Chutaro of Banba /番場の忠太郎/ Banba no Chutaro (1955)

Obscure Japanese Film #8 

Isuzu Yamada and Tomisaburo Wakayama

Based on a play by Shin Hasegawa entitled Mabuta no haha (which translates rather awkwardly as ‘Mother of the Eyelids’), Chutaro of Banba stars Tomisaburo ‘Lone Wolf’ Wakayama in one of his first film appearances as the title character. Having already been a famous kabuki actor before quitting the theatre in 1953 to concentrate on judo (becoming a black-belt in the process), Wakayama’s cinema career saw him go straight into starring roles in action pictures.

Chutaro of Banba has an autobiographical element as original author Hasegawa had himself been separated from his mother at an early age and the hero of his story is a matatabi (wandering yakuza) searching for his long-lost mother. Along the way, Chutaro gets into fights with less honourable yakuza, picks up a couple of waifs and strays, makes a few friends and falls in love. The opening fight scene may seem a little tame as, pre-dating Yojimbo by several years,  it’s too early for spurting blood, hacked-off limbs and even the sound of clashing swords, but Wakayama moves pretty fast for a chubby guy and is even better in a later fight scene when he fends off multiple opponents with a water dipper. 

 

The film boasts a strong supporting cast, three of whom have Kurosawa connections. Chutaro’s friend Hanji is played by Koji Mitsui, who appeared in seven Kurosawa films from Scandal to Dodes’ka-den, most notably as the gambler in The Lower Depths, where he got to deliver the memorable last line, ‘Idiot…you ruined the song.’ He rarely played a leading role, but specialised in acerbic character parts in which his wonderfully rasping voice and expressive facial features made an indelible impression. The English Wikipedia page for Mitsui is surprisingly detailed and well worth a read.

 

Koji Mitsui

Hanji’s sister, who supplies the love interest in the film, is played by Yoko Katsuragi, who was Takashi Shimura’s sick daughter in Kurosawa’s Scandal and also popped up in the Kurosawa-scripted The Portrait (1948), directed by Keisuke Kinoshita, although she has a better part in Kinoshita’s A Broken Drum (1949) as an aspiring actress playing Hamlet. 

Yoko Katsuragi

 

Most notably, however, Isuzu Yamada appears as Chutaro’s mother. Yamada was one of the greats and appeared in three films for Kurosawa, always in villainous roles - most memorably as the Lady Macbeth equivalent in Throne of Blood. In her youth she had been a beauty, often playing romantic leads, and she had in fact appeared in the first version of Mabuta no haha in 1931 – not as the mother, but as Otose, the half-sister Chutaro never knew he had (played in the 1955 version by Sanae Mitsuoka). 

 

Isuzu Yamada

The 1931 film was a silent directed by Hiroshi Inagaki and starring Tomu Uchida favourite Chiezo Kataoka (Bloody Spear at Mount Fuji / Swords in the Moonlight / Killing in Yoshiwara). Kataoka repeated the role for a 1936 version, while a third appeared in 1938 starring Kazuo Hasegawa (Gate of Hell / An Actor’s Revenge), making the 1955 film the fourth but not the last: in 1962, Tai Kato directed a remake with Kinnosuke Nakamura.

This 1955 Shintoho version is directed by Nobuo Nakagawa, remembered mostly for his horror films and sometimes referred to as ‘the Roger Corman of Japan.’ His best-known film nowadays seems to be Jigoku (Hell, 1960) – a shame, as I personally thought that was easily the worst of the five Nakagawa films I’ve seen. Much better were The Ghost of Yotsuya and a couple of female-focused films noir, Death Row Woman and A Wicked Woman. 

Hisaya Morishige, Tomisaburo Wakayama and Yoko Katsuragi

 

Chutaro of Banba has a lot going for it – the strong cast, which also includes an enjoyable guest star appearance by Hisaya Morishige as a surprisingly genial law enforcement official; Kagai Okaido’s dynamic camerawork and excellent sense of composition, and a pretty decent music score by Yasuji Kiyose. The story may be sentimental but there are quirks enough to keep things interesting all the way to the finale, when we are treated to one of those unnecessarily  sad endings that Japanese audiences seem to crave (see my earlier review of The Saga of Tanegashima for more thoughts on this phenomenon).

