Across Darkness / 闇を横切れ / Yami o yokogire (1959)

Obscure Japanese Film #234

Hiroshi Kawaguchi and So Yamamura

When a stripper is murdered in a love hotel, suspicion naturally falls on Ochiai (Kappei Matsumoto), the mayoral candidate found drunk and unconscious in the same room, but ambitious rookie reporter Ishizuka (Hiroshi Kawaguchi) smells a set-up. Urged on by the editor he idolises (So Yamamura), he starts digging and exposes a tangled web of corruption leading to the current mayor (Jun Hamamura) and transport boss Hirose (Osamu Takizawa). Along the way he falls for the dead woman’s best friend, a fellow stripper named Motomi (Junko Kano)…

Jun Hamamura and Kawaguchi

This Daiei production was from an original screenplay by regular Kurosawa collaborator Ryuzo Kikushima and its director, Yasuzo Masumura (Kikushima also co-wrote Masumura’s Afraid to Die and The Hoodlum Soldier). As you’d expect from Masumura, it zips along at a snappy pace, but unfortunately that in itself is not enough to make an engaging picture, a point that this one certainly proves. It doesn’t help that it relies so heavily on the very limited talents of Daiei boss Matsutaro Kawaguchi’s son Hiroshi, who is in almost every scene, while the slight lift the film gets when the more charismatic So Yamamura is on screen is insufficient to counteract the Kawaguchi effect. Junko Kano is also effective in an almost Gloria Grahame kind of way as a woman who’s been more or less forced to get by on her looks but retains her sense of self by generally refusing to turn on the charm that men seem to expect of her.

Kawaguchi and Junko Kano

Even with a better actor in the lead, though, I question whether this movie would be much improved – somehow, there’s just nothing convincing about the characters or situations or any real reason why we should care about any of it, and I was left wondering what on earth this film’s raison d’être was supposed to be, especially as it’s impossible to take seriously as a political drama. Perhaps it was intended as a send-up of American film noir but, if so, it falls spectacularly flat. Unusually, there’s no music score – presumably the producers felt that the endless amount of talk (much of it shouted) would render music unnecessary. All in all, it’s no wonder, then, that this has been one of the more obscure items in Masumura’s filmography – it’s definitely no hidden gem, that’s for sure. Of course, that’s just my opinion and it’s only fair to note that most of the Japanese viewers’ reviews which can be found online are quite positive, so maybe I’m missing something…

Osamu Takizawa

The print quality on the Japanese DVD release is not great and contains numerous scratches. 

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Asakusa no yoru / 浅草の夜 (‘Asakusa at Night’, 1954)

Obscure Japanese Film #156

 

Ayako Wakao and Machiko Kyo

Setsuko (Machiko Kyo) is a dancer at a theatre in Asakusa, where she’s been having a relationship with the in-house playwright, Yamaura (Koji Tsuruta), for the past three years. He’s a nice guy whose idealism is beginning to give way to disillusionment as he realises that the bosses will always prioritise putting bums on seats over art. Setsuko has a younger sister, Namie (Ayako Wakao), who has fallen in love with a young painter, Shisui (Jun Negami). 

 

Koji Tsuruta

Jun Negami

 

Setsuko is against the relationship and tries to force Namie into breaking it off, citing Shisui’s low social status as an adoptee as the reason. However, this seems to be merely an excuse because Shisui was adopted by Tsuzuki (Osamu Takizawa), a successful painter who is likely to make Shisui his heir. Things are further complicated when Komakichi (Hideo Takamatsu), the son of the yakuza boss who owns the theatre (Takashi Shimura), makes an unexpected offer of marriage to Namie…

Hideo Takamatsu

 

This Daiei production was based on a novel by Matsutaro Kawaguchi, who – perhaps not entirely coincidentally – was executive director of Daiei Studios. The novel had been published in serial form in Bungei Shunju magazine, but seems never to have made it into book form. Like the protagonists of this film, Kawaguchi grew up in Asakusa. He also went to school with director Kenji Mizoguchi, later writing or co-writing many of Mizoguchi’s films (as well as directing a few films of his own in the early 1930s), and was the father of Daiei star Hiroshi Kawaguchi.  He must have been quite a guy, and was well-respected as a writer, even having a collection published in English (Mistress Oriku – Tales from a Tokyo Teahouse). 

