The Last Trump Card / 最後の切札 / Saigo no kirifuda (1960)

Obscure Japanese Film #193

Keiji Sada

 

Tatsuno (Keiji Sada) is a clothing store owner who has an unusual side hustle – he pretends to be part of a ‘New Religion research group’ with his sidekick Yoshimura (Seiji Miyaguchi), and together they extort money from religious organisations by offering to save them from potential scandals (mostly created by Tatsuno) for a price. In other words, they are blackmailers, and their only motivation seems to be greed. As if this weren’t sleazy enough, Tatsuno also dabbles in a little pimping and procuring on the side, and is having affairs with multiple women including nightclub singer Sonoko (Miyuki Kuwano from The Shape of Night) and TV actress Tsuruko (Keiko Hibino), both of whom he treats with contempt… 

 

Miyuki Kuwano

 

Based on a 1957 novel entitled Niku no boku (‘Servant of the Flesh’ or ‘I am Flesh’) by Hideo Shirasaki (1920-92) and with a screenplay by Kurosawa regular Shinobu Hashimoto, this Shochiku production was directed by Yoshitaro Nomura, who had been an assistant to Kurosawa on Scandal (1950) and The Idiot (1951), and it features a whole host of character actors familiar from Kurosawa pictures, including Miki Odagiri (the girl from Ikiru), Jerry Fujio, Seiji Miyaguchi, Eijiro Yanagi, Taiji Tonoyama and Koji Mitsui. And just when you think Ko Nishimura’s not going to be in it, his macabre little face finally pops up to deliver the rather gruesome ending - it's the sort of role usually played by Michael Ripper in Hammer horror films. However, in my view screenwriter Hashimoto sometimes produced sub-par work when not undert the guidance of a really great director like Kurosawa or Masaki Kobayashi, and here he allows the story to become too talky and complicated (even when watched with pretty good subtitles) while forgetting to give us anyone to root for, resulting in a mostly unengaging movie. 

 

Ko Nishimura

 

Usually cast in nice guy roles, leading man Keiji Sada probably relished the opportunity to play a complete scumbag for a change, something he would go on to do again in his final film, Sweet Sweat (1964). Talking of sweat, there’s also a lot of that in this movie, which is set in Tokyo during a heatwave and has everyone dripping throughout. Director Yoshitaro Nomura – best known for his Seicho Matsumoto adaptations (often adapted by Hashimoto) such as Castle of Sand (1974) – was a very good director, but this is not one of his best and I couldn’t help feeling it’s the sort of material that would have been better in black and white. For all its cynicism, at heart this is a superficial film – if watching a nasty guy do nasty things for 90 minutes before getting his comeuppance is enough for you, you might enjoy it, but it’s really got nothing to say. I doubt that it was a box office success, especially as it appears to be the only film adaptation of a Hideo Shirasaki novel and Japanese film companies tended to raid an author’s work repeatedly if they had made any money from it.

 

Sada with Seiji Miyaguchi

 

Alternative titles: The Grave Tells All / The Cards Will Tell

Thanks to A.K.

A Dangerous Age / 続十代の性典 / Zoku judai no seiten (1953)

Obscure Japanese Film #118

 

Ayako Wakao

The Japanese title of this film (which translates as ‘Teenage Sex Diary Sequel’) is somewhat misleading as this is a separate story from Judai no seiten and, while it again features Yoko Minamida, Ayako Wakao and Miki Odagiri, they are playing new characters.

Yoko Minamida

 

Akiko (Minamida) is an 18-year-old high school student at a single-sex (possibly Catholic) school. One day, seeing Yoda (Ken Hasebe), a male student, drop a watch in the street, she picks it up and runs after him to return it, but he jumps onto a train before she can do so. She manages to find him at the station the next day, when he treats her to coffee and cake before inviting her to see his flat. Akiko naively accepts, but flees the place after he makes a pass. As she leaves, Yoda calls after her, saying that she is welcome to visit anytime. 

Jun Negami

 

Meanwhile, Akiko’s best friend, Natsuko (Wakao), accepts an invitation from Toshio (Yosuke Irie) to a party but is forced to stay home by her mother, who wants her to study maths at home with the new tutor she’s hired, a medical student named Masato (Jun Negami). Feeling guilty at standing up Toshio, Akiko pays him a visit the next day to apologise. However, when she failed to appear, he had ended up being seduced by an older woman (Murasaki Fujima) and losing his virginity. Natsuko has no knowledge of this, so she’s shocked to find that the sweet, gentle boy she had known has changed overnight and now thinks that he’s Dan Duryea. When Toshio tries to force himself on her, she gives him a few slaps and a good telling off, and decides not to see him again. Despite her annoyance, Natsuko takes the incident in her stride, forgets about him and moves on.

