Tobira o hiraku onna / 扉を開く女 (1946)

Obscure Japanese Film #270

Yumeji Tsukioka

Yokohama c.1880. Okinu (Yumeji Tsukioka) is a young woman who sings and plays the gekkin (aka yueqin or ‘moon lute’) in restaurants to earn a living. She’s in love with Shinkichi (Kanji Koshiba), a carriage driver studying to be a lawyer under windbag Professor Naito (Mitsusaburo Ramon).

Kanji Koshiba

Her neighbour, Kikue (Yaeko Mizutani I, frequently confused with her daughter, Yaeko Mizutani II), is a widowed sewing instructor who was forced to endure an unhappy marriage. As a young woman, she had been in love with Takano, but unable to marry him as he was an ashigaru (samurai of the lowest rank). Instead, she was made to recite the ‘Three Obediences of a Woman’ – which are first to her parents, second to her husband and finally to her children – until it nearly drove her mad and then had to marry a man who had no feelings for her.

Yaeko Mizutani

When the supposedly liberal Professor Naito proves objects strongly to Shinkichi’s intention to marry Okinu, Kikue is determined that Okinu not suffer the same fate, so she takes matters into her own hands and visits the professor herself…

Misusaburo Ramon (supposedly!)

Produced by Daiei at their Kyoto studios, this was supposedly based on an original screenplay by Yoshikata Yoda. However, Yoda clearly stole the plot from Kyoka Izumi’s 1907 novel Onna keizu, the multiple film versions of which include Teinosuke Kinugasa’s The Romance of Yushima and Kenji Misumi’s 1962 version (the latter of which had a screenplay by Yoda).

This was director Keigo Kimura’s first post-war film and the conditions he had to work under would have been quite restrictive this early on during the occupation, when the authorities would only give the green light to pictures that promoted democracy and were against feudalism. This one is not terribly subtle in its approach and contains dialogue such as, “I despise such feudalistic thinking! Japan still hasn’t managed to break free from it…”, etc etc.

Yaeko Mizutani

The acting is not terribly interesting either, with Yaeko Mizutani’s theatrical origins being all too obvious and her decision to speak like Minnie Mouse when playing the young Kikue in the flashbacks especially regrettable. Director Kimura manages some nice moments here and there, but overall this is a contrived and sentimental affair which has not aged well.

A note on the title:

A few slightly different variations are possible but, because the title seems to refer to Kikue, who opens a (metaphorical) door for Okinu – and potentially for other women in similar positions – the most apt translation is perhaps ‘The Woman Who Opened Doors’.

Thanks to A.K.

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Joshu karasu / 上州鴉 ('Crow of Joshu', 1951)

Obscure Japanese Film #95

Denjiro Okochi

 

This Daiei production stars silent screen veteran Denjiro Okochi as Takizo, a wandering samurai and master swordsman who returns incognito to the town where he was born, hoping to shake off some men pursuing him. Once there, he meets Sahei (Koichi Katsuragi), a widowed farmer, to whom he will later confess that his mother (now deceased) was a maid who became pregnant by a criminal and had to give birth to him in a warehouse. 

Michiko Hoshi

 

Sahei has two daughters, Okimi (Michiko Hoshi) and Omitsu (Kazuko Takamori). Unable to pay the annual tax, Sahei asks government official Yamagataya (Ryanosuke Higashi) to take Omitsu in as an indentured servant instead. Yamagataya agrees, but secretly intends to pimp her out.

 

Kotaro Bando

 

Mitsusaburo Ramon

Meanwhile, Inoyuki (Kotaro Bando) visits a gambling den owned by Hikigoro (Mitsusaburo Ramon from The Mysterious Edogawa Ranzan) in an attempt to raise money so that his sick wife Okichi (Mitsuko Mito) can take a rest, but he loses and is tricked into signing Okichi over to Hikigoro. Observing the way the innocent townspeople are abused and cheated by the powerful and corrupt, Takizo decides that it’s time to for him to come out of hiding and intervene…

Mitsuko Mito

 

Based on an original work by Shintaro Mimura, the screenplay was written by Kaneto Shindo, who must not only have been the most prolific screenwriter of all time, but who also maintained an impressively high standard throughout his 70-year career. Director Taizo Fuyushima (1901-81) was new to me, but on this evidence he seems worthy of further investigation as Joshu karasu features excellent mobile camerawork courtesy of Yasukazu Takemura, some very well-co-ordinated and complex staging, a lively sense of rhythm in the editing and a strong ensemble cast, including that reliable old scene-stealer Daisuke Kato as a travelling con artist. 

