Fukkatsu / 復活 (‘Resurrection’, 1950)

Obscure Japanese Film #283

Keiju Kobayashi

Machiko Kyo

The 12^th year of the Showa era (1937). Kunihiko (Keiju Kobayashi) is a young soldier from an aristocratic family of Christians. Having just completed his training, he returns home to Shirahama in Wakayama Prefecture to say goodbye to his family before being sent to serve in China. While there, he seduces the young maid, Yukiko (Machiko Kyo), not realising that he’s made her pregnant in the process. Despite pressure from the family, Yukiko refuses to name the father and is dismissed, while Kunihiko forgets about her.

Four years later, Kunihiko returns and, asked to be a witness for Ushio (Osamu Takizawa), a socialist and fellow Christian accused of spreading anti-war propaganda, he is shocked to run into Yukiko at the court, where he learns she has been accused of murder after the madam at the brothel she had been working at tricked her into giving poison to a client in order to rob him. Seeing Yukiko’s downfall as the result of his own sinful lapse, the guilt-stricken Kunihiko resolves to do everything in his power to help her, even if it means breaking ties with his family…

This is certainly a more faithful adaptation of Tolstoy’s Resurrection than Mizoguchi’s very loose version of 1937 (known in English as The Straits of Love and Hate), and retains the books deeply Christian perspective, which no doubt meant that it was easily approved by the occupying American authorities at the time. In the novel, Prince Nekhlyudov is serving on a jury when he realises that one of the defendants is the maid he had seduced and abandoned years before; the Mizoguchi film dispensed with the Christian theme and had the inspired idea of having the male protagonist a theatre audience member who sees the former maid – now a comedienne – mocking their affair in a comedy sketch.

Adapted by Yoshikata Yoda, this Daiei production is well-made by director Akira Nobuchi, but it’s also probably the most heavily Christian-influenced Japanese film I’ve seen and the preachiness does become tiresome after a while. Kobayashi and Kyo do good work in the leads, although Kyo was still a relative newcomer at this point and her inexperience occasionally shows. Nevertheless, she puts across Yukiko’s conflicting emotions very effectively at times, such as in the scene where Kunihiko first visits her in prison. Interestingly, Osamu Takizawa plays a character much like himself in some respects – he had been arrested during the war for a similar offence and spent 16 months in prison.

Osamu Takizawa

The director, Akira Nobuchi (1896-1968), came from the theatre and made around 30 films from 1935-55, but this is the only one I’ve seen so far.

Thanks to A.K.

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