Escape at Dawn / 暁の脱走 / Akatsuki no dasso (1950)

 

Yoshiko Yamaguchi

 

1945. Harumi (Yoshiko Yamaguchi) is a singer in a troupe of female entertainers sent to Manchuria to help the Japanese soldiers forget about their probable imminent deaths. Unfortunately, she quickly attracts the attention of overbearing Lieutenant Narita (Eitaro Ozawa) and is about to be raped by him when Private First Class Mikami (Ryo Ikebe) knocks on the door to deliver a trivial telegram to Narita, allowing Harumi to escape. Harumi and Mikami fall in love, but, when he's wounded in battle, circumstances lead to them being captured together by the Chinese. Mikami is treated with nothing but kindness by his captors, but he’s been completely brainwashed by the Japanese military propaganda machine into thinking that it’s better to die than be taken prisoner…

 

Eitaro Ozawa and Yamaguchi

Produced by Shintoho, the company founded by those who split from Toho after the studio’s big labour dispute of 1947, Escape at Dawn was nevertheless distributed by Toho. Like director Senkichi Taniguchi’s previous film, Jakoman and Tetsu, it was also produced by Tomoyuki Tanaka and co-written by Akira Kurosawa. In this case, the source was a 1947 novel by Taijiro Tamiya (1911-83) entitled Shunpu den (‘The Story of a Prostitute’, not available in English). Tamiya had served in Manchuria during the war (as had Taniguchi) and also written Nikutai no mon (‘The Gate of Flesh’), first filmed in 1948 by Masahiro Makino and later by Seijin Suzuki, Hideo Gosha and others. 

 

Ryo Ikebe

 

Although Tamiya is said to have created the character of Harumi with Yoshiko (later Shirley) Yamaguchi in mind, in the novel she was a Korean prostitute (or ‘comfort woman’), while it’s made very clear in the film that she is not a prostitute, and she has also become Japanese. Apparently, the original version of the screenplay was faithful to the novel on these points, but the content of Japanese films was still being controlled by the occupying Americans, who insisted that changes be made. It’s hard to see how such whitewashing benefitted the Americans, so their decision was presumably just a case of them imposing their own cultural nanny-state ideas of the time about the depiction of ‘immorality’ on screen. An unfortunate knock-on effect was that Harumi’s behaviour in the way she throws herself at Mikami and won’t take no for an answer now appeared extremely odd coming from a Japanese singer rather than a Korean prostitute. According to Stuart Galbraith IV in his book The Emperor and The Wolf, Kurosawa eventually got fed up with the requests for endless rewrites and left Taniguchi to it. He also states that,

…long preproduction, expensive exterior sets, and tangled red tape to secure permission for use of military hardware for filming (machine guns, etc) made it the most expensive Japanese feature to that point.

I’ve read elsewhere that it was also the first post-war Japanese film to feature scenes of Japanese soldiers on the frontlines. In any case, while it’s certainly a compromised vision, the film is at least very well-made and often technically impressive, with cinematographer Akira Mimura winning a Mainichi Film Concours award for his efforts. On the other hand, the essentially simple story of a predictably doomed romance feels overstretched at almost two hours. As Lieutenant Narita and his men are stationed in the desert, the film is very much like a Japanese Foreign Legion movie, and memories of Marlene Dietrich and Gary Cooper in Morocco (1930) are often brought to mind. There are some surprisingly sensual scenes between stars Yoshiko Yamaguchi and Ryo Ikebe – at one point, she bites his hand hard enough to draw blood, then sucks the wound, which he seems to enjoy. This would have been considered strong stuff in Japan in 1950 and probably helped at the box office.

Seijun Suzuki directed a more faithful version of the original novel in 1965.

Bonus trivia:

Setsuko Wakayama, who plays one of Harumi’s colleagues, had married director Senkichi Taniguchi in 1949, but they divorced in 1956 when he had an affair with actress Kaoru Yachigusa. This adultery scandal harmed Taniguchi’s career greatly – after directing an average of three films a year until 1957, he was subsequently out of work for over two years. When he did return to directing, the quality of the material he was offered was significantly lower than it had been before the scandal.

 

Setsuko Wakayama

DVD at Amazon Japan (no English subtitles)