Tokai no kaii 7-ji 03-bu / 都会の怪異 七時三分 (‘Mystery of the City: 7:03’, 1935)

Obscure Japanese Film # 271

Eiji Nakano

A newspaper reporter, Tarama (Zenpei Saga), gets a call from an old friend, Miyamoto (Eiji Nakano), who’s broke but about to become a father with Noriko (Sachiko Chiba) although they’re not yet married. Miyamoto works for a dubious company specialising in insider trading but his boss won’t lend him a penny and he’s hoping that Tarama can help him financially. They arrange to meet that night for a drink in Ginza; later, on his way to meet Tarama, Miyamoto is approached by an old man (Yoyo Kojima) in the street who wants to sell him the evening paper – only it’s not that evening’s paper, it’s the one for the following day. Miyamoto assumes he’s a crackpot and buys a paper to get rid of him.

Yoyo Kojima

At a bus stop, Miyamoto notices a young homeless woman sleeping in the street next to a newspaper advert with the headline ‘Brutally murdered body of a young girl found in a sewer. Murder thought to have been committed by prostitute due to financial hardship.’ After boarding a bus, he begins perusing his paper and is astonished to see that it does indeed bear the following day’s date. Among the headlines are ‘Shock news! Murder suspect is popular singer, Hanako Hanamura’,  ‘Robbery on the bridge at 4:30 in the morning!’, and ‘Earthquake causes fire at Chameleon Bar’ – the very bar in which Miyamoto has arranged to meet his friend and where the proprietress (Chikako Hosokawa) favours oil lamps over electric ones. However, the item which most piques his interest is the following day’s racing results, but at this point he still assumes it’s all some kind of elaborate joke. 

Sachiko Chiba

Tarama fails to show, so Miyamoto heads home. When an earthquake hits and the fire brigade rush past him on their way to the Chameleon Bar, he realises that the contents of his mysterious newspaper should be taken seriously after all. Determined to raise some money to bet on the horse races, he decides to ask Noriko for some things to pawn and leaps into a taxi, where he’s disconcerted to learn that the driver keeps his wife’s ashes in an urn on the back seat. After visiting Noriko, he wakes up a pawnbroker (Osamu Takizawa) who has already closed for the night, but he’s disappointed with the amount of money he receives. Remembering the newspaper story about the robbery on the bridge, he decides to head there and rob the robber. He ends up killing the man he suspects to be the robber and throwing his body in the river. The man’s wallet contains only a little money (implying that he killed an innocent man), but now he at least has the funds he needs to make a different kind of killing. After winning big at the racetrack, he starts to become nervous about the police connecting him with the dead man and decides to leave Tokyo. He gives Noriko some money and says he’s going to Osaka and will send for her later, but heads for Yokohama instead. In another taxi, he takes out the newspaper again and notices something he’d overlooked the first time – his own obituary, which states that he died at 7:03 that evening. It’s now 6:35...

Eitaro Ozawa in one of his earliest screen roles as a cop

Japanese horror films from the 1930s are as rare as hen’s teeth, so it was a real treat to see this obscurity, especially as it turned out to be pretty good. Running a mere 55 minutes, I’m uncertain whether or not it’s complete – the fact that the newspaper story about a popular singer becoming a murder suspect is not followed up made me suspect there are scenes missing. 

Nakano and Chiba

The film begins with a title stating that it’s based on the final work of Itsuma Maki. Born at the turn of the century, Maki had died of a heart attack* aged just 35 shortly before the film was made (whether or not he died at 7:03 I don’t know). Itsuma Maki was actually one of several pen names of Kaitaro Hasegawa. Under the name Fubo Hayashi, he had created the famous one-eyed, one-armed swordsman Tange Sazen, while Maki was his chosen name for crime and horror stories, of which this last had been finished by Maki’s editor (who knew the intended ending) after the author’s death. However, Maki had spent time in London in the late 1920s, where he’d purchased numerous books of crime and horror stories, and ‘7:03’ is, in fact, closely based on the short story ‘The Old Man’ by the British author Holloway Horn.** Incidentally, Maki’s version of the story is apparently more humorous than the film, which plays it nightmarishly straight throughout. 

Kojima and Nakano

One nice touch is that actor and opera singer Yoyo Kojima plays not merely the old man, but also pops up in four other roles: a driver, the man Miyamoto kills, the disconcerting man who wants to use the phone box, and a racetrack spectator. When Miyamoto walks the deserted streets just before meeting the old man who sells him the paper, there’s also an effective use of sound and shadows to suggest a hidden danger which brings to mind Val Lewton’s later approach to similar material. It’s atmospherically shot by cinematographer Akira Mimura, who would go on to shoot Sanshiro Sugata (1943) for Kurosawa. 