The film can be bought in a good quality print with excellent subtitles (by Merlin David) here: https://samuraidvd.com/chutaro-of-banba/ 

The Saga of Tanegashima / Teppo Denraiki (1968)

Obscure Japanese Film #1

This is an interesting film about the introduction of the firearm to Japan. American actor Rick Jason plays Pinto, a Portuguese captain whose ship is caught in a storm and badly damaged off the coast of Japan in 1543, when Japan was still officially closed to foreigners. As a result, he is forced to make his way to shore and ask the local lord for permission to stay until his ship can be repaired. Having never seen one before, the lord becomes interested in Pinto’s musket and asks him to demonstrate how it works. Pinto obliges and then offers the weapon as a gift in exchange for a safe harbour. The lord instructs his best blacksmith and weapon-maker, Kinbei (Eijiro Tono), to take the gun apart, find out how it works and duplicate it. Meanwhile, Pinto falls in love with Kinbei’s daughter, Wakasa (Ayako Wakao).

I’m not aware of any other films telling the story of how guns arrived in Japan, so the film has that on its side to begin with. There are some surprisingly lengthy, detailed scenes showing Kinbei’s attempts to reverse-engineer the musket, which involves a great deal of hammering red hot pieces of iron into shape. These parts look very authentic and I found them quite interesting. As a matter of fact, the film probably has a potential fan-base consisting of blacksmiths, antique-weapons fanciers and fans of the TV show Forged in Fire. I appreciate it when scenes of this kind are not faked or skipped over in films – a particular favourite of mine is the long scene in Le Trou where the prisoners knock a hole in the floor.

Japanese films which require Western actors in major parts have often had difficulty in finding good ones, as anyone who has seen Masahiro Shinoda’s Silence will be able to attest.  However, in this case, that is not a problem as Rick Jason turns out to be pretty decent as Captain Pinto in an Errol-Flynn kind of way, even if I had never heard of him beforehand. A quick bit of research reveals that he was an American TV star who had played a couple of leads in very minor films in the late ‘50s. I cannot believe that anyone in Japan had ever heard of him, so it was very generous of them to give him top billing over Japan’s major star Ayako Wakao. Or perhaps somebody had persuaded the Japanese that Jason was a big star in America – it’s not like they could Google him in those days.

In my opinion, Wakao is one of the most talented and versatile actresses in film, not to mention one of the most beautiful. Watch her performances in Satsuo Yamamoto’s Freezing Point, Kenji Mizoguchi’s Street of Shame, Keigo Kimura’s Diary of a Mad Old Man, and the films of Yasuzo Masumura and you will see that she was much more than a pretty face and could portray any type of personality with no apparent effort. While she has little to challenge her in The Saga of Tanegashima playing a traditional Japanese woman who finds herself falling in love with a foreigner against her better judgement,  she nevertheless gives her usual flawless performance.

The other main actor is Eijiro Tono, a familiar character actor who must have been thrilled to be given such a juicy role at the age of 60. If you’ve seen any Japanese films from the ‘50s or ‘60s at all, you’ve probably seen Tono, so frequently does his ugly mug turn up. He was especially good at playing characters you’d like to push over a cliff, and initially he seems to be one of those in this film. However, Kinbei turns out to be the most interesting character as he’s the one who undergoes a change and begins to question the wisdom of his actions.

Having watched a lot of Japanese films, I’ve noticed that sad endings are far more common than in Hollywood ones, and this can only be because Japanese audiences prefer them for some reason. It would take someone with more insight than myself to explain the reasons for that, but I’m convinced that a Hollywood studio would never have gone with the ending used here. This film could easily have had a happy ending, but a perfunctory tragedy occurs whose only purpose seems to have been to provide the sad ending Japanese audiences seem to crave. These endings often feel just as contrived as the upbeat ones in Hollywood films can do, and frequently involve somebody dying before their time or people who love each other being forced to part, and are usually accompanied by a lot of pointless shouting of the departed / departing one’s name. Unfortunately, this film is no exception and the ending spoiled it a bit for me, which is a shame as I otherwise greatly enjoyed this film.

The director was Kazuo Mori, who does not seem to be a great artist by any means, but certainly knew how to make a movie. I’ve seen one other by him – A Killer’s Key – which was also well-made, although I enjoyed it less as the script was ridiculous. He also directed the first Zatoichi film.