Obscure Japanese Film #266
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| Kinya Kitaoji |
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| Kunie Tanaka |
Goshogawa (Kinya Kitaoji) and Yujiro (Kunie Tanaka) are young truck drivers in Toyama. Having to drive to Niigata, they stop off to visit Yujiro’s sister, Yoshiko (Ayumi Ishida), who is in there with tuberculosis. Goshogawa finds himself attracted to a nurse, Nami (Yuriko Hoshi); meanwhile, Yujiro takes the opportunity to tell the doctor (Mikijiro Hira) that Goshogawa has been complaining about his gums bleeding recently. Examining Goshogawa, the doctor discovers that he has leukemia, but doesn’t tell him. However, Goshogawa soon learns the truth, and it emerges that he had been on a fishing boat near Bikini Atoll at the time of the US nuclear bomb test…
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| Yuriko Hoshi |
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| Mikijiro Hira |
This Toho production was based on an original screenplay by Hideko Takamine’s husband, Zenzo Matsuyama, who had a penchant for writing – and sometimes directing – what are somtimes termed ‘issue’ films; in other works, he tackled sensitive subjects such as forced emigration (Mother Country), dementia (The Twilight Years), and disability (The Happiness of Us Alone), some more successfully than others. Unfortunately, this is not an example of his better work, featuring as it does some clumsy – and corny – writing, and being really just a sentimental tearjerker at heart, with realism not on the agenda. (The most idiotic scene is the one in which the shouting policeman lets the cat out of the bag about Goshogawa’s illness).
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| Yuriko Hoshi |
As one would expect from a film directed by Shiro Toyoda and lensed by his frequent collaborator, Kozo Okazaki, it’s very well shot and has some effective scenes – the one in which Goshogawa chases a train in his truck is a technical tour de force – but that’s not enough here, partly due to the deficiencies in the script, but also because there are other issues, too. Kinya Kitaoji and Kunie Tanaka overact shamelessly for the most part, although Kitaoji is effective in some scenes after the diagnosis, while Masaru Sato’s music tries rather too hard to tug at our heartstrings. The women in the cast fare better, but have a tough job given what they have to work with.
The film failed to win any awards, but it was a box office hit, and Kinya Kitaoji and Yuriko Hoshi were re-teamed the following year in Kitahodaka zessho, in which Kitaoji suffers from amnesia instead of leukemia, and again for 1969’s Tsugaru zessho, in which he suffered, I think, from general misfortune. Neither of these cash-ins had any involvement from Matsuyama or Toyoda.
As a footnote, it’s perhaps worth mentioning that, in Japan, it apparently used to be common for doctors not to inform patients if they had a terminal illness, although I believe that this has gradually changed over the last few decades.
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