Nakano

This is the only film I’ve seen by director Sotoji Kimura (1903-88), though he made quite a few during his 30-year-plus career. This seems not to have been at all typical of his work, much of which was on musicals and comedies – something I found pretty surprising after watching this! Perhaps the film was a box office flop, but to me it’s a pity he didn’t make more like it.

Leading man Eiji Nakano was a star of contemporary dramas known for his fashion sense, bad boy image and violent temper – his Japanese Wikipedia page states that film critics were afraid to give him a bad review in case he beat them up. In this case, I need not fear his ghost as I thought he gave a fine performance. He appeared in a dozen films for Mizoguchi but more or less retired from the cinema in 1939 to pursue other interests. 

The film was made for PCL Film Productions, which was active from 1933-37 and later became part of Toho. 

*English Wikipedia states that he died of acute bronchial asthma, but Japanese Wikipedia gives the cause as a heart attack. 

**The easiest way to access the original Holloway Horn story is probably via Gav Cross’ likeably eccentric reading on YouTube.

Japanese sources:

https://borderland.txt-nifty.com/weblog_on_the_borderland/2009/03/post-7ed1.html

https://nihoneiga1920-1960.hatenablog.com/entry/2022/11/23/125253

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Escape at Dawn / 暁の脱走 / Akatsuki no dasso (1950)

 

Yoshiko Yamaguchi

 

1945. Harumi (Yoshiko Yamaguchi) is a singer in a troupe of female entertainers sent to Manchuria to help the Japanese soldiers forget about their probable imminent deaths. Unfortunately, she quickly attracts the attention of overbearing Lieutenant Narita (Eitaro Ozawa) and is about to be raped by him when Private First Class Mikami (Ryo Ikebe) knocks on the door to deliver a trivial telegram to Narita, allowing Harumi to escape. Harumi and Mikami fall in love, but, when he's wounded in battle, circumstances lead to them being captured together by the Chinese. Mikami is treated with nothing but kindness by his captors, but he’s been completely brainwashed by the Japanese military propaganda machine into thinking that it’s better to die than be taken prisoner…

 

Eitaro Ozawa and Yamaguchi

Produced by Shintoho, the company founded by those who split from Toho after the studio’s big labour dispute of 1947, Escape at Dawn was nevertheless distributed by Toho. Like director Senkichi Taniguchi’s previous film, Jakoman and Tetsu, it was also produced by Tomoyuki Tanaka and co-written by Akira Kurosawa. In this case, the source was a 1947 novel by Taijiro Tamiya (1911-83) entitled Shunpu den (‘The Story of a Prostitute’, not available in English). Tamiya had served in Manchuria during the war (as had Taniguchi) and also written Nikutai no mon (‘The Gate of Flesh’), first filmed in 1948 by Masahiro Makino and later by Seijin Suzuki, Hideo Gosha and others. 

 

Ryo Ikebe

 

Although Tamiya is said to have created the character of Harumi with Yoshiko (later Shirley) Yamaguchi in mind, in the novel she was a Korean prostitute (or ‘comfort woman’), while it’s made very clear in the film that she is not a prostitute, and she has also become Japanese. Apparently, the original version of the screenplay was faithful to the novel on these points, but the content of Japanese films was still being controlled by the occupying Americans, who insisted that changes be made. It’s hard to see how such whitewashing benefitted the Americans, so their decision was presumably just a case of them imposing their own cultural nanny-state ideas of the time about the depiction of ‘immorality’ on screen. An unfortunate knock-on effect was that Harumi’s behaviour in the way she throws herself at Mikami and won’t take no for an answer now appeared extremely odd coming from a Japanese singer rather than a Korean prostitute. According to Stuart Galbraith IV in his book The Emperor and The Wolf, Kurosawa eventually got fed up with the requests for endless rewrites and left Taniguchi to it. He also states that,

…long preproduction, expensive exterior sets, and tangled red tape to secure permission for use of military hardware for filming (machine guns, etc) made it the most expensive Japanese feature to that point.

I’ve read elsewhere that it was also the first post-war Japanese film to feature scenes of Japanese soldiers on the frontlines. In any case, while it’s certainly a compromised vision, the film is at least very well-made and often technically impressive, with cinematographer Akira Mimura winning a Mainichi Film Concours award for his efforts. On the other hand, the essentially simple story of a predictably doomed romance feels overstretched at almost two hours. As Lieutenant Narita and his men are stationed in the desert, the film is very much like a Japanese Foreign Legion movie, and memories of Marlene Dietrich and Gary Cooper in Morocco (1930) are often brought to mind. There are some surprisingly sensual scenes between stars Yoshiko Yamaguchi and Ryo Ikebe – at one point, she bites his hand hard enough to draw blood, then sucks the wound, which he seems to enjoy. This would have been considered strong stuff in Japan in 1950 and probably helped at the box office.

