Bonds of Love / 愛のきずな / Ai no kizuna (1969)

Obscure Japanese Film #125

 

Mari Sono and Makoto Fujita

Suzuki (Makoto Fujita) is a low-level manager at a travel agency who drives a modest car and is dissatisfied with his life. One night, driving home in heavy rain, he notices Yukiko (Mari Sono), an attractive young woman taking shelter by the side of the road, and manages to persuade her to accept a lift. He takes her home and she gives him her card with the name of the restaurant where she works. The two begin seeing each other, but things become complicated when it emerges that they each have a secret…

 

To reveal any more of the plot would spoil this movie – it’s based on a Seicho Matsumoto story, so the twists are kind of the point. However, I feel I should comment on one dramatic event so far as to say that a crime committed by one of the protagonists may seem random and unmotivated to non-Japanese viewers, but I believe that the motivation is the character’s desire to silence the victim by any means necessary in order not to lose face (which would also result in a loss of status and position). Incidentally, the original story was entitled ‘Tazutazushi’ and published in 1963; this remains the sole film version, although it has been remade for TV three times since. 

 

Director Takashi Tsuboshima seems to have recognised the absurd aspects of the story and approached it as a black comedy, albeit one that’s played fairly straight for the most part. One notable exception is a slapstick sequence when a distracted Suzuki pours milk and sugar into an ashtray instead of his coffee cup. The choice of Makoto Fujita for the leading role works in the film’s favour – he doesn’t look in the least like a film star, and wasn’t one, though he was a popular TV star (often in comic parts) and also gave a notable performance in a leading role in Masaki Kobayashi’s Hymn to a Tired Man. 

 

Fujita’s co-star here, Mari Sono, was a famous pop singer who passed away very recently at the age of 80. Considering she was not a trained actress, she does pretty well here. There are also strong supporting performances by Makoto Sato and Chisako Hara as well as a cameo by Noriko Sengoku.

Makoto Sato

 

Chisako Hara

 

Noriko Sengoku

Bonds of Love is a very engaging and well-made variation on the Matsumoto crime formula; Tsuboshima’s slightly tongue-in-cheek approach to the material may be unexpected, but feels exactly right given the implausibility of the plot. Tsuboshima (1928-2007) was a minor director, many of whose films were vehicles for a popular group of comedians/musicians known as the Crazy Cats; Bonds of Love seems to have been an anomaly in his filmography. It was a co-production between Toho and Watanabe Productions, a company belonging to Shin Watanabe (1927-87), a former jazz bassist who started the company as a talent agency in the 1950s before expanding into film production in 1962, subsequently producing at least 48 films, virtually all of which have fallen into obscurity.

English subtitles courtesy of Ohako Subs can be found here. 

Hateful Thing / 憎いもの / Nikui mono / (1957)

Obscure Japanese Film #62

 

This Toho B-movie features Kurosawa favourite Kamatari Fujiwara in a rare leading role as Hikoichi, a meek and mild provincial who goes to Tokyo for the first time in 20 years in order to seek out cheap goods to sell in his store and also see his daughter, Yuko (Kyoko Anzai), who works in an office there and has been sending money home regularly. He is accompanied on his visit by Kiyama (Eijiro Tono), a fellow store owner who is more experienced and successful but has a less wholesome reason for visiting the capital. Hikoichi enjoys spending a day with his apparently unchanged daughter and the business side of his trip is also successful. When Kiyama insists that he join him on a visit to a brothel one evening, Hikoichi reluctantly agrees, although he declines to sleep with any of the young women available. However, while there he learns something that causes him a terrible shock and turns his life upside down…

Kamatari Fujiwara and Kyoko Anzai

Adapted by the great screenwriter Shinobu Hashimoto from a short story by Yojiro Ishizaka, this is an effective little film with a cruelly ironic and rather unpleasant twist. While some of the early scenes may be on the bland side, this only serves to make the last third more unsettling. These latter scenes contain a number of memorable images, mainly involving the use of masks, and Fujiwara’s performance is especially good when Hikoichi finally turns from mild-mannered rube to violent avenger.

Kamatari Fujiwara

Kamatari Fujiwara (1905-85) remains best known as the untrusting farmer Manzo in Seven Samurai and the drunken kabuki actor in The Lower Depths. Aside from Hateful Thing, the only other film I'm aware of in which he had the leading role is Mikio Naruse's charming comedy Tabi yakusha (1940), where he was a pompous itinerant kabuki actor cast as the front half of a horse. Although diminutive in stature, he is said to have had considerable martial art skills, which he once used to knock Toshiro Mifune to the ground during an argument when filming The Hidden Fortress. He later found himself in America appearing in Arthur Penn’s 1965 film Mickey One. 

