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| Tatsuya Nakadai |
This Toho production was the fourth entry in their ‘Sakusen’ (‘Operation’) series, which attempted to emulate the style of Kihachi Okamoto’s 1959 hit Desperado Outpost and its sequel (in fact, it’s sometimes considered the sixth film in the Desperado Outpost series). These films had brought a new cynicism and humour to the war action genre in Japan and found favour with males of the younger generation, for whom the more po-faced war films were often a turn-off.
This one stars Tatsuya Nakadai – who had actually been offered the lead in Desperado Outpost but been obliged to turn it down due to his commitment to The Human Condition. This turned out to be a stroke of luck for Makoto Sato, who was cast in his place and went on to star in all of the follow-ups. However, in this film he plays second banana to Nakadai, apparently because Toho wanted to try increasing the audience numbers by giving the lead to an actor with a lot of female fans.
L-R: Natsuki, Hirata, Sato, TN, Sakai,
Nakadai plays Lt. Isshiki, an insubordinate junior officer assigned with a suicide mission to blow up a bridge somewhere in China during the final months of the war. He’s given a team of five other insubordinate types, several of whom are released from the stockade for the purpose. The other men are played by Makoto Sato, Yosuke Natsuki, Sachio Sakai, Akihiko Hirata (the one-eyed scientist in the original Godzilla) and Tadao Nakamaru. Naturally, this dirty half-dozen encounter a variety of dangers on their way to the bridge and mow down a large number of unfortunate Chinese National Revolutionary Army fighters in the process. Of course, it’s one thing watching soldiers of the Allied Forces machine-gunning Nazis and quite another when it’s Japanese soldiers doing it to the Chinese, which makes this film and its ilk a little problematic. The filmmakers throw in a couple of ‘good’ Chinese characters, but neither are convincing. One is an apparently cowardly villager played by Kan Yanagiya who turns out to be a resistance fighter, while the other is a grimy-faced ‘boy’ who looks exactly like a young woman and turns out to be (surprise, surprise) a young woman. Played by Kumi Mizuno, she falls in love with one of the Japanese soldiers after he gives her a rice ball. Still, if its gritty realism you’re after, you’re watching the wrong film as this is strictly entertainment and, to be fair, it succeeds pretty well on that level even if much of the humour was too broad for my taste.
Sato, Kumi Mizuno, Natsuki
The film moves along at a good pace and is very well staged and shot by director Takashi Tsuboshima and his cinematographer Fukuzo Koizumi (who also shot Kurosawa’s Sanjuro). Tsuboshima had worked as an assistant to Jun Fukuda, who was best-known for his monster movies, and he was probably not the best with actors – allowing too many of the supporting cast to go way over the top here – but clearly had a great deal of technical skill. Although his output was largely routine, he later made the interesting Bonds of Love (1969).
Nakadai looks like he’s enjoying himself in a more straightforward action role than he usually played, and does plenty of horse-riding and shooting, but there’s nothing to stretch him here. Although the movie pre-dates The Dirty Dozen (1967), the influence of English-language war films (especially The Guns of Navarone) and westerns is obvious. Toho’s DVD release boasts perfect picture quality and the film is not too difficult to follow even without subtitles as the plot mostly consists of men-on-a-mission clichés anyway.
A note on the title:
As far as I’m aware, the film has not been distributed in any English-speaking countries and has no official English title. IMDb and some other sites list it as ‘Jigoku sakusen’, but that title gives only the last four kanji in romanji. The first kanji, 蟻, means ‘ant’, while the second and third together mean ‘hell’ and the final two (‘sakusen’) in combination can mean ‘tactics’, ‘strategy’ or ‘military operation’. Letterboxd lists the film as ‘Ant Hell War’. However, although a literal translation of the first three kanji gives ‘ant hell’, it’s actually the Japanese name for ‘antlion’. Wikipedia offers the following information:
The antlions are a group of about 2,000 species of insect in th neuropteran family Myrmeleontidae. They are known for the predatory habits of their larvae, which mostly dig pits to trap passing ants or other prey.
In Japan, both the insect and its pit-traps are popularly known as Arijigoku (蟻地獄; lit. "Ant Hell"). This term has since become a stock colloquialism for any "inescapable" trap, whether literal or metaphorical (e.g. an unpleasant social obligation).
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| commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Antlion1_by_Jonathan_Numer.jpg |
DVD at Amazon Japan (no subtitles)
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