Daisuke Kato

 

Atsushi Watanabe and Toshiaki Konoe

Atsushi Watanabe and Toshiaki Konoe are also great fun as a couple of oddball palanquin carriers, one of whom has a topknot with a life of its own. The fight scenes are well above-average for 1951, too – one even takes place in heavy rain, which would soon become a Kurosawa trademark (not the only time this film brought Kurosawa to mind). 

Denjiro Okochi

 

It’s a marvel how the Japanese cinema of this period appears to have been populated with an almost endless number of excellent directors of whom we’ve never heard. Taizo Fuyushima’s career stretched back to 1926 and he directed over 90 films, mainly period dramas, but he seems to be almost completely forgotten. After his retirement, he made kabuki paper dolls, at which he was considered a master, and took on a number of pupils.

Denjiro Okochi and Koichi Katsuragi

 

Watch on my YouTube channel (no subtitles)

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The Mysterious Edogawa Ranzan /怪奇 江戸川乱山 / Kaiki Edogawa Ranzan (1937)

Obscure Japanese Film #39

 

Mitsusaburo Ramon

A samurai horror film from 1937, no less! Although clearly a minor work, this is certainly a fascinating curio, albeit one with a slightly misleading title – the picture has nothing to do with the famous Japanese mystery writer Edogawa Rampo (1894-1965), but the choice of the protagonist’s name was probably intended to make audiences believe that it did.

 

As the film begins, we see a man’s body being carried to an isolated house by an old geezer with a long beard and fingernails that would make Fu Manchu green with envy. He lays the body out on a table and performs a black magic ritual which revives the dead man. A turning waterwheel introduces a flashback sequence revealing that the man is a samurai named Edogawa Ranzan who was assassinated by henchmen of the local Mr Big. Needless to say, Ed wakes up in a foul mood and sets about revenging himself on those responsible, indulging in a blood-curdling laugh every time he dispatches another victim.

 

The story may be nothing to write home about, but there are some nice visual flourishes, such as a shot of a spider’s web which is refocused to resolve into a shot of Ed’s weeping fiancée, who has been abducted by Mr Big. Other visual elements such as shadows, swirling fog and tilting gravestones and streetlamps lend a suitably spooky atmosphere and suggest the influence of the Universal horror films of the early 1930s. However, the film does not quite live up to its opening and gets rather talky in the middle before recovering a bit in a couple of the later scenes, in which Ed makes a surprise attack through a ceiling and emerges from a swamp. The climax, though, feels somewhat fumbled and thrown away as if the filmmakers were running out of time and money, which perhaps they were.

 

While the picture quality remains surprisingly good, the same cannot be said of the crackly soundtrack. There were also a couple of abrupt and confusing cuts which made me wonder if the extant print could be missing a couple of scenes.

So, was this film a one-off or were other similar films produced in Japan at the time? Rather disappointingly, star Mitsusaburo Ramon (1901-76) proves not to have been the Japanese Boris Karloff, but a star of silent chambara (sword-fighting) films who by this stage in his career was a little down on his luck. The film was made for the short-lived Imai Eiga company, which cranked out a number of B-movies during its two years of existence (1937-8), many of them starring Ramon. However, judging by the titles, none of the others were horror films. 

 

The film was written and directed by Kenji Shimomura (1902-93), a cinematographer-turned-director whose feature film career ended soon after this work, although he continued to make short documentaries into the 1970s. He deserves credit for bringing more visual flair to The Mysterious Edogawa Ranzan than is usually seen in such a low-budget programmer and even for venturing into the horror genre in the first place – this type of film only became popular in Japan around the mid-1950s and earlier examples are rare (with the exception of the many versions of The Ghost of Yotsuya). 

Given the timing of the film's release, it's tempting to conclude that the story was intended as a metaphor about the need to revive Japan's warrior spirit. But then again, perhaps it's just a horror movie after all...

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