The Beast Must Die: Mechanic of Revenge / 野獣死すべし 復讐のメカニック / Yaju shisubeshi: fukushu no mekanikku (1974)

Obscure Japanese Film #247

Hiroshi Fujioka

At the end of The Beast Must Die (1959), Kunihiko Date (Tatsuya Nakadai), a highly intelligent but amoral student leading a double life as a thief and murderer, escapes the clutches of the police and jets off to America. In this sequel (loosely based on author Haruhiko Oyabu’s 1960 sequel to his original book) he’s back from the States and is now a Moby Dick-obsessed literature professor, but is still killing and stealing in his spare time. Although it’s unclear whether exactly 15 years have passed in story terms, it does look like 1974, and he’s now played by the 28-year-old Hiroshi Fujioka (Nakadai – who had been playing a little younger than his real age in the first film – was 41 by this point and perhaps deemed too old. It should also be noted that he does not appear in this film despite a credit on IMDb).

Date, who was already pretty nasty, has become even nastier (burning a man’s face, casually killing a woman who’s helped him, etc) but has also been given a personal motive for his crimes. This time round he’s targeting the businessmen who drove his father to suicide and took over his company. In my view, despite the fact that this element seems to have been present in the book, this was a mistake – Date is someone who simply does not care about other people, so it makes no sense that he would care about his father so much that he would go to all the trouble he does here to get revenge (in the superior first film, Date does what he does because he views himself as a sort of Nietzschean superman above normal standards of morality).

Mako Midori

Hiroshi Fujioka, previously a supporting actor in movies but a star in TV, fails to make much of the character and, while the supporting cast are decent enough, they only have so much to work with. Mako Midori – something of a cult actress in Japan – is among them, but her screen time is limited and she has been better served in other films, such as Yasuzo Masumura’s The Great Villains (1968). Akemi Mari, who plays the other main female role, had been married to this film’s director, Eizo Sugawa, since 1969. She’s fine here, but her film career never really took off, although she had some success on TV.

Akemi Mari

The film is also rather cheap and drab-looking – I suspect that Toho had limited faith in it and only allowed Sugawa (who had also made the first film) a pretty low budget. Incidentally, Sugawa made other unrelated films with the word ‘beast’ in the title, including his previous film, Beast Hunt (1973, aka The Black Battlefront Kidnappers) and the excellent Beast Alley (1965).

On the plus side, the soundtrack features a cool combination of classical and jazz courtesy of composer Kunihiko Murai, who was better known as a producer of pop music, though he also composed the soundtrack for Tampopo (1985). Running a taut 86 minutes, the film also has an appealing leanness about it, and its misanthropic tone is certainly of a piece with its director’s other best-known works so, while it’s certainly not as good as the first film, it’s not a total wash-out. (Incidentally, one of the screenwriters, Yoshio Shirasaka, had also worked frequently with that other great misanthropic director of the era, Yasuzo Masumura).

Starring Yusaku Matsuda, Toru Murakawa’s 1980 remake of the 1959 original is more impressive (if more self-indulgent) than this sequel and recently received the deluxe Blu-ray treatment courtesy of Radiance Films, while a further remake and sequel (neither of which I’ve seen) appeared in 1997 starring Kazuya Kimura as Date.

It’s a bit low-res, but you can watch the film on YouTube with English subtitles here.

Hear part of Kunihiko Murai's original soundtrack on YouTube here.

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Get ‘em All / みな殺しの歌より 拳銃よさらば! / ‘Minagoroshi no uta' yori kenju-yo saraba! (From the ‘Song of Annihilation’-Farewell, Gun!) (1960)

Obscure Japanese Film #78

Hiroshi Mizuhara and Akemi Kita

 

This Toho crime flick was a vehicle for Hiroshi Mizuhara* (1935-78), a pop singer who had just become hugely popular at the time. He plays Kyosuke, a young man fresh out of prison, who goes to stay with his brother, Kozo (Akihiko Hirata, the one-eyed scientist from the original Godzilla), and his wife, Mamiko (Yukiko Shimazaki). However, it’s not long before Kozo is killed in a suspicious hit-and-run – something which fails to make much impression on Mamiko, who observes that she ‘can’t dance the mambo with a dead man’ and assumes she will simply switch brothers. Kyosuke, though, has other ideas, and begins investigating his brother’s death. 