Fujiwara with Eijiro Tono

 

Eijiro Tono (another member of the Kurosawa-gumi) is one of those actors who appeared to enjoy playing repellent types and was very good at it, having the ability to speak as he does here in an incredibly grating voice. One particularly nice touch is when Hikoichi gets drunk after the shocking revelation and starts talking like Kiyama! Was this an imitation by Kamatari Fujiwara or was he dubbed by Tono? I would love to know. The cast of Kurosawa regulars is rounded out by Noriko Sengoku as a maid and Seiji Miyaguchi as a detective. 

Director Seiji Maruyama would go on to be better known for his World War II films such as Admiral Yamamoto (1968) and Battle of the Japan Sea (1969).

Hateful Thing was the fourth in the ‘Toho Diamond’ series – these were stand-alone B-movies adapted from various literary works with running times of around an hour. 

 

Beast Alley / けものみち / Kemono michi (1965)

Obscure Japanese Film #43

Junko Ikeuchi

Based on a novel by prolific social realist crime writer Seicho Matsumoto, Beast Alley is a Toho production directed by Eizo Sugawa, who also made the excellent Tatsuya Nakadai vehicle The Beast Must Die (1959). An impressive array of talent is on display in other departments, too – the music score is by Japan’s foremost film composer, Toru Takemitsu, while the cast is littered with excellent actors, many of whom will be familiar from the films of Akira Kurosawa.

Ryo Ikebe

Giving a flawless performance in a role which was probably the highlight of her career, Junko Ikeuchi stars as Tamiko, a young woman working as a maid to support her older, bedridden husband, Kanji (Satoshi Morizuka), a man with bad teeth and a foot fetish who, despite his condition, is carrying on with another woman. When Tamiko comes home one day and catches him in the act, the other woman flees and a disgusted Tamiko has to fight off the advances of the frustrated Kanji.

Yunosuke Ito and Junko Ikeuchi

At the inn where she works, Tamiko has attracted the attention of a wealthy customer, Kotaki (a typically wooden Ryo Ikebe). She becomes his favourite and he offers her the chance of a better life, putting a dangerous idea into her head – in order to take full advantage of her new opportunity, she decides to get rid of her troublesome husband permanently. Kotaki introduces her to Hadano (Yunosuke Ito), a dodgy lawyer who finds her a new position looking after the rich and powerful Kito (the ubiquitous Eitaro Ozawa in convincing old-age make-up). Kito keeps a gruesome statue of the fearsome Buddhist deity Fudo Myo-o in his bedroom - surely a red flag if ever there was one! In a cruel twist of ironic fate, it turns out that Kito is another randy, bedridden monster with bad teeth, and she is forced to become his mistress while continuing her relationship with Kotaki (Tamiko seems oddly sanguine about this, I'm not sure why).

Eitaro Ozawa

Meanwhile, the death of Kanji is being investigated by a police detective, Hisatsune (Keiju Kobayashi). Becoming convinced that Tamiko murdered her husband, he tries to use the information to pressure her into having sex with him. Hisatsune has also uncovered some information about the murky pasts of Kito and Hadano; as a result, strings are pulled behind the scenes and he is fired from the police force. His attempt to get revenge by giving the story to a newspaper backfires, and soon nobody involved is safe… 

 

Keiju Kobayashi

The shocking denouement of Beast Alley features a further cruel irony for Tamiko and provides an appropriate ending to a misanthropic movie in which everyone turns out to be a scumbag. This is especially surprising in the case of Keiju Kobayashi's character. Kobayashi, who played the lead in Kihachi Okamoto's The Elegant Life of Mr Everyman, was best-known for comic parts but was also a fine straight actor when given the chance. The detective he plays here seems quite genial initially so, when his true character is revealed, it's entirely unexpected.

Also notable among the cast are Kurosawa favourite Noriko Sengoku as a scene-stealing maid and Tatsuya Nakadai’s mentor, Koreya Senda, in a tiny but significant non-speaking part. 

Noriko Sengoku

 

Takemitsu’s music is typically subtle and there is fine high-contrast black and white ‘scope photography throughout by Yasumichi Fukuzawa (who has oddly few credits but also worked for Kurosawa and Mikio Naruse). 

However, the film’s most impressive asset is the remarkable lead performance by Junko Ikeuchi, who has to play just about every emotion in the book and is never less than entirely convincing. In 1966, she travelled to Argentina, where the picture had been nominated for Best Film at the Mar del Plata Film Festival. Unfortunately, it lost out to Czechoslovakia’s entry, Long Live the Republic! Although she never enjoyed such a good role again in the cinema, Ikeuchi went on to become one of the most successful actresses in Japanese television drama. A heavy smoker, she died of lung cancer in 2010 at the age of 76. 

Watched without subtitles.

Fudo Myo-o