Brand of Evil / 悪の紋章 / Aku no monsho (1964)

Obscure Japanese Film #229

Tsutomu Yamazaki

 

Kikuchi (Tsutomu Yamazaki, the kidnapper from High and Low) is a police detective investigating the murder of a young woman. The trail leads to company boss Shibata (Rokko Toura), but he suddenly finds himself falsely accused of accepting bribes from a drug dealer and is kicked out of the police force and sent to prison for two years. After his release, he manages to find work with a private detective agency on condition that he drops any notion of trying to clear his name. He agrees, then promptly sets about trying to clear his name, during the course of which he finds himself involved with Setsuko (Michiyo Aratama), a young woman he sees falling victim to a pickpocket on the subway…

 

Michiyo Aratama

This co-production between Toho and Takarazuka Eiga was based on a 1962 novel of the same name by Shinobu Hashimoto, who co-wrote the screenplay with Sakae Hirosawa and the director, Hiromichi Horikawa. Horikawa and Hashimoto had previously collaborated on The Lost Alibi (1960) and Shiro to kuro (1963), two similarly dark and twisty crime thrillers, and both had begun their film careers under the tutelage of Kurosawa. The master’s influence is apparent here in the way certain scenes are shot and the use of weather to heighten atmosphere. In fact, the moody high-contrast cinematography comes courtesy of Yuzuru Aizawa, who had shot The Bad Sleep Well (1960). Another asset is a strong jazz score by one of Japan’s top composers, Toshiro Mayuzumi, while the excellent cast also includes Kyoko ‘Woman in the Dunes’ Kishida, Keiji Sada and, wasted in a tiny role as the head of the detective agency, Takashi Shimura. 

 

Hashimoto’s view of the world tended towards the misanthropic, and none of the characters in Brand of Evil are terribly nice. In fact, one of the most memorable scenes involves the supposed hero torturing a hapless yakuza stooge to the strains of a Strauss waltz (‘Rosen aus dem Süden’), which reminded me of the way Tarantino used ‘Stuck in the Middle with You’ in Reservoir Dogs, although Tarantino certainly took it to another level. 

 

Keiji Sada and Tsutomu Yamazaki

In my view, the film is slightly less effective than The Lost Alibi or Shiro to kuro because the combination of the lack of a sympathetic protagonist combined with a rather convoluted plot and slightly excessive running time of around two hours and eleven minutes makes it hard to feel emotionally invested in the story all the way to the end. It’s also hard to forgive the demeaning portrayal of a disabled character, Setsuko’s friend Tsuyako, played by Toshiko Yabuki. 

 

Rokko Toura

 

Heat Wave Island / かげろう / Kagero (‘Heat Wave’, 1969)

Obscure Japanese Film #223

 

Nobuko Otowa

Produced by Kindai Eiga Kyokai, an independent company formed by director Kozaburo Yoshimura, screenwriter Kaneto Shindo and actor Taiji Tonoyama in 1950, this crime drama was directed and co-written by Shindo and features Tonoyama in a supporting role as the head of an island village. Shindo’s long-term muse and mistress Nobuko Otowa plays Otoyo, a bar hostess who turns up dead at the beginning of the film when a dog carrying a human hand (an idea obviously nicked from Yojimbo) leads the cops to her corpse. Otowa, an actor always willing to do anything for her art, has to play a partially-excavated cadaver, but gets to pop up in flashbacks as a a living being throughout the rest of the movie. 

 

Rokko Toura

 

As the title suggests, it’s set during a heatwave, and a murder investigation is soon underway led by sweaty detectives Oishi (Oshima favourite Rokko Toura) and Iino (future director Juzo Itami), who have to traipse all over the islands of the Seto Inland Sea to interview sundry witnesses played by Shindo’s favourite character actors, including Jukichi Uno, Tanie Kitabayashi, Eitaro Ozawa and, of course, the aforementioned Taiji Tonoyoma. The dogged police begin to suspect that following Michiko (Masako Toyama), a young woman who worked at Otoyo’s bar, may lead them to the killer…

 

Masako Toyama

 

The little-known Masako Toyama, who has one of the principal roles here, was apparently a theatre actor whom Shindo had cast as a result of seeing her in a camera commercial. She had actually already made one film before this, a Shochiku action picture known in English as Pursuit of Murder: Shinjuku’s 25th Hour (1969), and she would go on to appear in at least nine more movies. IMDb has her listed (incorrectly I think) as Masako Tomiyama. 

 

Taiji Tonoyama

 

Anyway, the film is stylishly shot by cameraman Kiyomi Kuroda and has an interesting score by Hikaru Hayashi, although it’s one that works better in certain scenes than others, sometimes lending a strange feeling of detachment rather than enhancing the suspense. Both Kuroda and Hayashi had worked on Shindo’s best known films, Onibaba (1964) and Kuroneko (1968). 

 

Tanie Kitabayashi

 

What surprised me most about the film is how much it reminded me of Castle of Sand (1974), Yoshitaro Nomura’s big hit movie adaptation of Seicho Matsumoto’s 1961 novel of the same name. Heat Wave Island must surely have been an influence on that later film, right down to the permanently perspiring policemen. On the other hand, the plot of Heat Wave Island is also very much like something that Matsumoto might have written, and he was undoubtedly an influence on the original screenplay written by Shindo and Isao Seki (an assistant director on Onibaba and other Shindo films). 

 

Jukichi Uno

 

Unsurprisingly for Shindo, there’s also a leftist social commentary aspect to the film, as Joan Mellon pointed out in her 1975 book Voices from the Japanese Cinema:

Kagero has been highly praised by both [Donald] Richie and [Richard N.] Tucker. Its locale is again the Inland Sea, the same setting as The [Naked] Island [1960]. Ten years have elapsed and the people who might have been the heroes of the earlier film have moved to the cities. Lacking skills, they are absorbed inevitably into the lumpen proletariat as petty criminals, prostitutes and dealers in drugs. Richie holds that the film far transcends the level of melodrama:

From the brilliant opening it becomes apparent that he [Shindo] is making a statement on the relation between love and death; from other parts of the film (“cops are poor – criminals are poor: it is the poor chasing the poor”) it is apparent that a social statement is being made; finally, Shindo is making a film about what happens when sudden affluence reaches a simple people. 

The islands around the Seto Inland Sea, where poverty is high and employment low, certainly make for an interesting and often photogenic setting, as one of the cops muses at one point, saying,

The beauty of this scenery made them poor. The islands are beautiful because they’re made of granite soil. The soil can only grow wheat and potatoes. When it rains, the soil erodes and the fields wash into the sea. The beautiful white soil is a symbol of infertility. It’s a symbol of poverty. 

Heat Wave Island is a fascinating film even if the plot is arguably a little over-complicated and, though Otoyo seems a remarkably unsympathetic character at first, things turn out to be a lot less black and white as the story unfolds. 

 

Juzo Itami and Rokko Taura (centre)