Aku no kaidan / 悪の階段 (‘Stairway to Evil’, 1965)

Obscure Japanese Film #260

Tsutomu Yamazaki

Ko Nishimura

Daisuke Kato

Akira Kubo

Iwao (Tsutomu Yamazaki, the kidnapper from Kurosawa’s High and Low) heads a gang of robbers comprised of Shimoyama (Ko Nishimura), the muscle; Konishi (Daisuke Kato), the getaway driver; Kumagai (Akira Kubo), the safecracker, and himself as mastermind. After making a huge score of over 40 million yen, they agree to split the loot equally four ways and leave it untouched for six months until the heat has cooled. However, it turns out that there’s little honour among thieves, and the men soon begin to fall out, partly due to greed, but also because of lust for Iwao’s girlfriend and accomplice, Rumiko (Reiko Dan)...

Reiko Dan

This Toho production was based on a 1964 novel entitled Ore no yumi wa… (‘My Dream Is…’) by Norio Nanjo (1908-2004), who had also supplied the source material for Masaki Kobayashi’s The Inheritance (1962) and Umetsugu Inoue’s The Third Shadow Warrior (1963). Like those stories, this one takes a rather jaundiced view of human nature, something which Nanjo seems to have shared with this film’s writer and director, Hideo Suzuki, who had made the similarly misanthropic Structure of Hate in 1961.

Reiko Dan

This is noir at its noirest, with dark shadows dominating the visual design throughout. Unusually for a Japanese film of its time, it’s shot in academy ratio, so whenever we get a close-up (which is often), the actor’s faces completely fill the screen. The film not only looks striking, but also sounds great due to Masaru Sato’s cool jazz score. The only element which I found a little disappointing was the plot – once you know where it’s going (which is quite early on), everything unfolds all too predictably.

Thankfully, the excellent cast help to keep the interest with the usually vivacious Reiko Dan successfully cast against type as a cold and gloomy moll, and – looking like the sinister love-child of Peter Lorre and Christopher Lee – the diminutive Ko Nishimura managing to be totally convincing as a man who could kill you with his bare hands (and probably would given half a chance).

Thanks to A.K.

DVD at Amazon Japan (no English subtitles)

If you enjoy this blog, feel free to Buy Me a Coffee.