receive new information. The remainder of the cast are not especially notable, and Chuji Kinoshita’s unsubtle music score does not help matters either, so I have to mark this one down as another disappointment. If it’s karmic anguish you’re after, watch Tomu Uchida’s adaptation of Minakami’s Straits of Hunger (better-known in English as A Fugitive from the Past) instead.

Watched with dodgy subtitles (I auto-translated from Japanese). 

Amazon Japan (no English subtitles)

The Hidden Profile / 風の視線 / Kaze no shisen (‘Gaze of the Wind’, 1963)

Obscure Japanese Film #181

Shima Iwashita

 

Keisuke Sonoi

 

Natsui (Keisuke Sonoi) is a photographer who has just entered into an arranged marriage with Chikako (Shima Iwashita). Their honeymoon is an awkward flop, but during the trip Natsui discovers the body of a suicide victim, grabs his camera and snaps away with ghoulish gusto.  He later uses the photos in an exhibition which is a big hit. 

 

Michiyo Aratama

 

Akira Yamanouchi

Keiji Sada

Natsui is actually in love with Ayako (Michiyo Aratama), but not only is she married to the mostly-absent Shigetaka (Akira Yamanouchi), but she’s in love with Kuze (Keiji Sada), with whom she’s having an affair, and who is also married and having an affair with a clingy bar hostess. It gradually emerges that Ayako was the one who arranged the marriage between Natsui and Chikako, partly to get Natsui to stop pestering her, but also because she knew that Chikako was having an affair with Shigetaka …

 

 

Perhaps it was somebody’s sly joke that this adaptation of a 1961 novel by Japan’s best-selling mystery writer Seicho Matsumoto begins with the discovery of a body but turns out to be a romantic drama rather than a crime story. A Shochiku production directed by Yoshiro Kawazu, who made the previously-reviewed Eyes of a Child (1955), it also features a rather stiff cameo by Seicho Matsumoto himself as a writer Kuze runs into in a bar. 

 

Seicho Matsumoto and Keiji Sada

 

The plot features a couple of unlikely and fairly pointless coincidences and in this case the level of suspense is mild to say the least. Despite a promising cast, nobody gets a chance to do their best work here, while composer Chuji Kinoshita simply seizes the opportunity to follow in the footsteps of Toshiro Mayuzumi and Sei Ikeno and experiment with a musical saw for no good reason. A story concerning such a bizarre web of intertwined relationships might have worked as a farcical black comedy, but the film takes itself far too seriously and plods leadenly on to its contrived conclusion, making it hard to regard it as anything other than a competent failure. 

 

 

Thanks to A.K.

DVD at Amazon Japan (no English subtitles) 

English subtitles courtesy of Coralsundy can be found here.