 

Tatsuya Nakadai

 

First, he pays a visit to Kozo’s best friend, Tsubota (Tatsuya Nakadai), a crippled ex-boxer. Not wanting to shatter Kyosuke’s illusions, Tsubota decides not to tell him that Kozo was involved in a bank robbery with himself and five other men and that the loot has gone missing. Kyosuke leaves, still under the impression that Kozo was an honest citizen, but then he finds a coin locker key in his brother’s wallet. When he opens the locker, he’s surprised to find a revolver inside; later, he gets in a fight with his ex-girlfriend’s new boyfriend, Namioka (Jerry Fujio). During the scuffle, his jacket falls open, revealing the gun, and Namioka immediately backs down. Realising his new-found power, Kyosuke orders Namioka to get down on all fours and ‘squeal like a pig.’ He's delighted when Namioka does just that, and the power of the pistol goes to Kyosuke’s head as he sets about getting revenge on the men who murdered his brother. 

 

Mizuhara and Nakadai

 

The director of this film, Eizo Sugawa, had directed Tatsuya Nakadai in the excellent The Beast Must Die the previous year and had also written the script for A Dangerous Hero (1957) featuring Nakadai. I couldn’t help feeling it a pity that this third and final collaboration should be this, rather than a sequel to Beast – a film which introduced a fascinating Ripley-like antihero to Japanese cinema and left things wide open for a part two. Having said that, Get ‘em All is a well-made, entertaining and stylish noir.

 

Hiroshi Mizuhara

In my opinion, Mizuhara gives a good performance but doesn’t quite cut it as a film star. He appeared in around 20 movies (not always in the lead) but his career was harmed by his alcoholism and gambling addiction. It’s a little strange to see him in the starring role instead of Nakadai (who receives special billing), but Nakadai always relished these slightly odd parts; in fact, it’s one of a number of ‘bad leg’ roles he would play throughout his career. However, perhaps the role had another attraction for him as he had actually flirted with boxing before becoming an actor, but decided he didn’t like being punched in the face and gave it up. There’s a scene here in which he really goes at it with a punching bag and it certainly looks like he had some moves; indeed, he later got into a scrap with Kinnosuke Nakamura in real life, and I think it was Tetsuro Tanba who said that Nakadai was the best at fighting. Talking of Tanba, he’s also good here as the toughest of the gang members. 

 

Tetsuro Tanba

 

Also notable among the cast are Kurosawa favourite Seiji Miyaguchi in one of his trademark downtrodden-loser roles, and Kyoko Kishida (the Woman in the Dunes) as the girlfriend of another gang member. 

 

Seiji Miyaguchi

 

Kyoko Kishida

Get ‘em All was based on the novel Minagoroshi no uta by Haruhiko Oyabu, who had also written The Beast Must Die. In the original, the criminal gang are not bank robbers, but are involved in a black market morphine racket. While the loose adaptation here is nothing special in terms of story, director Sugawa and his screenwriter, Shuji Terayama – later an art-house director known for films such as Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets – inject it with some nice touches of black humour, and emphasize the very obvious Freudian symbolism of the pistol. Indeed, there’s an implication here that Japanese men had been, in a sense, emasculated after the war by the occupying Americans; this is made most explicit when Kyosuke is nearly shot by a kid dressed as a cowboy who has got hold of his gun and claims to be… ‘Burt Lancaster’!

