Obscure Japanese Film #274
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| Chojuro Kawarasaki |
Mori (Chojuro Kawarasaki) is one of many day labourers scrambling for jobs clearing up the rubble of post-war Tokyo. After failing to find work one day, he returns to the slum where he lives with his wife, Sato (played by Kawarasaki’s real-life wife, Shizue), and two children only to learn that they’re to be evicted the following day. Sato decides that she should take the kids and stay with her sister until Mori can find a new place.
Mori has a chance of improving his lot when he’s offered a job as a lathe operator, but there’s one problem – how can he survive until payday when his boss won’t give him an advance? Old lady Akiyama (Choko Iida) comes to the rescue by gathering the day labourers together and getting them all to chip in a few yen for Mori, but if it weren’t for bad luck, Mori wouldn’t have any luck at all…
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| Chojuro and Shizue Kawarasaki (or Kawarazaki) |
After his blacklisting from the major studios for being a member of the Communist Party, director Tadashi Imai founded Shinsei Eigasha (the New Star Film Company) with fellow director Satsuo Yamamoto and producer Takero Ito. This was the first film produced by the company and they actually financed it by getting members of the public to contribute 50 yen each. Considering that Imai also managed to produce a good film which was well-reviewed and made a profit, this is an impressive achievement indeed.
Under such circumstances, it’s not surprising that there are no big movie stars in the film, although leading actor Chojuro Kawarasaki was a major star of the kabuki theatre and played the lead role in occasional films, such as Sadao Yamanaka’s Priest of Darkness (1936). A communist sympathiser since the late 1920s, he and his theatre group, Zenshinza (the ‘Progressive Troupe’), joined the Japanese Communist Party en masse in 1949, and it was apparently Zenshinza which was largely responsible for raising the money to make And Yet We Live by soliciting donations from their audiences as they toured the country. (According to Japanese Wikipedia, Kawarasaki was later expelled from the JCP in 1967 for being a Maoist.) Kawarasaki and his troupe were later featured in Kozaburo Yoshimura’s excellent The Beauty and the Water Dragon (1955), which I have previously reviewed. His performance here is decent if unremarkable; there’s a drunk scene I disliked, partly because Kawarasaki – like most Japanese actors of the time in such scenes, it seems – overdoes it, but also because I thought that Mori wouldn’t have been so stupid and irresponsible in his situation. However, it is the fact that Mori is portrayed as a flawed individual rather than an idealised working class hero which helps the film to rise above mere commie propaganda. In terms of acting, though, it’s Choko Iida who provides the most memorable characterisation as the feisty old woman.
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| Choko Iida |
In A Hundred Years of Japanese Film, Donald Richie states that ‘The film’s inspiration was De Sica’s The Bicycle Thief (1949) [sic]. Imai shot on the streets of Tokyo, around the major downtown railway terminal of Ueno. His camera was often hidden, and the camera was sometimes placed in real situations.’ While not quite the classic that De Sica’s film certainly is, And Yet We Live is still a very well-made and effective film in the same neorealist vein.
The film benefits from an interesting and mostly excellent score by Masao Oki (1901-71), a highly-regarded composer whose film work was limited, although he worked for Imai on a number of films. His Symphony No.5 ‘Hiroshima’ (1953) is generally regarded as his masterpiece, but is unrelated to the film Hiroshima released the same year.
Watch And Yet We Live with English subtitles on my YouTube channel here.
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