A Picture of Madame Yuki / 雪夫人繪圖 / Yuki Fujin ezu (1968)

Obscure Japanese Film #227

1949. Teenage orphan Hamako (Sumiko Hasegawa) arrives at a grand residence at Shinobazu Pond in Ueno, Tokyo, to serve as maid to the aristocratic Madame Yuki (Yoshiko Sakuma), whose father, a former viscount, has just died. Various relatives and opportunistic acquaintances flock to the scene like vultures hoping to secure a piece of the carcass for themselves. Among them are Yuki’s husband, Naoyuki (Isao Yamagata), who spends most of his time in Kyoto with his mistress, Ayako (Yuko Hama). However, it turns out that Yuki’s father has left nothing but debts, so the house is sold and the family’s other home in snowy Nagano is turned into an inn. Meanwhile, Yuki has been having an affair with Kikunaka (Tetsuro Tanba), a married writer, but even though she detests her own husband, he retains a mysterious sexual hold over her from which she seems unable to break free...

Isao Yamagata

Although the official English title of this film chooses ‘Picture’ over ‘Portrait’, it is, of course, based on the same novel as the better-known Kenji Mizoguchi film of 1950. The novel, by Seiichi Funahashi* (1904-76), first appeared in serial form between 1948-1950 and remains untranslated into English. To be frank, I can’t stand the story in either film version. One reason is the portrayal of unquestioning devotion, even idolatry, of a servant for her mistress, which seems to give tacit approval to the class system. Although Hamako becomes disillusioned with her mistress and Funahashi may have been trying to make a broader point about the disillusionment of the younger generation in the post-war years regarding the ruling class, the problem is that Yuki is presented as someone to be pitied and, if not deserving of the elevated status she enjoyed, it’s only because of her lack of courage. Indeed, while her self-pitying, acquiescent victimhood is irritating, she’s still painted as a tragic heroine. It also doesn’t help that the bad behaviour of the villains of the piece – the cruel husband and his predictably cheap and vulgar mistress – is so blatant that it’s never convincing.

At heart, the story is an old-fashioned melodrama, and, while the writer-director of this version, Masashige Narusawa – who had been a screenwriter for Mizoguchi on four of the latter’s final films – has for the most part clearly tried to downplay this as much as possible, still it is what it is. He certainly made a very different film to his mentor’s and was, reportedly, more faithful to the original novel. However, well-photographed though it is, it lacks the often inspired camera placement and composition found in the original, and so is not really an improvement overall, only in certain aspects. Transferring the bulk of the story to a snowy location (yuki means snow in Japanese) was a good idea, but it’s those crane shots with the rolling mist by the lake at the end of Mizoguchi’s film that linger in my mind.

Tetsuro Tanba

Compared to the wimpy character portrayed by Ken Uehara in 1950, Tetsuro Tanba is a much more commanding, masculine presence, yet none of the performances in either film are especially notable, perhaps because Funahashi – who also wrote the source novel for The Story of a Blind Woman – failed to put much life into them in the first place. Still, it’s a shame that this proved to be the final film directed by Narusawa as he clearly had talent, even if it’s less evident here than in his previous two pictures.

Produced by Toei, who had been pushing Yoshiko Sakuma as a star of literary erotica since their 1963 film of Tsutomu Mizukami’s Gobancho Yugiri-ro (aka A House in the Quarter), this version was shelved and not released until it was bought by Nikkatsu in 1975.

*Sometimes listed as Funabashi, but I think that’s incorrect.

Thanks to Coralsundy for the subtitles, which can be found here.

Thanks to A.K.

Asakusa kurenai dan / 浅草紅団 / (‘The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa’, 1952)

 

Machiko Kyo

Maki (Nobuko Otowa) is a dancer at the Asakusa Follies,  Ryuko (Machiko Kyo) is a kabuki actress and quick-change artist who was adopted by local gang boss Nakane (Joji Oka) when she was a child. Maki is in debt to Nakane, who has designs on her and ordered his men to beat up her boyfriend, Shimakichi (Jun Negami), and scare him away from Asakusa. However, Shimakichi injured one of Nakane’s henchmen and escaped before disappearing for a year. Now he’s back in search of Maki, but Nakane has not forgotten about him and wants revenge, so he tricks Ryuko into luring Shimakichi into a trap…

 