 * not 'Mizuwara'

Beast Alley / けものみち / Kemono michi (1965)

Obscure Japanese Film #43

Junko Ikeuchi

Based on a novel by prolific social realist crime writer Seicho Matsumoto, Beast Alley is a Toho production directed by Eizo Sugawa, who also made the excellent Tatsuya Nakadai vehicle The Beast Must Die (1959). An impressive array of talent is on display in other departments, too – the music score is by Japan’s foremost film composer, Toru Takemitsu, while the cast is littered with excellent actors, many of whom will be familiar from the films of Akira Kurosawa.

Ryo Ikebe

Giving a flawless performance in a role which was probably the highlight of her career, Junko Ikeuchi stars as Tamiko, a young woman working as a maid to support her older, bedridden husband, Kanji (Satoshi Morizuka), a man with bad teeth and a foot fetish who, despite his condition, is carrying on with another woman. When Tamiko comes home one day and catches him in the act, the other woman flees and a disgusted Tamiko has to fight off the advances of the frustrated Kanji.

Yunosuke Ito and Junko Ikeuchi

At the inn where she works, Tamiko has attracted the attention of a wealthy customer, Kotaki (a typically wooden Ryo Ikebe). She becomes his favourite and he offers her the chance of a better life, putting a dangerous idea into her head – in order to take full advantage of her new opportunity, she decides to get rid of her troublesome husband permanently. Kotaki introduces her to Hadano (Yunosuke Ito), a dodgy lawyer who finds her a new position looking after the rich and powerful Kito (the ubiquitous Eitaro Ozawa in convincing old-age make-up). Kito keeps a gruesome statue of the fearsome Buddhist deity Fudo Myo-o in his bedroom - surely a red flag if ever there was one! In a cruel twist of ironic fate, it turns out that Kito is another randy, bedridden monster with bad teeth, and she is forced to become his mistress while continuing her relationship with Kotaki (Tamiko seems oddly sanguine about this, I'm not sure why).

Eitaro Ozawa

Meanwhile, the death of Kanji is being investigated by a police detective, Hisatsune (Keiju Kobayashi). Becoming convinced that Tamiko murdered her husband, he tries to use the information to pressure her into having sex with him. Hisatsune has also uncovered some information about the murky pasts of Kito and Hadano; as a result, strings are pulled behind the scenes and he is fired from the police force. His attempt to get revenge by giving the story to a newspaper backfires, and soon nobody involved is safe… 

 

Keiju Kobayashi

The shocking denouement of Beast Alley features a further cruel irony for Tamiko and provides an appropriate ending to a misanthropic movie in which everyone turns out to be a scumbag. This is especially surprising in the case of Keiju Kobayashi's character. Kobayashi, who played the lead in Kihachi Okamoto's The Elegant Life of Mr Everyman, was best-known for comic parts but was also a fine straight actor when given the chance. The detective he plays here seems quite genial initially so, when his true character is revealed, it's entirely unexpected.

Also notable among the cast are Kurosawa favourite Noriko Sengoku as a scene-stealing maid and Tatsuya Nakadai’s mentor, Koreya Senda, in a tiny but significant non-speaking part. 

Noriko Sengoku

 

Takemitsu’s music is typically subtle and there is fine high-contrast black and white ‘scope photography throughout by Yasumichi Fukuzawa (who has oddly few credits but also worked for Kurosawa and Mikio Naruse). 

However, the film’s most impressive asset is the remarkable lead performance by Junko Ikeuchi, who has to play just about every emotion in the book and is never less than entirely convincing. In 1966, she travelled to Argentina, where the picture had been nominated for Best Film at the Mar del Plata Film Festival. Unfortunately, it lost out to Czechoslovakia’s entry, Long Live the Republic! Although she never enjoyed such a good role again in the cinema, Ikeuchi went on to become one of the most successful actresses in Japanese television drama. A heavy smoker, she died of lung cancer in 2010 at the age of 76. 

Watched without subtitles.

Fudo Myo-o