Towering Waves / 波の塔 / Nami no to (1960)

Obscure Japanese Film #221

 

Ineko Arima and Masahiko Tsugawa

 

Wakako (Miyuki Kuwano), the daughter of corporation director and ministerial candidate Tazawa (Hiroshi Nihonyanagi), meets Onogi (Masahiko Tsugawa) by chance while exploring an ancient dwelling in Kamisuwa in Nagano Prefecture. Although she’s attracted to him, they go their separate ways and she assumes they’ll never meet again. However, sometime later she runs into him while he’s in the company of Yoriko (Ineko Arima), but Wakako is unsure about the nature of their relationship.

 

Miyuki Kuwano

 

It turns out that Yoriko and Onogi have been having an affair since they met by chance while watching a Russian theatre troupe perform The Lower Depths. When Onogi noticed that Yoriko, who happened to be sitting next to him, looked like she was going to vomit during the performance, Onogi – perhaps happy for an excuse to  leave – escorted her out, and their relationship began. 

 

Koji Nanbara and Kyoko Kishida

 

Yoriko is unhappily married to Yuki (Koji Nanbara), a political fixer who’s having multiple affairs of his own, including one with Hideko (Kyoko ‘Woman in the Dunes’ Kishida). Given that Onogi is a junior prosecutor, it’s no surprise that he ends up investigating Yuki in relation to a corruption case, and it just so happens that Wakako’s father is also involved, thereby guaranteeing much hand-wringing and misery for everybody involved…

 

Hiroshi Nihonyanagi

 

This Shochiku production was based on a novel by Seicho Matsumoto published the same year and contains so many unlikely coincidences that it should have received some kind of booby prize for Most Contrived Plot. However, the book was a best-seller in Japan and was also adapted for TV no fewer than eight times. It was also said to have been responsible for making the Aokigahara Forest at the base of Mount Fuji a popular suicide spot. 

 

Ineko Arima

 

One expects better from director Noboru Nakamura, best known these days for The Shape of Night (1964), which also starred Miyuki Kuwano, although it’s the underrated Ineko Arima who’s the top-billed star here. Unfortunately, they’re both wasted in this, as are the rest of a mostly strong cast that also includes talented character actors Sadako Sawamura (as Wakako’s mother) and Ko Nishimura (as a slippery lawyer). There are some nice shots here and there, but overall this is easily the least impressive of the nine Nakamura films I’ve seen so far.

DVD at Amazon Japan (no English subtitles)

Thanks to A.K.

Gyakukosen / 逆光線 / (‘Backlight’, 1956)

Obscure Japanese Film #199

Mie Kitahara

Following on from the commercial success earlier in 1956 of their films Season of the Sun and Crazed Fruit, this was Nikkatsu’s stab at a female-centred ‘sun tribe’ movie - ‘sun tribe’ being a term adopted by the Japanese press in reference to the first film to describe what was then a new phenomenon: rebellious, spoilt teenagers, generally from wealthy families, who despised the older generation and were unapologetically interested only in gratifying their own desires. Like Season of the Sun, this one was directed by Takumi Furukawa, a lesser director than Ko Nakahira, who had made Crazed Fruit, the female star of which was Mie Kitahara, who stars again here. 

 

Kitahara and Shoji Yasui

 

Kitahara plays Reiko, a student who shares a dormitory with other female students and who, in this case, does not seem to be from a wealthy family or even to have a family – certainly no reference is made to one, and she has to take on various part-time jobs to get by. What marks Reiko out as different is her attitude to sex – she likes to take the initiative and, early on in the film, she makes advances to a male student, Maki (Shoji Yasui), literally throwing herself at him and biting the button off his jacket. The two begin having a relationship, but one in which traditional roles are reversed – in this case, it’s the man who wants marriage and complains that she only loves him for his body, while she wants no commitment, only to have a good time. Reiko also has a one-night stand with Teramura (Kyoji Aoyama), incurring the wrath of his fiancé / her classmate Motoko (Misako Watanabe) as a result. But it’s when she begins tutoring a young boy at his home and seduces his father (Hiroshi Nihonyanagi) that she really begins playing with fire… 

 

Hiroshi Nihonyanagi

 

Whereas the previous two films had been based on stories by Shintaro Ishihara, the source for Gyakukosen was a novel of the same name by Kunie Iwahashi (1934-2014). Apparently, on its publication (also in 1956), there was ‘a frenzy of media coverage of her as the female equivalent of Ishihara’ (Japanese Wikipedia). 