Jun Negami

This Daiei production was supposedly based on Yasunari Kawabata’s 1930 novel of the same name, a fine English translation of which was published by the University of California Press in 2005 under the title The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa. However, the only thing this film has in common with the novel is that it concerns the criminal underworld of Asakusa, a pleasure district of Tokyo which was twice destroyed – first by the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, later by American bombs. Kawabata’s novel is a largely plotless and uncharacteristically modernist work consisting of a series of vignettes about the petty thieves and prostitutes who haunted the back alleys of Asakusa and kept an eye for out for each other. Not only is there no gang boss like Nakane, but none of the characters from the book appear in the film and the setting has been updated to the post-war era. While the nature of Kawabata’s novel would have made it difficult to adapt for the screen, it’s disappointing that screenwriter Masashige Narusawa failed to come up with a better story than the corny melodrama which unfolds here, especially considering the fact that he was responsible for many fine scripts, including a number for Mizoguchi.

 

Kyo in bumpkin mode

The other reason I found this film something of a let-down is that it was directed by Seiji Hisamatsu, whose later works Five Sisters (1954) and Policeman’s Diary (1955) I greatly enjoyed. On a more positive note, it does offer a fun role for Machiko Kyo, who gets to appear in a number of different guises, as she would also later do in The Hole (1957) and Black Lizard (1962). Watching the scene in which Ryuko pretends to be a country bumpkin, I even found myself wondering who the strangely familiar-looking actress was before realising it was Kyo. 

 

Joji Oka

Otherwise, Joji Oka is a rather hammy bad guy and Jun Negami a decent enough hero, while a young Nobuko Otowa gets to sing the theme song, dance and show off what Daiei touted as her ‘million dollar dimples’. Perhaps it was partly being reduced to a pair of dimples that led her to quit Daiei the year this film was released and pursue largely unglamorous roles from then on.

 

Nobuko Otowa and dimple

Presumably, the film proved popular as Daiei followed it with Asakusa monogatari (‘Asakusa Story’) the following year, Asakusa no yoru (‘Asakusa at Night’) in 1954 and Asakusa no hi (‘Lights of Asakusa’) in 1956, although I believe that each featured an entirely separate story.

 

Machiko Kyo

There had actually been an earlier film of the same title, again supposedly based on Kawabata’s book, back in 1930. It appeared before Kawabata had even finished the novel, which was being published in instalments in the Tokyo Asahi newspaper. Unfortunately, the 1930 film appears not to have survived.

 

 

Thanks to A.K.

 

DVD at Amazon Japan (no English subtitles)

Yojohan monogatari: Shofu shino / 四畳半物語 娼婦しの (‘Tale of the Four and Half Mat Room: Prostitute Shino’, 1966)

Obscure Japanese Film #189

Takahiro Tamura and Yoshiko Mita

 

Shino (Yoshiko Mita) is an amateur geisha working under the name of O-Shige at a modest geisha house run by the money-loving Taneko (Michiyo Kogure), where she also lives. This means that she lacks the musical and dancing skills of a true geisha and simply sleeps with men for money – not because it’s the life she wanted to lead, but because she has taken it upon herself to pay off his father’s debts so that he can avoid prison. Shino is involved with Ryukichi (Shigeru Tsuyuguchi), who works informally as Taneko’s procurer, but he’s a lazy sponger, so she’s naturally not in love with him. 

 

Tamura, Mita and Tsuyuguchi

 

One day, Tadasu (Takahiro Tamura) visits the geisha house as a new client. Compared to most of her customers, he’s kind and gentle, and the two fall in love. However, being a former samurai reduced to pickpocketing, he can’t afford to buy her freedom. He resolves to go straight, but meanwhile Ryukichi becomes jealous of their relationship and begins plotting revenge… 

 

 

Like the previously-reviewed Cards Are My Life, this was one of just five films written and directed by Masashige Narusawa, who was more usually a screenwriter only. This one is an adaptation of a short story by Kafu Nagai first published in 1917 – a story which went on to have a controversial history when a second, pornographic version appeared and began to circulate on the black market. Nagai claimed that somebody else had added the explicit material without his knowledge, but many thought he had written it himself. After the later version was finally posthumously published in 1972, the magazine publisher responsible was taken to court and charged with obscenity. In any case, although Toei studios based their film on the earlier version, their choice of it as material was one of the tentative steps they were taking at the time to introduce more eroticism into their films as a means of competing with television, where such adult themes were not allowed. 

