Obscure Japanese Film #230
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| Sayuri Yoshinaga and Mitsuo Hamada |
Jiro (Mitsuo Hamada) is a teenage yakuza who rescues high school girl Mami (Sayuri Yoshinaga) from being harassed in the street by a couple of young yakuza from a rival gang. When one pulls a knife, Jiro gets stabbed and his assailant ends up dead by his own blade. Despite his injury, Jiro manages to complete the drug delivery he had been assigned before collapsing. After receiving medical attention he makes a full recovery and ends up meeting Mami again when she wants to thank him. The two fall in love, but she’s an ambassador’s daughter while he was brought up in poverty – is there any way for them to be together in a society determined to keep them apart?
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This Nikkatsu production was based on a 1962 short story by the prolific Shinji Fujiwara (1921-84), whose fiction also provided the basis for Imamura’s Endless Desire (1958) and Intentions of Murder (1964), Yoshida’s Akitsu Springs (1962) and many others. The adaptation is by Masaru Baba (1926-2011), a screenwriter associated with the new wave who went on to win an award for penning Imamura’s Vengeance is Mine (1979).
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The story is the sort which could easily have been treated with an excess of sentimentality, but fortunately the director is Ko Nakahira, a director definitely not known for that particular characteristic. Having said that, this is an unusually warm-hearted film for him. Jiro is basically a good-natured kid who’s pretty likeable when not trying to show off and impress other yakuza, while Mami has somehow grown up free from the snobbery of most of her class. After their first date, Jiro starts watching wildlife programmes and reading the Bible like Mami; she reads a boxing magazine and tries whisky so that she’ll be able to understand him better. Upping the ante, Jiro even agrees to attend a concert of contemporary music, where he’s baffled by the strange racket of the avant-garde.
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Young stars Mitsuo Hamada and Sayuri Yoshinaga were a joint box office phenomenon in Japan in the 1960s, and this was the 15th of 43 films in which they co-starred, all of which were made in that single decade. Mitsuo Hamada (then 19) later came very close to being permanently blinded in an assault in 1966, but gradually recovered and continued acting until 2015. Like Yoshinaga (then 17), he was also a popular singer. She had won the Blue Ribbon Best Actress award for Foundry Town the previous year and is still acting at the time of writing. It’s not difficult to see why they were popular, and the fact that this film – one of their biggest hits – works as well as it does is partly down to them, even if Hamada goes overboard at times. It also helps that the film’s point about class is made effectively without the filmmakers feeling the need to patronise the audience by spelling it out. Furthermore – in my opinion anyway – the ending of the picture is exactly the right one.
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Dorodarake no junjo was remade in Korea the following year as Maenbaleui cheongchun (‘Barefoot Youth’), again in Japan in a 1977 version directed by Sokichi Tomimoto and starring Momoe Yamaguchi as Mami and Tomokazu Miura as Jiro, and finally as a Japanese TV movie in 1991.
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