Kanashiki kuchibue / 悲しき口笛 (‘Sad Whistling’, 1949)

Obscure Japanese Film #249

Hibari Misora

Mitsuko (Hibari Misora) is a homeless child who hangs around with the day labourers at the docks in the Sakuragicho district of Yokohama. They look after her and she keeps them entertained by singing, for which she has a remarkable talent. Mitsuko dresses as a boy, but it’s never explained whether this is simply because it was easier for her to get hold of boy’s clothes or for some other reason. However, she is soon adopted and dressed in girl’s clothes by a waitress named Kyoko (Keiko Tsushima) and her father, Osamu (Ichiro Sugai), a classical violinist reduced to busking to make a living.

Keiko Tsushima

Ichiro Sugai

Meanwhile, Mitsuko’s older brother, Kenzo (Yasumi Hara), a musician, has finally made it back to Yokohama after being posted overseas during the war and is searching for his sister but has also become involved in a smuggling racket. One night he runs into Osamu, who is extremely drunk and singing a song which Kenzo wrote but never published. Kenzo knows that Osamu could only have heard the song from Mitsuko, but Osamu is too intoxicated to provide any useful information. When Osamu subsequently goes blind as a result of drinking bootleg liquor containing methanol, Kyoko’s efforts to raise money to pay his medical bills result in her being forced into helping the same gang of smugglers that Kenzo is involved with...

Yasumi Hara

Although it lacks big Hollywood-style production numbers, this Shochiku production has enough songs that it certainly qualifies as a musical. It was based on a story by the prolific Toshihiko Takeda (1891-1961), whose work also provided the basis for Tomu Uchida’s Policeman (1933) and Hiroshi Shimizu’s Why Did These Women Become Like This? (1956). It was the third film to be directed by Miyoji Ieki, who would become known for films dealing with childhood, although this particular film has the feel of an assignment, and its main raison d’être was probably to function as a vehicle for singing prodigy Hibari Misora. She was 12 at the time but looks younger; it was her fifth film appearance but her first starring role. Here, she comes across as a sort of Japanese Shirley Temple, which might not be entirely by chance – its worth remembering that the film was produced during the occupation when filmmakers needed the approval of the American authorities. As well as Hibari’s singing, Keiko Tsushima – a trained dancer as well as actor – also gets to strut her stuff.

Kanashiki kuchibue is a contrived and sentimental tale but it’s quite well-made and lent a little interest due to its portrayal of a chaotic post-war world in which people are forced to do whatever they can to survive.

Hibari Misora

Sung by Hibari, the title song was released about a month before the movie and became a huge hit.

DVDat Amazon Japan (no English subtitles)

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Yukiko / 由紀子 (1955)

 Obscure Japanese Film #224

 

Keiko Tsushima

1932. Intending to kill herself in a beautiful place, high school girl Yukiko (Keiko Tsushima) travels to Lake Towada in northern Honshu, but her plans are foiled by Kyosuke (Jukichi Uno), an older artist who happened to be contemplating suicide in the same spot. Kyosuke is disabled as a result of contracting polio at the age of 30 and is miserable because his wife has left him and run off with his apprentice.

 

Jukichi Uno

As Yukiko tells her story to Kyosuke, we learn in flashback that she is an orphan brought up by her cold-hearted aunt (Sachiko Murase), who considers Yukiko’s mother to have been a slut as she had Yukiko out of wedlock and who thinks that Yukiko will go the same way. Yukiko’s best friend, Tatsuko (Chieko Seki), has already dropped out of school and become a dancer at the Casino Follies in Asakusa, run by dapper gangster Aoto (Eitaro Ozawa), who has already broken up Tatsuko’s relationship with her fiancé Miyoshi (Isao Kimura). 