 

Yumiko Nogawa and Yoshiko Mita

 

As a film set in a single location, albeit with quite an elaborate exterior set as well as the interior one, this was also probably quite a cheap film to make, although it never looks it. Narusawa (who had studied under Mizoguchi) uses long takes with few close-ups and little cutting – a style I’ve always admired as I feel that it promotes naturalistic acting and makes the viewer feel less led by the nose than in the many films which frequently cut from one close-up to another. Cinematographer Juhei Suzuki – who shot 13 Assassins (1963) and Tales of the Inner Chambers (1968) – also deserves credit for his mobile camerawork, which enabled Narusawa to have only 39 cuts in the entire film.

 

 

On the other hand, the performances are adequate but not exceptional and the story is not terribly compelling, featuring as it does the types of characters and situations we’ve seen many times before. Narusawa retains the framing device used by Nagai (here featuring narration by a mostly-unseen Eijiro Tono), but I’m not sure it added much. The one really poor choice, though, is the easy-listening jazz score by Harumi Ibe, which just seems out of place in a Japanese period film, especially when the strummed guitar and accordion kick in, which lend a distinctly inappropriate French flavour to the proceedings!

Thanks to A.K. 

Tales of the Inner Chambers / 大奥絵巻 / Ooku emaki (1968)

Obscure Japanese Film #173

Yoshiko Sakuma

 

Edo Castle, c.1790. When virginal chambermaid Aki (Yoshiko Sakuma) catches the eye of the shogun (Takahiro Tamura) while taking part in a dance performance, he decides to make her his concubine. Aki’s elder sister, Asaoke (Chikage Awashima), is already employed at the castle, but once Aki enters the inner chambers, all family ties are supposed to be forgotten. 

Takahiro Tamura

 

Aki is extremely reluctant at first, but has absolutely no choice in the matter; fortunately, the shogun treats her better than she expected. This may be because she reminds him of the girl he wanted to marry who died, leading him to become trapped in a loveless marriage of political convenience to Hagino (Hiroko Sakuramachi). Unfortunately, the favouritism of the shogun for Aki and the fact that this is to the advantage of Asaoke is greatly resented by some female members of the court, who split into two factions. 

Chikage Awashima

 

Aki also has a younger sister, Machi (Reiko Ohara), who has a naïve idea of the inner chambers and wants to work there but is discouraged from doing so by her sisters. When the rival faction offer her a position, the scheming between the two groups spirals out of control, leading to blackmail, torture and murder... 

Reiko Ohara

 

Surprisingly, this Toei production is not based on a literary source – the intelligent screenplay was an original work by Masashige Narusawa (who wrote and directed the recently-reviewed Cards Are My Life). In this case, the director is Kosaku Yamashita, perhaps best-known for the same year’s Big Time Gambling Boss. It looks like he put a great deal of care into this, and was ably abetted by cinematographer Juhei Suzuki (13 Assassins), not to mention those responsible for the costumes and art direction, whose combined talents make this film a feast for the eyes which exploits the colour format to the fullest. Ichiro Saito’s orchestral music is also an integral part of the film and is another asset that marks it out as being far from routine. 

Chikage Awashima

 

As far as I can tell, the story itself has little historical basis. It unfolds rather like a Jacobean tragedy and offers a pretty dark view of human nature. As Asaoke (another fine performance from Chikage Awashima) observes, “There is no righteousness or morality here, only female vanity and ostentation. You slay or be slain, kill or be killed.” Indeed, things do get violent, but not gratuitously so, and the film’s comparative restraint may be one reason it’s not better known. In fact, it’s a fine piece of work all round, and the only explanation for its currently criminally low rating on IMDb (5.4) that occurs to me is that maybe some people didn’t get the sexploitation movie they were expecting. 

Yoshiko Sakuma and Hitomi Nozoe

 

I was surprised to see former Daiei star Hitomi Nozoe in such a minor role as the one she has here, but then realised that she’d left Daiei to have kids in 1962 and had only just begun attempting to resurrect her acting career.

A note on the title: Ooku is the name for the inner palace or chambers of Edo Castle, where the shogun’s harem was kept, while emaki means ‘picture scroll’ rather than ‘tales’.

Thanks to A.K.

DVD at Amazon Japan (no English subtitles)