 

 

Although it may seem like fairly tame stuff today, there’s no doubt that the sexual frankness of this film and the carefully-calculated moments of uninhibited sensuality on Reiko’s part (another example being the scene in which she takes a drink of water from Teramura’s mouth at a drinking fountain) would have been quite shocking at the time. The problem with the film is that it comes across less as a heartfelt plea for sexual equality and more like a cynically motivated product designed to stir up controversy and extract as many yen as possible from the pockets of Japanese teenagers. The sun tribe genre proved to be extremely short-lived as there was some evidence that a number of rapes and sexual assaults had been committed by youngsters influenced by the films. This led to protests by concerned parents and teachers, who were successful in having the genre effectively banned by the end of the year. As Liam Grealy and Catherine Driscoll point out in an online article, there were really only five sun tribe films proper, all of which were released in 1956, the other two being Kon Ichikawa’s Punishment Room and Hiromichi Horikawa’s Summer in Eclipse.

 

 

One oddity of this film is that it features a great deal of group singing of Russian folk songs by the young people, presumably a reflection of the fact that communism had become popular in Japan during the post-war years and had inspired an interest in Russian culture. Gyakukosen is largely unremarkable in terms of cinematic craft – the ending is really the only part that is visually memorable – and probably only of interest to fans of Mie Kitahara or anyone with an interest in the sun tribe phenomenon. 

 

 Thanks to A.K. 

Dancing Girl / 舞姫 / Maihime (1951)

Obscure Japanese Film #74

Mariko Okada

  

Namiko (Mieko Takamine) is a ballet teacher married to university prof Yagi (So Yamamura). They have two grown children – Shinako (Mariko Okada), who aspires to be a ballet dancer like her mother, and her brother Takao (Akihiko Katayama). However, the marriage was an arranged one, and Namiko still has feelings for former sweetheart Takehara (Hiroshi Nihonyanagi), whom she still sees regularly, although their relationship is platonic. This puts an increasing strain on the marriage while Shinako and Takao look on uneasily. Meanwhile, Shinako’s disillusionment deepens when she finds herself powerless to help either Kayama – her former ballet teacher whose career has ended due to a war wound (Heihachiro Okawa) – or Tomoko (Reiko Otani), a fellow student reduced to working as a stripper in an effort to help her sick lover. 

Mieko Takamine and Hiroshi Nihonyanagi

 

This Toho production is based on a novel published the same year by Yasunari Kawabata, who in 1968 became the first Japanese writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. The novel is not regarded as one of his major works and has yet to be translated into English (although there have been translations in German and Spanish) and it should be noted that Kawabata also wrote a famous story entitled The Dancing Girl of Izu, which is entirely unrelated to this one. The screenplay was written by Kaneto Shindo, who may be the most prolific screenwriter of all time with over 200 credits, but is best known as the director of Onibaba, Kuroneko and The Naked Island. He appears to have made a few changes to the original, some of which may be explained by the fact that films still had to be approved by the occupying Americans in 1951 (presumably not too difficult in this case as Dancing Girl promotes Western culture while also including some anti-war dialogue). The platonic nature of the relationship between Namiko and Takehara appears to have been the same in the original, but the Buddhist theme of the novel is largely absent and there is no mention of Takao’s flirtation with communism or Takehara being married. Unfortunately, Shindo chose to write a new scene in which Shinako visits her former ballet teacher on his deathbed – this scene is incredibly corny and easily the worst bit in the film. 

 

So Yamamura and Mieko Takamine

This sequence aside, director Mikio Naruse does a fine job, appropriately staging many scenes so that his characters have their backs to each other, which serves to emphasize their emotional distance. Ichiro Saito’s Western-style, string-laden score should perhaps have been used more sparingly, although it could be argued that it matches the maudlin tone of the film. The cast are solid across the board and it’s interesting to see Mariko Okada in her film debut even if she was obviously doubled for most of the ballet sequences. Okada would go on to rival Ayako Wakao as one of Japan’s top film actresses and, although her performance here may not quite have the subtlety of her later ones, she acquits herself pretty well in a major role that must have been daunting for an 18-year-old who had been signed as a ‘Toho New Face’ just 20 days before this film went into production.