Kenka tobi / 喧嘩鳶 (‘Fighting Firemen,’ 1939)

Obscure Japanese Film #222

 

Kazuo Hasegawa

 

This Toho Eiga production was based on a newspaper serial novel by Kanji Kunieda (1892-1956), who specialised in stories set in the Edo period and also wrote the source novel upon which Mizoguchi’s  Utamaro and His Five Women (1946) was based. The story of Kenka tobi concerns the genuine historical phenomenon of the samurai firefighting gangs of the Edo period, who were often in fierce competition with each other. 

 

Isuzu Yamada

 

The film features four of the big stars of Japanese cinema in the late 1930s: Kazuo Hasegawa, Isuzu Yamada, Ranko Hanai and Yataro Kurokawa. Directed by Tamizo Ishida, who also made Fallen Blossoms (1938) and the previously-reviewed Flower-Picking Diary (1939), it was a big budget production originally released in two parts and featuring impressively large sets (much of which goes up in flames) and hundreds of extras. 

 

Ranko Hanai

 

Kenka tobi zenpen (‘Fighting Firemen Part 1’) ran 73 minutes and, while I was unable to find a reliable running time for Part 2 (Kenka tobi kohen), I think it’s safe to assume it was a similar length. What we are left with is an 89-minute version cobbled together from the two original parts, so it’s likely that nearly an hour has been chopped out, and there are certainly elements of the story that are a little unclear. 

 

Yamada and Hasegawa

What remains has Kichigoro (Hasegawa), a firefighter from the Kaga-tobi gang, coming to the rescue of Omon (Hanai) when some villains try to abduct her in the street. Omon is the sister of the Ha-gumi gang’s Jirokichi (Kurokawa). She falls in love with Kichigoro, but this is complicated as he belongs to the rivals of her brother’s gang (shades of Romeo and Juliet) and also because Koina (Yamada), a geisha who knows him as a client, is already in love with him…

 

Hasegawa and Yataro Kurokawa

 

Although it’s a meller aimed squarely at the box office, there’s a good deal of subtlety in Ishida’s direction here, and it’s really very well staged and shot throughout, while performances are free from the hamminess you might expect from this type of material. With so few early Japanese talkies available in such good quality before it mostly became military propaganda, Kenka tobi is a rare treat. I doubt that we’ll ever get to see the original two parts in full and would not be surprised if they no longer exist – it was quite common in the Japanese cinema at the time for studios to make two-part films, then edit them down to a single feature and apparently bin the rest. Other examples that spring to mind are Kon Ichikawa’s 365 Nights (1948) and The Burmese Harp (1956), and The Spider Man (1958).

A remake appeared in 1961 under the title Edokko-hada, directed by Masahiro Makino. 

 

Thanks to A.K. 

Watch on my YouTube channel here (with English subtitles) 

The Seasons of Love / 四季の愛欲 / Shiki no aiyoku (‘Four Seasons of Love’, 1958)

 

Shoji Yasui

 

Gyo (Shoji Yasui) is a famous writer married to self-centred model Ginko (Yuko Kusunoki), but their marriage is not registered and they have told few people about it, fearing that to make it public might damage their careers. Ginko hates Gyo’s mother, Urako (Isuzu Yamada), believing that she abandoned Gyo when he was a child and only got back in touch after he became famous so she could sponge off him. Now 48, Urako is a widow, but in many ways she behaves like a young woman and has a lover, Hirakawa (Tomo’o Nagai), who owns a fabric wholesale business (at one point, she even takes him to see a blue movie). 

 

Yuko Kusunoki

 

Tomo'o Nagai and Isuzu Yamada

She also has two other adult children. One, Momoko (Yoko Katsuragi), is married to the older Tatabe (Jukichi Uno), but does not love him even though he treats her kindly and they have a young son. Unfortunately, she’s fallen in love with Tatabe’s cousin, Akaboshi (Yuji Odaka), a two-faced womaniser who laughs at her love letters behind her back. (After he tears one up and throws it in the wastepaper basket, we see his secretary taping it back together so she can read it). 

 

Yoko Katsuragi and Yuji Odaka

 

Urako’s other daughter is Harue (Sanae Nakahara), who dislikes Ginko and wants her brother, Gyo, to dump her and date her friend, Shinako (Shinako Mine) instead. However, when he takes them both to a hot spring inn for a treat, he gets chatting to the barmaid, Yuriko (Misako Watanabe), and when she casually mentions being troubled by athlete’s foot, he jumps behind the bar, removes her socks and smears her toes with a remedy he happens to have handy, kick-starting a love affair… 

 

Misako Watanabe

 

