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| Machiko Kyo |
Maki (Nobuko Otowa) is a dancer at the
Asakusa Follies, Ryuko (Machiko Kyo) is
a kabuki actress and quick-change artist who was adopted by local gang boss
Nakane (Joji Oka) when she was a child. Maki is in debt to Nakane, who has
designs on her and ordered his men to beat up her boyfriend, Shimakichi (Jun
Negami), and scare him away from Asakusa. However, Shimakichi injured one of
Nakane’s henchmen and escaped before disappearing for a year. Now he’s back in
search of Maki, but Nakane has not forgotten about him and wants revenge, so he
tricks Ryuko into luring Shimakichi into a trap…
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| Jun Negami |
This Daiei production was supposedly based on Yasunari Kawabata’s
1930 novel of the same name, a fine English translation of which was published
by the University of California Press in 2005 under the title The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa. However,
the only thing this film has in common with the novel is that it concerns the
criminal underworld of Asakusa, a pleasure district of Tokyo which was twice
destroyed – first by the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, later by American
bombs. Kawabata’s novel is a largely plotless and uncharacteristically
modernist work consisting of a series of vignettes about the petty thieves and
prostitutes who haunted the back alleys of Asakusa and kept an eye for out for
each other. Not only is there no gang boss like Nakane, but none of the
characters from the book appear in the film and the setting has been updated to
the post-war era. While the nature of Kawabata’s novel would have made it
difficult to adapt for the screen, it’s disappointing that screenwriter
Masashige Narusawa failed to come up with a better story than the corny
melodrama which unfolds here, especially considering the fact that he was responsible
for many fine scripts, including a number for Mizoguchi.
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| Kyo in bumpkin mode |
The other reason I found this film something of a let-down is that
it was directed by Seiji Hisamatsu, whose later works Five Sisters (1954) and Policeman’s
Diary (1955) I greatly enjoyed. On a more positive note, it does offer a
fun role for Machiko Kyo, who gets to appear in a number of different guises,
as she would also later do in The Hole
(1957) and Black Lizard (1962). Watching
the scene in which Ryuko pretends to be a country bumpkin, I even found myself
wondering who the strangely familiar-looking actress was before realising it
was Kyo.
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| Joji Oka |
Otherwise, Joji Oka is a rather hammy bad guy and Jun Negami a decent
enough hero, while a young Nobuko Otowa gets to sing the theme song, dance and
show off what Daiei touted as her ‘million dollar dimples’. Perhaps it was
partly being reduced to a pair of dimples that led her to quit Daiei the year
this film was released and pursue largely unglamorous roles from then on.
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| Nobuko Otowa and dimple |
Presumably, the film proved popular as Daiei followed it with Asakusa monogatari (‘Asakusa Story’) the
following year, Asakusa no yoru
(‘Asakusa at Night’) in 1954 and Asakusa
no hi (‘Lights of Asakusa’) in 1956, although I believe that each featured
an entirely separate story.
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| Machiko Kyo |
There had actually been an earlier film of the same title, again
supposedly based on Kawabata’s book, back in 1930. It appeared before Kawabata
had even finished the novel, which was being published in instalments in the Tokyo Asahi newspaper. Unfortunately,
the 1930 film appears not to have survived.
Thanks
to A.K.
DVD at Amazon Japan (no English subtitles)
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