 

Chieko Seki

Yukiko finds herself in the awkward position of becoming an intermediary between Tatsuko and Miyoshi, but the result is that she falls out with Tatsuko and becomes close to Miyoshi, who gets in a fight with Aoto, stabs him in self-defence and is forced to flee. Yukiko is then expelled from school for having been friends with Miyoshi, who is now wanted by the police. 

 

Isao Kimura

 

Back in the present, Yukiko and Kyosuke become close companions. Four years pass, and it’s now 1936. When the attempted coup of February 26 occurs, they head south to escape the chaos, and she suggests going to Innoshima island. Her hidden motive is that she knows this is where Miyoshi fled to and is hoping to see him again. She finds him in a remote fishing village where he has now become engaged to fisherman’s daughter Tome (Hitomi Nozoe)…

 

Hitomi Nozoe

This independent production by by Chuo Eiga (who made the previously-reviewed Sisters the same year) was based on a popular radio serial of the time by the prolific Kazuo Kikuta (male, 1908-73), who also provided the source material for Kurosawa’s The Silent Duel (1949), Hideo Oba’s What’s Your Name? (trilogy 1953-54) and wrote the play version of Fumiko Hayashi’s autobiographical Horo-ki filmed by Mikio Naruse in 1962 (the film is known in English as A Wanderer’s Notebook). 

 

Sachiko Murase

It’s difficult to see what director Tadashi Imai saw in this corny and sentimental misery fest – certainly, it’s quite a dull watch and there’s little of interest in it in terms of direction, although he does do an excellent job of recreating the Asakusa of 1932. This neighbourhood was largely destroyed in bombing raids during the war, but the Casino Follies was a real venue located, oddly enough, above an aquarium, and the mock-up constructed for this film looks identical.*

 

Keiko Tsushima

Matters are not helped by the miscasting of the 29-year-old Keiko Tsushima, who’s entirely unconvincing as a high school teenager and immediately looks more comfortable as soon as her character’s finally grown up a bit and shed the sailor suit uniform. The organ music featured prominently on the soundtrack is another poor choice.

 

Eitaro Ozawa and Chieko Seki

The only people to come out of this film well are Sachiko Murase (later the elderly heroine of Kurosawa’s 1991 film Rhapsody in August), whose performance suggests a thin line between puritanism and sadism, and Eitaro Ozawa as the foppish, narcissistic bully Aoto. Ozawa seems to have got into his role a bit too much, in fact, as I swear he’s hitting poor Isao Kimura for real during their big confrontation scene.

*Go to this link if you’d like to compare the two.

Watched with dodgy subtitles.

Junpaku no yoru / 純白の夜/ (‘Pure White Nights’, 1951)

Obscure Japanese Film #161

Michiyo Kogure

Ikuko (Michiyo Kogure) is a young woman happily married to Tsunehiko (Seizaburo Kawazu), a banker. At a party, she dances with one of his friends, Kusunoki (Masayuki Mori), a dapper businessman. Afterwards, she’s surprised to discover that Kusunoki has slipped a note into her bag confessing his love for her. Ikuko informs her husband, who finds the situation amusing and advises her to ignore it and carry on as if nothing has happened. However, Kusunoki proves to be persistent and Ikuko begins to develop feelings for him in spite of herself. 

Masayuki Mori

 

Meanwhile, Ikuko’s younger sister, Tsuyuko (Keiko Tsushima), wants to marry a penniless actor-playwright (Keiji Sada), but her mother (Sachiko Murase) won’t allow it and wants her to marry Tsunehiko’s colleague, Sawada (Kinzo Shin). Ikuko regards Sawada with contempt but, unfortunately for her, he finds out that she has been seeing Kusunoki behind her husband’s back. During a storm, he gets Ikuko drunk and uses his information to pressure Ikuko into sleeping with him…

Keiko Tsushima

 

This Shochiku production was the first ever film version of a Yukio Mishima novel. Junpaku no yoru was first published as a magazine serial the previous year and has yet to be translated into English. Although not regarded as one of his major works, it seems to have been more than a mere job to pay the rent, and Shochiku’s publicity quoted Mishima as saying the following:

Junpaku no yoru is my favourite of the works I wrote last year. Works that are too overtly ambitious can have a certain vulgarity about them, but this one has relatively little of that, which is probably why the author likes it so much. However, since it is a novel that focuses more on psychology than plot, when I heard about the possibility of making it into a movie, I wondered if it could actually be done. This is because psychological portrayal is one of the weakest points of film.

