The Invisible Wall / 眼の壁 / Me no kabe (‘Wall of Eyes’, 1958)

Obscure Japanese Film #137

Keiji Sada

Masao Oda

 

This Shochiku production stars Keiji Sada as Hagisaki, the deputy head of an accounts department whose boss, Sekino (Masao Oda), commits suicide. Hagisaki receives a letter from the dead man explaining that he felt it was the only way to take responsibility for losing 30 million yen of the company’s money as a result of a scam. 

Ko Nishimura

 

Shinji Takano

Despite being warned by the company’s lawyer, Segawa (Ko Nishimura), not to interfere, Hagisaki takes it upon himself to investigate and joins forces with his friend Tamura, a journalist (Shinji Takano). Their clues lead them first to the Red Moon bar on the Ginza, and eventually to a mountain village in Nagano. 

Fumio Watanabe and Jun Tatara

 

Yachiyo Otori

Jun Usami

 

Among the other people involved in the mystery are bartender Yamamoto (Fumio Watanabe), a private detective (Jun Tatara), a moneylender’s secretary named Etsuko (Yachiyo Otori) and right-wing politician Funasaka (Jun Usami), but it proves to be a crusty old villager (Bokuzen Hidari) who provides the key to the mystery before events reach a gruesome climax involving an acid bath… 

Bokuzen Hidari

 

Based on a novel of the same name by popular mystery writer Seicho Matsumoto, this story is typical of the author’s work, but not one of the best adaptations of it. Masayoshi Ikeda’s suspenseful music score helps, but the story is allowed to become a little too complicated for its own good and fails to maintain the interest as a result. 

 

It also doesn’t help that the hero, Hagisaki, is such a blank slate of a character – Keiji Sada was a good actor, but he’s given very little to work with here, which is at least partly his own fault as he was a big enough star to have made changes if he had cared to. It’s competently but rather indifferently directed by Hideo Oba, best known for his What Is Your Name? trilogy (1953-54), which also starred Keiji Sada, but the proceedings are occasionally enlivened by some of the excellent character actors who pop up along the way.  

Yachiyo Otori

 

Leading lady Yachiyo Otori had been a stage star for the Takarazuka theatre company; this was her first film under contract to Shochiku. She makes little impact here, although it’s not much of a role, to be fair. Her film career never really took off and she had more success on stage and television. At the time of writing, she’s still alive at the age of 91.

 

The Lost Alibi / 黒い画集 あるサラリーマンの証言 / Kuroi gashu: Aru sarariman no shogen ('Black Art Book: An Employee’s Confession', 1960)

Obscure Japanese Film #45

Keiju Kobayashi

Based on a 1958 Seicho Matsumoto short story entitled Shogen (‘Testimony’) published as part of his ‘Black Art Book’ (Kuroigashu) series, this crime drama stars Keiju Kobayashi as Ishino, a procurement manager for a fabric company. The film spends the first 8 minutes showing us how uninteresting the life of this faceless executive and family man is before revealing his secret – not only does he have a mistress, but the pretty young female in question is an employee who works under him. Chieko (Chisako Hara) is a bubble-headed good-time girl living in a love nest paid for by Ishino. Given the fact that Ishino has a sweet-tempered and still-attractive wife (Chieko Nakakita) as well as two children, he really has no justification for his behaviour, but he seems to have no qualms as long as he’s able to keep it secret and avoid losing face. Leaving Chieko’s apartment after one of his evening visits, he bumps into a neighbour, Sugiyama (Masao Oda), who works as a door-to-door salesman. When Sugiyama becomes a murder suspect, his only alibi is the chance meeting with Ishino, who is extremely reluctant to admit having seen him as he believes it may expose his philandering…

Chisako Hara

 

The story takes some ingenious twists and turns which are all the more effective for being quite plausible. The excellent script is by Shinobu Hashimoto, who collaborated with Kurosawa on numerous occasions, wrote the screenplay for Hara-Kiri (1962) and skilfully adapted the work of Satsuo Matsumoto for a number of films directed by Yoshitaro Nomura.

Ko Nishimura

 

The cast is uniformly good, and also features Ko Nishimura as the detective on the case and Kin Sugai as Sugiyama’s wife. A specialist in downtrodden characters, in one scene she breaks down and begs Ishino for help in an exhibition of raw emotion so powerful it’s uncomfortable for the viewer as well. 

Kin Sugai

 

The star of the film, Keiju Kobayashi, was best-known in Japan at the time for salaryman comedies, so his casting here is interesting in the way it subverts his usual image, as would Kihachi Okamoto’s Elegant Life of Mr Everyman (1963) in a rather different way. He was also an excellent dramatic actor whose other notable performances include Happiness of Us Alone (1961), in which he and Hideko Takamine portrayed a deaf-mute couple with admirable sensitivity, and his cameo as the samurai locked in the cupboard in Sanjuro. Kobayashi had already scored a hit for this film’s director, Hiromichi Horikawa, in The Naked General (1958), for which Kobayashi had won a Best Actor Award. The two would go on to collaborate on a number of further occasions, including on Shiro to kuro (1963), a film not dissimilar to this one and which involved many of the same people. Horikawa described Kobayashi as ‘an irreplaceable actor whose extraordinary performances burst out from an extremely ordinary person.’ Horikawa himself was highly rated by Akira Kurosawa, for whom he had often worked as an assistant director and, on the basis of The Lost Alibi and Shiro to kuro, Horikawa is the Japanese director whose work I would most like to be able to see more of. 

 

Masao Oda and Kin Sugai

The Lost Alibi appears to have been pretty successful and spawned several TV remakes, including a 1965 version starring Rentaro Mikuni. In the case of Horikawa’s version, there is more to it than just a clever crime drama. While not explicitly discussed, Japan’s post-war trauma is evident throughout, the characters embodying the moral vacuum the country seemed in danger of becoming after the seismic cultural shock of defeat, the atom bomb and the American occupation, all of which challenged the people’s long-held values and in some cases led them to embrace materialism or lead lives of hedonistic excess. In this example, the character of Ishino is so far gone that it is made quite explicit at the end of the film that he merely considers himself to have been unfortunate and has learned precisely nothing – a discomfiting ending, to say the least.