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| Eiji Funakoshi and Machiko Kyo |
The early Meiji era (1870s). O-Den (Machiko Kyo) and Naminosuke (Eiji Funakoshi) are young villagers recently married. Naminosuke is suffering from a mysterious illness, but they lack the money to pay for proper medical care. Then Daihachi (Taiji Tonoyama), a man who had wanted to marry O-Den, turns up and gives her the necessary money, but then reveals there’s a catch – she has to sleep with him for it. The two argue on a bridge with rotten railings and Daihichi rather conveniently falls to his doom below.
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| Taiji Tonoyama |
The couple hotfoot it to Tokyo, where Naminosuke is treated by a dashing young doctor, Sugimoto (Keizo Kawasaki), who dresses in the newly-fashionable Western style. He gives Naminosuke a medicine which proves very effective in stopping the pain, but he becomes reliant on it and it’s not long before O-Den is sleeping with the doctor in order to get repeat prescriptions – and so begins her fall into immorality...
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| Keizo Kawasaki |
This Daiei production was based on a novel of the same name from 1935 by Kanji Kunieda (1892-1956), who had previously provided the source material for Tamizo Ishida’s Kenka tobi (1939) and Mizoguchi’s Utamaro and His Five Women (1946) among others, but appears to have remained untranslated in English. His novel was itself based on the story of O-Den (or Oden) Takahashi, who was convicted of murder and beheaded in 1879 at the age of 31. Kodansha’s Japan: An Illustrated Encyclopedia contains the following entry on Takahashi:
Murderess, the most notorious dokufu (wicked woman) of the modern era. Accused of several sex-related murders, Oden was the first woman to be executed by beheading after the Edo period (1600-1868). Born in what is now Gumma Prefecture, she was known from girlhood for her beauty and promiscuity. Her life of crime began after her husband contracted leprosy. When the disease proved incurable, Oden allegedly poisoned her husband and embarked on a career of prostitution, larceny and homicide. Arrested in 1876 for slitting the throat of a used-clothing merchant at an inn in Asakusa, she was convicted and ultimately executed. It was the most sensational crime story of the day, and lurid accounts of Oden’s escapades filled the newspapers. The popular author Kanagaki Robun wrote a spicy novel based on her life, Takahashi Oden yasha monogatari (1879, Tale of Takahashi Oden, the She-Devil), which Kawatake Mokuami adapted as a kabuki play.
I can’t vouch for the accuracy of all of the information in the above entry, but it’s certainly clear that O-Den’s life began to be fictionalised in the very year of her death, and few of her chroniclers seem to have worried much about the actual facts since. Surprisingly, this film version features no throat-slitting, no arrest of O-Den and no execution. It’s also worth noting that, although it’s widely believed that she was the last woman to be executed by beheading in Japan, that’s simply not the case – there were at least a further 22 women put to death in this way in the two years following O-Den’s execution.
O-Den had already been the subject of at least half a dozen previous films, including silent pictures now lost, as well as Nobuo Nakagawa’s Dokufu Takahashi Oden (1958), usually known in English as A Wicked Woman, and a 1935 version of Kunieda’s novel directed by Tamizo Ishida. I doubt that Ishida’s film has survived, but the theme song sung by Kiyozo Shinbashi (who appeared in Sadao Yamanaka’s 1935 film The Million Ryo Pot) has, and you can listen to it on YouTube here. Incidentally, the role of O-Den in Ishida’s film was played by Sumiko Suzuki, who had also played her in a 1929 film. Suzuki (1904-85) is largely forgotten today, but may be known to some as the star of The Ghost Cat and the Shamisen (1938) and she apparently cornered the market in ‘ghost cat’ roles.
This
film is so unlike Nakagawa’s version of O-Den’s story from only
two years previously that it would be easy to miss the fact that they
were inspired by the same real-life person. Director Keigo Kimura,
who also wrote the screenplay, avoids the obvious exploitation
elements of the story and focuses instead on charting the moral
downfall of a woman who begins as a model wife trying her best to
help her suffering husband. Having been the one to turn Machiko Kyo
into a star in his 1949 film A Fool’s Love and worked with
her frequently since, he was perhaps also concerned with providing
her with a juicy role, which he certainly did. It’s a very
sympathetic portrayal of O-Den which views her largely as a victim of
circumstance – or fate – and her journey into cynicism is played perfectly by Kyo. In fact, performances are top-notch all round,
with Eiji Funakoshi being especially believable in a difficult role
as a man frequently almost out of his mind with pain.
Kimura pays considerable attention to period detail, and we see how the then-recent opening up of Japan has introduced various novel experiences to its people, from the eating of beef to having a photograph taken. In terms of style, he uses mainly long- and medium-shots throughout, with few close-ups and slightly longer takes than usual, allowing plenty of freedom to his actors, something which is especially apparent in Kyo and Funakoshi’s final, dramatic scene together. Kimura also seldom cuts to his main characters when transitioning between scenes, opting instead to focus briefly on random people going about their business: a crouching rickshaw driver tapping his pipe on the wheel of his vehicle, a young child fascinated by a sparkler, an old man enjoying a bottle of beer at a festival. As someone who’s always disliked the received wisdom that everything should be there to move the plot along, I heartily approve of these beautiful moments, and it’s these more than anything that, for me, make this an exceptionally fine film.
A note on the title:
The ‘O’ in O-Den’s name is an honorific prefix seldom used today, while the ‘Den’ (伝) can mean ‘legend’ in English, and the film is sometimes listed as ‘The Legendary Hell’, which makes little sense and, as far as I’m aware, was never an official release title. It does seem odd to use to use ‘O-Den Hell’ as a title without the character の, which would indicate that the English should be ‘O-Den’s Hell’ or ‘The Hell of O-Den’; my guess is that O-Den Hell is a sort of nickname, but I haven’t been able to confirm this.
Thanks to A.K.
DVD at Amazon Japan (no English subtitles)
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