 

Akiko, on the other hand, proves less able to handle this kind of situation. Natsuko’s new tutor is actually Akiko’s cousin, whom she has feelings for, so she begins to feel jealous as she sees Masato taking an interest in his new pupil, even though this jealousy proves groundless. Masato is actually so much in love with his cousin that his thesis is on the viability of incestuous marriage. Nevertheless, Akiko’s feelings of insecurity are compounded when she discovers that her widowed mother (Kuniko Miyake) has been having a clandestine relationship with a businessman, Ueda (Nobuo Nakamura). Believing herself unwanted, she remembers her open invitation to Yoda’s apartment and foolishly goes there, where she is not only raped but impregnated. When she misses her period, her bitchy classmate (Miki Odagiri) begins to suspect the truth and starts spreading rumours. Things come to a head when the pregnant Akiko finds herself cast as that icon of purity, Joan of Arc, in the school play… 

Miki Odagiri

 

Ayako Wakao, Yoko Minamida and Michiko Saga

This is a slight improvement on Judai no seiten as it’s not quite as risible despite some daft moments. Director Koji Shima has been replaced by the younger Kozo Saeki (1912-72), who also made The Girl Who Tamed Beasts. At first, I thought that the Christian propaganda featured in the first film had been scrapped until I noticed that Michiko Saga (in one of her first film appearances, here playing another classmate of Akiko’s) was wearing a crucifix, and then Ayako Wakao appeared playing a bishop in the school’s Joan of Arc play. I’m unsure how to account for the Christian theme, but perhaps screenwriter Katsuya Susaki or producer Itsuo Doi (both of whom worked on all four films in this series) were Christians, or perhaps it was normal during this period for reasonably wealthy Japanese families to send their daughters to Catholic schools. In any case, although we may laugh at certain aspects of these movies today, it’s not difficult to see how they might have served a valuable function at the time in encouraging discussion of awkward subjects.

 

Judai no seiten / 十代の性典 (‘Teenage Sex Book’, 1953)

Obscure Japanese Film #114

Ayako Wakao

 

When high school student Fusae (Yoko Minamida) is excused from PE one day due to having her period, she finds herself opportunistically stealing the wallet of a classmate, Eiko (Ayako Wakao). She’s caught in the act by a male student who tries to blackmail her into kissing him. When she refuses, he grasses her up to the teacher, who tells Fusae not to be too hard on herself as many women do strange things when in this condition.

Yoko Minamida

Later, Fusae finds 10,000 yen in the street and gives 1000 to her father (Eijiro Tono) to pay the overdue electricity bill as he is being threatened with disconnection. Feeling that she had no right to this money either, Fusae is tormented by feelings of shame and decides that she needs to get a job, so she seeks help from Machiko (Ikiru’s Miki Odagiri), a friend who has already left school and is selling fish door to door.

Miki Odagiri

 

Akiko Sawamura

 

Meanwhile, 17-year-old Eiko has a crush on older female friend Kaoru (Akiko Sawamura), a senior student who is secretly dating Nitta (Ken Hasebe), a male art student. However, Kaoru does not allow Nitta to touch her as she has a fear of men, perhaps partly because she’s a Christian and believes she will go to Hell if she has sex before marriage. Asako (Yuko Tsumura), on the other hand, is a free and easy hedonist who is also in love with Nitta. When these three go ice skating together as part of a larger group, tragedy strikes…

Yuko Tsumura

 

 

This is a strange little film that comes across as some kind of Christian propaganda intended to persuade young women to hang on to their virginity until they are married; Ayako Wakao’s character even converts to Christianity at the end. Today, the film seems quaint and even ludicrous at times. For instance, it suggests that it’s perfectly normal for women to become kleptomaniacs when menstruating, and the strange sound effect we hear whenever a man gets too close to Kaoru soon becomes unintentionally comical.

Koreya Senda

 

Eijiro Tono

Yuko Tsumura and Eitaro Ozawa

The supporting cast includes Haiyuza Theatre founders Koreya Senda, Eijiro Tono and Eitaro Ozawa as the fathers of the main female characters, but the film will be of most interest today for fans of Ayako Wakao. According to Japanese Wikipedia, this film gave Wakao her breakthrough role and ‘received considerable criticism from educators, newspapers, and magazines, and for many years it was treated as taboo in interviews.’ If true, it’s hard to see why Teenage Sex Book was considered so controversial – the salacious title disguises a film which seems innocuous today and, although it was unusually frank regarding sexual matters for its time, there is nothing in it that seems designed to titillate. In any case, it clearly made money for Daiei studios as they turned it into a series and produced three follow-up films, although these were not direct sequels but separate stories with new characters. It’s also worth noting that Ayako Wakao cannot really be said to have the star role here – she is part of an ensemble, as can be seen from the fact that Yoko Minamida and Miki Odagiri also appeared alongside her in all of the sequels. Anyway, it’s fun to see Wakao at this early stage in her career, and she even engages in a little slapstick and executes an impressive pratfall at one point. Her real breakthrough role, though, was surely in Kenji Mizoguchi’s Gion Bayashi (aka A Geisha) the same year.

 

Akiko Sawamura

 

The fate of the film’s other star, Akiko Sawamura, remains something of a mystery – she appeared in the first sequel, then changed her name to Michiko Sawamura and made a few more films for Daiei before disappearing from the screen in 1954, after which she surfaced just one more time, appearing in The Story of Iron-Arm Imao, a baseball movie directed by Ishiro Honda for Toho in 1959.

 

Director Koji Shima (1901-86) was a former leading actor of the 1920s and ‘30s who worked frequently for directors Kenji Mizoguchi and Tomu Uchida. Most of these films are now lost, with Uchida’s Sweat (1929) being a notable exception. As a Daiei contract director during this period, it’s no surprise to learn that he also directed Wakao in ten other films including The Phantom Horse (1955). However, his most widely-seen film is Warning from Space (1956).