Obscure Japanese Film #247
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| Hiroshi Fujioka |
At the end of The Beast Must Die (1959), Kunihiko Date (Tatsuya Nakadai), a highly intelligent but amoral student leading a double life as a thief and murderer, escapes the clutches of the police and jets off to America. In this sequel (loosely based on author Haruhiko Oyabu’s 1960 sequel to his original book) he’s back from the States and is now a Moby Dick-obsessed literature professor, but is still killing and stealing in his spare time. Although it’s unclear whether exactly 15 years have passed in story terms, it does look like 1974, and he’s now played by the 28-year-old Hiroshi Fujioka (Nakadai – who had been playing a little younger than his real age in the first film – was 41 by this point and perhaps deemed too old. It should also be noted that he does not appear in this film despite a credit on IMDb).
Date, who was already pretty nasty, has become even nastier (burning a man’s face, casually killing a woman who’s helped him, etc) but has also been given a personal motive for his crimes. This time round he’s targeting the businessmen who drove his father to suicide and took over his company. In my view, despite the fact that this element seems to have been present in the book, this was a mistake – Date is someone who simply does not care about other people, so it makes no sense that he would care about his father so much that he would go to all the trouble he does here to get revenge (in the superior first film, Date does what he does because he views himself as a sort of Nietzschean superman above normal standards of morality).
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| Mako Midori |
Hiroshi Fujioka, previously a supporting actor in movies but a star in TV, fails to make much of the character and, while the supporting cast are decent enough, they only have so much to work with. Mako Midori – something of a cult actress in Japan – is among them, but her screen time is limited and she has been better served in other films, such as Yasuzo Masumura’s The Great Villains (1968). Akemi Mari, who plays the other main female role, had been married to this film’s director, Eizo Sugawa, since 1969. She’s fine here, but her film career never really took off, although she had some success on TV.
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| Akemi Mari |
The film is also rather cheap and drab-looking – I suspect that Toho had limited faith in it and only allowed Sugawa (who had also made the first film) a pretty low budget. Incidentally, Sugawa made other unrelated films with the word ‘beast’ in the title, including his previous film, Beast Hunt (1973, aka The Black Battlefront Kidnappers) and the excellent Beast Alley (1965).
On the plus side, the soundtrack features a cool combination of classical and jazz courtesy of composer Kunihiko Murai, who was better known as a producer of pop music, though he also composed the soundtrack for Tampopo (1985). Running a taut 86 minutes, the film also has an appealing leanness about it, and its misanthropic tone is certainly of a piece with its director’s other best-known works so, while it’s certainly not as good as the first film, it’s not a total wash-out. (Incidentally, one of the screenwriters, Yoshio Shirasaka, had also worked frequently with that other great misanthropic director of the era, Yasuzo Masumura).
Starring Yusaku Matsuda, Toru Murakawa’s 1980 remake of the 1959 original is more impressive (if more self-indulgent) than this sequel and recently received the deluxe Blu-ray treatment courtesy of Radiance Films, while a further remake and sequel (neither of which I’ve seen) appeared in 1997 starring Kazuya Kimura as Date.
It’s a bit low-res, but you can watch the film on YouTube with English subtitles here.
Hear part of Kunihiko Murai's original soundtrack on YouTube here.
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