This Nikkatsu production was based on a 1957 novel entitled Shiki no engi (‘The Four Seasons of Acting/Performance’) by Fumio Niwa (1904-2005), whose work also provided the basis for Women of Tokyo (1939), The Beloved Image (1960) and Four Sisters (1962) among other films. Like many films by director Ko Nakahira, it takes a pretty dim view of human nature on the whole, although in this case some of the characters are quite sympathetic despite the amount of adultery going on. In any case, it’s clear that we’re a long way from Ozu and the world of Tokyo Story here, and perhaps that’s partly the point. There’s no genial Chishu Ryu-type father figure in this film, nor any father figure at all for that matter. The screenplay was written by the intriguing if not very prolific Keiji Hasebe, also known for his collaborations with Shohei Imamura, so new-wavers like him and Nakahira were likely reacting against the cosier domestic dramas of Ozu and others. In fact, the ending piles coincidence on top of coincidence in a way that strongly suggests that Nakahira and Hasebe were taking the piss. 

 

Yoko Katsuragi

 

If you can accept the film’s (possibly deliberate) absurdities, there’s much to enjoy, with Isuzu Yamada and Yoko Katsuragi taking the acting honours among a strong cast. There’s also an effective score by Toshiro Mayuzumi, albeit one of his more conventional efforts.

Thanks to A.K.

Okuman choja / 億万長者 (‘Billionaire’, 1954)

 

Isao Kimura

 

Karoku (Isao Kimura) is a tax collector so self-effacing he barely exists, so it’s easy for the people he’s supposed to collect from to send him away empty-handed. These include an unemployed photographer, Juji (Kinzo Shin), and his wife (Toyo Takahashi), who have 18 children and a lodger, Sute (Yoshiko Kuga). Like Karoku, Sute is an orphan who lost her parents to the atom bomb. She believes that the only way to protect peace is for Japan to have its own nuclear weapons and is now devoting all her energy to making them herself. 

 

Yoshiko Kuga

 

Karuko is attracted to his boss’s liberated daughter, Asako (Sachiko Hidari), who works in the same office, and she inspires him to become more aggressive in his collecting, but this only leads to him being bribed rather than paid. Realising the extent of corruption in the tax business, Karuko is persuaded by scheming geisha Hanakuma (Isuzu Yamada) into keeping a record of all the tax evaders. He intends to use this to expose corrupt politicians like Ebizo (Yunosuke Ito), but she has her own ideas…

 

Isuzu Yamada

 

This Shintoho release was produced by the Young Actors' Club (later known as Gekidan Seihai), which had been founded in 1952 and also produced Satsuo Yamamoto’s Hi no hate the same year. According to Japanese Wikipedia,

Isao Kimura, the lead actor, actually lost his family in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. It was Kimura who also appointed Kon Ichikawa as director.

The film was originally intended to be a film adaptation of Marcel Pagnol's play Topaz, starring Junkichi Orimoto, Kobo Abe was initially tasked with writing the screenplay, and had already completed a first draft. However, due to differences with Ichikawa, who had been appointed director, Abe's abstract script was not adopted. Ichikawa's wife, Natto Wada, quickly completed the script, and [cartoonist] Taizo Yokoyama and others contributed their opinions and ideas to the final screenplay, and are credited as scriptwriters…

This film does not have a director's name credit. Initially, it was to be distributed by Shochiku, but, after many twists and turns, it was eventually distributed by Shintoho. However, the producers agreed to cut the final scene, depicting the explosion of the atomic bomb, a blend of reality and hallucination, without Ichikawa's consent. This led Ichikawa to protest and refuse to have his name credited as director... Ichikawa later testified that the reasons for his removal from the credits were that the Young Actors' Club, the producers, had begun production without completing fundraising and were enthusiastic about it, and that it was Ichikawa's first independent production job and he had proceeded with filming without understanding the circumstances.

However, the version I saw does have a credit for Ichikawa as director, so I’m uncertain whether the Wikipedia article is incorrect or the credit was added to later prints. It’s perhaps also worth noting that, though many sources credit Ichikawa as a screenwriter, the film itself does not. 

 

Yunosuke Ito

Anyway, given the circumstances in which it was made, it’s perhaps not too surprising that the resultant film is a messy affair, albeit quite an enjoyable one with sterling work all around from an excellent cast. Though it’s a wacky satirical comedy in the vein of other Ichikawa films such as Pu-san (1953) and The Crowded Train (1957), it gets surprisingly dark in places and the underlying message to Japanese cinemagoers in 1954 seems to have been that the post-war problems of over-population, unemployment, poverty, corruption and atomic weapons meant that they were all screwed. 

Thanks to A.K.

