Obscure Japanese Film #262
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| Ayako Wakao |
with Takashi Shimura
Kyoko (Ayako Wakao) is a young model who allows herself to be photographed nude in order to pay her mentally-ill mother’s hospital bills. She subsequently attracts the attention of elderly film studio head Kudo (Takashi Shimura), who offers her a movie deal. He also wants to marry her, but to her he’s just a father figure; nevertheless, she’s devastated when he dies. She then goes on to have relationships with a young reporter (Masahiko Tsugawa) and a university professor (Eiji Funakoshi) before marrying a baseball star (Jun Fujimaki), and later a bespectacled, pipe-smoking writer (Takahiro Tamura). Kyoko’s relationships never seem to work out as each of the men is smitten by her looks rather than the person within. Failing to find the emotional fulfilment she craves, she becomes increasingly unstable and develops an addiction to sleeping pills…
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| Masahiko Tsugawa |
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| Eiji Funakoshi |
Jun Fujimaki
Takahiro Tamura
This Daiei production was based on a 1966 novel by Ayako Sono (1931-2025), a right-wing Christian whose work also provided the basis for Masahiro Shinoda’s Epitaph to My Love (1961) and a few other films; it was adapted by Sugako Hashida (1925-2021), probably Japan’s most successful female writer of TV drama. The story was based on the life of Marilyn Monroe, and it’s not hard to figure out which characters are Japanese versions of Joe DiMaggio and Arthur Miller. Admittedly, the idea of Ayako Wakao in effect playing Marilyn Monroe is intriguing if only for its weirdness, but the film proves to be less interesting than it sounds and Wakao’s breathy performance is not one of her best. The problem is that she’s required to be extremely sensitive and over-emotional in practically every scene, which soon becomes tiresome, while there’s too much repetition in seeing her stumble from one unsuitable relationship to another, rendering it largely ineffective as drama. It does, however, provide plenty of opportunities to display the star in an endless array of outfits, not to mention sporting every variety of haircut you can imagine bar an actual skinhead or peroxide job. In other words, it’s another of Daiei’s Ayako Wakao fashion parade / costume-change pics, which seemed to be a bankable formula for them at the time.
It may seem surprising that this film was directed by the leftist Tadashi Imai, but he’d been struggling to find film work and stuck in the doldrums of television for the previous couple of years. When Joan Mellen – who had published a feminist biography of Monroe in 1973 – questioned him about it in her interview with Imai for her 1975 book Voices from the Japanese Cinema, he had this to say:
“I was asked to make the film by Daiei. ...I am one of those Japanese directors who cannot afford to make only the films I want to make, so I accepted. In some respects I enjoyed making it, but it is not a film I really want to talk about. … Directors in Japan are not very wealthy and often they have to do films they don’t especially like.”
Indeed, there was nothing I could see that marked the film out as a Tadashi Imai picture, but at least it enabled him to resume his cinema career even if his best work was behind him.
A note on the title:
Although When the Cookie Crumbles seems to be the official English title, the English expression is more usually 'that's the way the cookie crumbles', which is used in a similar way to 'c'est la vie' when you have to accept the inevitable. The Japanese title translates more literally as 'the moment the sugar candy breaks', which I think does not mean quite the same thing, and it’s pretty clear that the ‘sugar candy’ in question is Kyoko / Marilyn.
Watched without subtitles.
DVD at Amazon Japan (no English subtitles)
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