Seijun Suzuki directed a more faithful version of the original novel in 1965.

Bonus trivia:

Setsuko Wakayama, who plays one of Harumi’s colleagues, had married director Senkichi Taniguchi in 1949, but they divorced in 1956 when he had an affair with actress Kaoru Yachigusa. This adultery scandal harmed Taniguchi’s career greatly – after directing an average of three films a year until 1957, he was subsequently out of work for over two years. When he did return to directing, the quality of the material he was offered was significantly lower than it had been before the scandal.

 

Setsuko Wakayama

DVD at Amazon Japan (no English subtitles)

365 Nights / 三百六十五夜 / Sambyaku-rokujugo ya (1948)

Obscure Japanese film #34

Hideko Takamine

 

After making his feature film debut as director[1] with the Shintoho production A Flower Blooms (1948) starring Hideko Takamine and Ken Uehara, Kon Ichikawa was assigned the task of directing another vehicle for the same two stars. He was handed a screenplay by Kennosuke Tateoka based on a 1946 novel by Masajiro Kojima (1894-1994)[2] entitled 365 Nights. Although unimpressed with the script, he agreed in the hope that a studio-pleasing success would enable him to make a film version of Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s short story ‘In a Grove’, but he was to be disappointed in this as Akira Kurosawa pipped him to the post and used the story as the basis for Rashomon (1950). Ichikawa allegedly rewrote the screenplay for 365 Nights with his newly-wed wife Natto Wada while leaving Tateoka sole credit. However, in my view he failed to raise it above the level of melodramatic tosh and I lost count of the number of coincidences on which the overly-contrived plot relies. 

Ken Uehara

 

Kawakita (Ken Uehara) is an up-and-coming young architect being relentlessly pursued by spoilt rich bitch Ranko (Hideko Takamine), who claims to love him for his ‘sincerity’ (this seems unlikely – the real reason is perhaps that he shows not the slightest interest in her). In order to avoid Ranko, Kawakita changes address, lodging with a middle-aged woman and her attractive daughter, Teruko (Hisako Yamane), with whom he quickly falls in love. However, the young couple’s hopes of marriage and future happiness are foiled by Kawakita’s old enemy, Tsugawa (Yuji Hori), an unscrupulous businessman who wants to marry Ranko and hates Kawakita partly out of jealousy, but mainly because the idealistic Kawakita regards him with contempt for his crass materialism. 

Hisako Yamane

 

Tsugawa is such a comic-book villain I’m sure Ichikawa would have had him twirling his moustache had it been longer, while the actions of Kawakita and Teruko are so foolish throughout that one soon loses patience with them. The fact that these three characters are so unrealistic makes it difficult to assess the abilities of Uehara, Yamane and Hori on this evidence. However, it’s no surprise that the best performance here comes from the great Hideko Takamine – as egotistical and arrogant as her character is, she at least resembles a real human being for whom it’s possible to feel some sympathy. It’s also Takamine with whom Ichikawa chooses to end the movie rather enigmatically practising golf. As this is a Western sport, it may be symbolic, especially as Ranko is always seen dressed in Western clothes, while Teruko – the embodiment of purity – is usually shown in Japanese dress. Takamine left Shintoho in 1950 and went freelance, but surprisingly never worked for Ichikawa again after 365 Nights. 

Yuji Hori

 

For his part, despite his failure to rescue the script, Ichikawa does impress as a director, staging many sequences with considerable flair – there is a terrific prolonged fight scene when Kawakita confronts a burglar, for example, and he even breaks the rules by having Tsugawa rant directly to the camera at one point. Ichikawa is ably assisted by the fluid camerawork of Akira Mimura, although the music by Tadashi Hattori is cloying and has not dated well. 

Hideko Takamine

 

Like Ichikawa’s later picture, The Burmese Harp (1956), the film was originally released in two parts. The first half (set in Tokyo) appeared in cinemas on 21 September 1948, the second half (set in Osaka) a week later, running 78 minutes and 73 minutes respectively. The following year, a re-edited omnibus edition was released running 119 minutes – this is apparently the only version to have survived. Personally, I felt that this shorter version felt overlong, but then again sentimental tearjerkers of this type are not my favourite genre. However, 365 Nights was very popular in its day and was remade in 1962 by director Kunio Watanabe with Ken Takakura as Kawakita and Hibari Misora as Ranko. On the whole, I would say that the original remains worth seeing for some interesting direction by Ichikawa and for Hideko Takamine.

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[1] Ichikawa himself did not count his earlier A Thousand and One Nights at Toho, made under a pseudonym.

[2] Sometimes mistranslated as Seijiro Kojima