The last sentence of Mishima’s quote is especially relevant here – although the film is quite effective in communicating the thoughts of the characters via the facial expressions and gestures of the characters as well as the dialogue, it basically adds up to scene after scene of people talking in rooms, and director Hideo Oba is not always inventive enough in his direction to make this very interesting. It probably doesn’t help that none of the main characters are terribly sympathetic, and it seems implausible that Ikuko would give herself to someone as repellent as Sawada even while drunk on a stormy night. Kinzo Shin – surely one of the gauntest faces in cinema – gets one of his better roles here as the smirking, chuckling, leering Sawada, but (from what I could gather by reading a translated synopsis), the Sawada of the book seems to have been a more sympathetic, slightly comic character. 

Kinzo Shin

 

Incidentally, other differences from the book are that Kusonoki no longer has a sick wife, a younger sister to Ikuko and Tsuyuko has disappeared, and the character played in the film by a young Keiji Sada was portrayed in the novel as being a spoilt, jazz-obsessed playboy.

Keiji Sada

 

Like The Ball at the Anjo House (1947), this is one of those post-war Japanese films in which the characters seem to live like wealthy foreigners in big, Western-style houses and are highly cultured with an interest in European art. I wonder how many people in Japan really lived like that at the time or to what extent audiences could relate to such people – perhaps it was some kind of aspirational fantasy? 

Michiyo Kogure

 

This is one of four films directed by Hideo Oba that I’ve seen now, and so far it’s hard to see him as anything other than competent but undistinguished.

Supposedly, Mishima appears as an extra in the ball scene, but if you can spot him, you have a sharper eye than mine.

Nemuri Kyoshiro – Journal of an Outlaw / 眠狂四郎 無頼控 / Nemuri Kyôshirô burai hikae (aka The Lonely Swordsman Part 1, 1956)

Obscure Japanese Film #97

Koji Tsuruta

This Toho production was the first film based on the series of novels about Kyoshiro Nemuri, a fictional swordsman created by Renzaburo Shibata (1917-78) in the same year this film was released. The character later became the hero of a series of films starring Raizo Ichikawa – these are known in the West as the Sleepy Eyes of Death series (‘Nemuri’ actually means ‘sleep of death’ according to Merlin David’s first-rate subtitles here). Shibata appears to have modelled his character partly on Ryunosuke Tsukue, the anti-hero of Kaizan Nakazato’s novel Dai-bosatsu toge, portrayed most memorably by Tatsuya Nakadai in Sword of Doom. However, in the hands of actor Koji Tsuruta (see The Romance of Yushima), Nemuri simply comes across as an oddly unlikeable hero, especially considering the fact that he rapes Mihoyo (Keiko Tsushima) a few minutes into the film. Of course, she falls in love with him as a result (I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen this dodgy cliché in Japanese films). Although there is some compensation in the fact that the women get to do some of the fighting too (which is probably the best thing about this film), unfortunately the swordfights are never very convincing and feature neither cutting sounds nor blood. This would change forever post-Yojimbo and Sanjuro, but even though those game-changing movies were still a few years away at this point, I felt that director Shigeaki Hidaka (who also made World War III: 41 Hours of Fear) could have done a little better on the action front than what we see here. 