DVD at Amazon Japan (no English susbtitles) 

 

Ths Shogun and His Mistresses / 大奥(秘)物語 / Ooku maruhi monogatari (‘Secret Tales of the Inner Palace’, 1967)

Obscure Japanese Film #188

Masaya Takahashi

 

Three stories set in the vast and labyrinthine inner chambers of Edo Castle during the reign of the sixth shogun, Ienobu Tokugawa, who held the title from 1709-12. (Nearly 50 at the time, Tokugawa is portrayed here as a somewhat younger man by the 37-year-old Masaya Takahashi.) With the exception of the shogun, only women are permitted in the inner palace, where power plays and factional battles are the norm… 

 

Junko Fuji (left) and Reiko Hagi

 

In the first story, Fusa (Reiko Hagi) is brought to the castle at the request of concubine Okon (Junko Miyazono), who is in poor health and no longer able to bear children, in the hope that she will catch the eye of the shogun and have his child, thus weakening the position of the rival faction of women headed by Osume (Naoko Kubo). However, the shogun prefers the maid that Fusa brought with her instead, Omino (Junko Fuji). But when Osume gets pregnant first, Omino conspires with Okon’s senior attendant Matsushima (Isuzu Yamada) to get pregnant secretly by another man and claim that it’s the shogun’s child…

 

Kyoko Kishida (left) and Tomoko Ogawa

In the second story, the shogun has his eye on the innocent Shinonoi (Tomoko Ogawa) for his next bed partner, but she enters into a lesbian relationship with her mistress, Urao (Kyoko Kishida, in another lesbian role after Manji). But Shininoi has no choice but to obey when summoned to the shogun’s boudoir, which leads Urao to become dangerously jealous… 

 

Kaneko Iwasaki (lying) and Yoshiko Sakuma

 

In the third story, Ochise (Yoshiko Sakuma), a maid to senior lady-in-waiting Asukai (Kaneko Iwasaki), is about to finish her three years of indentured servitude, after which she plans to leave the castle and marry fabric dyer Chokichi (Kunio Murai). No prizes for guessing what happens when she too catches the eye of the lustful shogun…

 

Kunio Murai and Yoshiko Sakuma

 

This Toei production was based on an original screenplay with four contributors, none of whom are especially well-known. Its director, Sadao Nakajima, started out as an assistant director around 1959 at Toei’s Kyoto studios – which meant that most of the films he worked on early on had period settings – before directing his first film, Female Ninja Magic, in 1964. With this debut, he (together with Kyoto studio head Shigeru Okada) was responsible for introducing a new eroticism to the jidaigeki (costume drama) genre, something which is also in evidence in The Shogun and His Mistresses. Although these films were classified as ‘for adults only’ at the time, it should be noted that they were not pornographic, though other filmmakers would copy the template and add nudity and more explicit sex scenes in the years to come. As is often the case, Nakajima’s career was more schizophrenic than that of many directors in the West, and went on to encompass a wide range of material from yakuza flicks and sex documentaries to more highbrow (or at least middlebrow) period dramas. His Meiko Kaji vehicle Jeans Blues: No Future (1974) has a minor cult following, while his passion project The Seburi Story (1985) was nominated for the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. Nakajima’s career as a feature film director ended in the late 1990s, but not quite – he can be seen playing the part of a director at Toei Kyoto studios (much like himself) in Uzumasa Limelight (2014) and returned to the director’s chair one last time at the age of 84 for Love’s Twisting Path (2018) before passing away in 2023. 

 

Isuzu Yamada and Junko Fuji

 

The most striking direction in this film occurs towards the end of the first story, when Omino arrives at the secluded house with the aim of being impregnated by a stranger and we hear the cries of the cicadas reaching fever pitch on the soundtrack before we get a POV shot from the bottom of a well down which the old lady who owns the house drops her bucket. No other scene is quite as memorable, but it’s a strong film overall, although not without its technical flaws – the wire attached to a fake firefly is visible at one point, while more depth of focus would have been preferable in some scenes, when the actors in the background are reduced to blurry blobs. 

 

Tomoko Ogawa and a blurry Kishida

 

But these niggles are more than made up for by the quality cast, excellent score by Hajime Kaburagi (which utilises traditional instruments to great effect) and the fact that, with all the colourful kimono on display, this is exactly the type of film that benefits most from colour cinematography. The film was a huge hit, which not only spawned two sequels directed by Nakajima, but created a whole new subgenre of female-oriented jidaigeki which came to be known in Japan as ‘Ooku’ (inner palace) stories and would include the previously reviewed Tales of the Inner Chambers. 

 

Isuzu Yamada

 

Bonus trivia:

Most of the young actresses featured in the film had never worn the type of kimono known as uchikake before, so jidaigeki veteran Isuzu Yamada (on loan from Toho) had to spend half a day training them how to walk without falling over. 

Director Tadashi Imai was originally attached to the project, but his reluctance to emphasise the erotic aspects of the story led to him being taken off it by studio head Shigeru Okada.

Thanks to A.K.

DVD at Amazon Japan (no English subtitles) 

 

Kyoko Kishida