Jun Negami, Osamu Takizawa and Ayako Wakao

 

I was hoping for something a little grittier from this film, more along the lines of Yuzo Kawashima’s Suzaki Paradise: Red Light District (1956). Instead, what we get is a rather contrived melodrama with a plot hinging on a massively unlikely coincidence. The film was written and directed by Koji Shima, and occupies something of a middle ground among his films, being neither total hack work nor anything especially impressive artistically, although he throws in a few of his trademark symbolic shots (in this case including rolling pachinko balls and a broken sake bottle) and there's also a well-staged fight scene which takes place in heavy rain.

Machiko Kyo

 

Machiko Kyo fans will probably enjoy this, especially as she had worked as a revue dancer herself earlier in her career and gets to strut her stuff here. Ayako Wakao fans, however, are likely to find the film considerably less rewarding as she doesn’t have much of a role, although that shouldn't be too surprising as this was still early in her career and she wasn't yet a major star. 

 

The remainder of the cast are fine but unremarkable, with the exception of Takashi Shimura, who seems determined to steal each of his few scenes by any means necessary, and is variously seen limping, massaging his foot, smoking with a cigarette holder, using a lucky cat as an ashtray, and pruning his bonsai. It’s a masterclass in the actor’s guiding principle of there being ‘no small parts.’

 

Takashi Shimura

Thanks to A.K.

DVD at Amazon Japan (no English subtitles)

A Town Not on the Map / 地図のない町 / Chizu no mai machi (aka ‘The Jungle Block’, 1960)

Obscure Japanese Film #127

Yoko Minamida

Ryoji Hayama

 

Shinsuke (Ryoji Hayama) is a young doctor who has had to resign from his post at a hospital after failing to save a patient. Returning to the shanty town where he grew up, he begins assisting the local doctor, Kasama (Jukichi Uno), who is greatly respected by the poor community he serves. 

 

Jukichi Uno

Unfortunately, the local yakuza boss, Azusa (Osamu Takizawa), has managed to obtain a contract to clear the shanty town and replace it with modern apartment blocks. Meanwhile, Shinsuke’s sister Sakiko (Kazuko Yoshiyuki) is out walking one night with her fiancé Kajiwara (Yasukiyo Umeno) when they are attacked by a gang of yakuza and she is gang-raped. Shinsuke is appalled to find that, not only is Kajiwara too spineless to go to the police, but he no longer wants to marry Sakiko. If that wasn’t bad enough, he then learns that not only has his childhood sweetheart Kayoko (Yoko Minamida) become a prostitute, but she has accepted an offer to become Azusa’s mistress instead in order to pay off a debt owed by her father (Jun Hamamura). Shinsuke decides to take matters into his own hands, but what can he do against such a powerful mob?

Osamu Takizawa

 

There’s a lot going on in this Nikkatsu picture, which starts out almost like one of Satsuo Yamamoto’s leftist dramas in which an oppressed community band together to take on their corrupt oppressors, but morphs into a Seicho Matsumoto-style murder mystery at the end. Based on a story by Kaoru Funayama,* it was adapted by director Ko Nakahira and regular Kurosawa collaborator Shinobu Hashimoto. In the film, the story unfolds in a series of consecutive flashbacks (probably Hashimoto’s idea). This is an unusual approach, but one that works well in this instance, with the tension building nicely as events reach their climax. When they do, there is perhaps a twist too many, with the result that things become a little absurd – almost comic, in fact (something I doubt was intended).

Shobun Inoue

 

A Town Not on the Map benefits from a strong all-round cast. In the lead, Nikkatsu contract star Ryoji Hayama makes for a sympathetic hero despite being better known for playing bad guys, while the underrated Yoko Minamida is equally good as the troubled cat-loving heroine, Osamu Takizawa makes a suitably loathsome villain, Jukichi Uno exudes integrity as only he could, Shobun Inoue is convincingly tough as a scar-faced yakuza, and Jun Hamamura manages to look even more like death warmed up than usual. 

 

Jun Hamamura

The score by the great avant-garde composer Toshiro Mayuzumi is surprisingly conventional for him, but nonetheless highly effective. Director Ko Nakahira brings his customary flair to the proceedings, with impressive staging and camerawork (by his regular collaborator Yoshihiro Yamazaki) which is seldom pedestrian and often memorably stylish. 

Yoko Minamida

 

Excellent subtitles by Stuart J Walton can be found here: https://www.opensubtitles.org/en/subtitles/9880312/the-jungle-block-en

*The original story, ‘Satsui no kage’ / 殺意の影 (‘Shadows of Murder’), appeared in Funayama’s 1957 collection Akutoku /悪徳 (Vice).