Keiko Tsushima

 

Talking of Kurosawa, the screenplay was written by his frequent collaborator Hideo Oguni and features two of his regular actors, Kamatari Fujiwara and (all too briefly) Bokuzen Hidari. It’s by no means a bad film, but I found it disappointing on the whole and the plot felt both over-complicated and implausible (this is why I couldn’t face writing a synopsis). The character of Kiheita, ‘the flying squirrel’ (Shin Tokudaiji) is especially daft – he’s a hunchbacked swordsman who is supposedly Nemuri’s deadliest rival and can leap really high into the air (i.e. be pulled up by wires). 

Kamatari Fujiwara

 

Shin Tokudaiji

Koji Tsuruta starred in two sequels before Toho dropped the series in 1958. Part 2 was shot back-to-back with this one and features many of the same cast members, but adds Koji Mitsui and Setsuko Wakayama, while the second sequel was shot in widescreen with a new director and a particularly impressive supporting cast including Isuzu Yamada, Haruko Sugimura and Michiyo Kogure. Daiei studios revived the character with Raizo Ichikawa and greater success in 1963 in a series which continued for 12 films and probably ended only due to the premature death of their star in 1969.

Koji Tsuruta

 

Wedding Day / 嫁ぐ日 / Totsugu hi (1956)

Obscure Japanese Film #94

Masami Taura and Keiko Tsushima

 

Sakie (Keiko Tsushima) is a young widow living with her father-in-law, Shinsaku Kijima (Tatsuo Saito), and his family. Kijima is a formerly successful playwright whose confidence has vanished in the post-war years; seen as a progressive in his heyday, his ideas are now regarded as hopelessly out-of-date. Unbeknownst to Kijima, Sakie pays a visit to Haiyuza (the real-life theatre company which trained Tatsuya Nakadai among many others) and asks director Mizuno (Seiji Miyaguchi) if he would help to get Kijima out of his funk by requesting a new play from him. Meanwhile, the rest of the family think it’s time that Sakie got married again and believe they’ve found the perfect candidate…

Tatsuo Saito

 

Although distributed by Shochiku, this is an independent production by Kindai Eiga Kyokai, the company formed by director Kozaburo Yoshimura, screenwriter Kaneto Shindo and actor Taiji Tonoyama in 1950, and which went on to produce films such as The Naked Island (1960) and Onibaba (1964). 

Keiko Tsushima

 

The modest story of Wedding Day may seem inconsequential, but it’s well done in all departments and a pleasure to watch. Perhaps the best thing about it is that it provided roles with depth for two underrated actors: Tatsuo Saito, who had starred in many of Ozu’s earlier works, and Keiko Tsushima, best-known for playing the beautiful daughter of one of the farmers in Seven Samurai. She also played the ‘stripper’ who doesn’t actually strip in Tomu Uchida’s Twilight Saloon. 

Sumiko Hidaka and Kurumi Yamabato

 

Setsuko Wakayama

Also notable among the cast are the actresses playing Kijima’s three daughters: Sumiko Hidaka (the hard-working one), Kurumi Yamabato (the lazy tomboyish one) and Setsuko Wakayama (the one who has a miscarriage but remains cheerful). Hayuza's Masami Taura is effective, too, as the son who has a crush on Sakie.

Director Kozaburo Yoshimura and his cast clearly went to great pains to make the characters convincing as fully-rounded human beings – note, for example, how the dialogue scenes usually involve someone carrying out a chore of some kind while speaking, or the troubled expression that sometimes passes across Sakie’s face – but only when she’s alone. 

Kaneko Iwasaki, Eitaro Ozawa, Seiji Miyaguchi and others

 

Recommended viewing for fans of Ozu and Naruse, Wedding Day should also be of interest to Japanese theatre buffs as Haiyuza founders Chieko Higashiyama and Eitaro Ozawa both make appearances (although Ozawa has no lines and is only glimpsed briefly), while Haiyuza member Kaneko Iwasaki is seen rehearsing the part of Anya in The Cherry Orchard – a role she had actually performed for the company five years earlier. 

Poster for Haiyuza's 1951 production of The Cherry Orchard