Dorodarake no junjo / 泥だらけの純情 (‘Mud-Spattered Purity’/ ‘Trampled Innocence’, 1963)

 Obscure Japanese Film #230

 

Sayuri Yoshinaga and Mitsuo Hamada

 

Jiro (Mitsuo Hamada) is a teenage yakuza who rescues high school girl Mami (Sayuri Yoshinaga) from being harassed in the street by a couple of young yakuza from a rival gang. When one pulls a knife, Jiro gets stabbed and his assailant ends up dead by his own blade. Despite his injury, Jiro manages to complete the drug delivery he had been assigned before collapsing. After receiving medical attention he makes a full recovery and ends up meeting Mami again when she wants to thank him. The two fall in love, but she’s an ambassador’s daughter while he was brought up in poverty – is there any way for them to be together in a society determined to keep them apart? 

 

This Nikkatsu production was based on a 1962 short story by the prolific Shinji Fujiwara (1921-84), whose fiction also provided the basis for Imamura’s Endless Desire (1958) and Intentions of Murder (1964), Yoshida’s Akitsu Springs (1962) and many others. The adaptation is by Masaru Baba (1926-2011), a screenwriter associated with the new wave who went on to win an award for penning Imamura’s Vengeance is Mine (1979). 

 

The story is the sort which could easily have been treated with an excess of sentimentality, but fortunately the director is Ko Nakahira, a director definitely not known for that particular characteristic. Having said that, this is an unusually warm-hearted film for him. Jiro is basically a good-natured kid who’s pretty likeable when not trying to show off and impress other yakuza, while Mami has somehow grown up free from the snobbery of most of her class. After their first date, Jiro starts watching wildlife programmes and reading the Bible like Mami; she reads a boxing magazine and tries whisky so that she’ll be able to understand him better. Upping the ante, Jiro even agrees to attend a concert of contemporary music, where he’s baffled by the strange racket of the avant-garde. 

 

Young stars Mitsuo Hamada and Sayuri Yoshinaga were a joint box office phenomenon in Japan in the 1960s, and this was the 15^th of 43 films in which they co-starred, all of which were made in that single decade. Mitsuo Hamada (then 19) later came very close to being permanently blinded in an assault in 1966, but gradually recovered and continued acting until 2015. Like Yoshinaga (then 17), he was also a popular singer. She had won the Blue Ribbon Best Actress award for Foundry Town the previous year and is still acting at the time of writing. It’s not difficult to see why they were popular, and the fact that this film – one of their biggest hits – works as well as it does is partly down to them, even if Hamada goes overboard at times. It also helps that the film’s point about class is made effectively without the filmmakers feeling the need to patronise the audience by spelling it out. Furthermore – in my opinion anyway – the ending of the picture is exactly the right one. 

 

Dorodarake no junjo was remade in Korea the following year as Maenbaleui cheongchun (‘Barefoot Youth’), again in Japan in a 1977 version directed by Sokichi Tomimoto and starring Momoe Yamaguchi as Mami and Tomokazu Miura as Jiro, and finally as a Japanese TV movie in 1991. 

DVD at Amazon Japan (no English subtitles)

English subtitles at OpenSubtitles 

The Gate of Youth / 青春の門 / Seishun no mon (1975)

Obscure Japanese Film #165

Tomohiro Tanabe and Sayuri Yoshinaga

 

Based on the first part of a bestselling doorstop novel by Hiroyuki Itsuki (b.1932) and running over three hours, this big-budget Toho production spans a period of over 30 years from 1918 to the 1950s, and tells the story of Shinsuke, the son of a Fukuoka coalminer, as he is raised alone by his stepmother (after his father is killed attempting to rescue some trapped Korean miners), survives the Second World War, grows into a man and has his first sexual and romantic experiences. 

 

Tatsuya Nakadai

The first half hour focuses on Shinsuke’s father, Juzo, a tough, brawling miner with a sense of justice, who not only tries to save the exploited Koreans, but had earlier fought against the army as they tried to suppress the workers’ rebellion during the rice riots of 1918. Played in full scenery-chewing mode by Tatsuya Nakadai, he is known as the ‘climbing spider’ and sports a large spider tattoo on his back à la Ayako Wakao in Irezumi (1966). He completely dominates the opening scenes, then departs with a fart gag and is only briefly glimpsed again in a couple of flashbacks. 

 

Once Juzo dies, Shinsuke and his stepmother become the focus. As the character grows from a very young child into a man during the course of the movie, Shinsuke is played by a number of actors, but mainly by Tomohiro Tanabe as a pre-teen and teenager, and by Ken Tanaka as an adult. His stepmother, Tae, is portrayed by Sayuri Yoshinaga, a big star in Japan who has remained little-known abroad but delivers the film’s most convincing performance. 

Sayuri Yoshinaga

 

The beginning of the movie, with its use of speeded-up film and voiceover from a narrator (Shoichi Ozawa) who sometimes even pops up on screen (once during a sex scene, of which there are some weird ones) made me wonder if I was in for some irreverent, Kihachi Okamoto-inspired wackiness, but these eccentric touches ultimately proved too intermittent to seem anything other than occasional bits of whimsy on the part of the director, Kirio Urayama. A former assistant to Shohei Imamura, Urayama had won the Blue Ribbon Award for Best New Director for his debut film, Foundry Town (1962), also starring Sayuri Yoshinaga. Subsequently, he appeared to struggle to find enough work and only managed to complete 10 films before his death at 54 in 1985. Perhaps personal hygiene may have been a reason for his lack of employment, as his Japanese Wikipedia page states:

He hated baths, and when he went to Seijun Suzuki's house while drunk, he was locked naked in the bathroom by Seijun and his common-law wife (whom he later married) because of the terrible smell. However, he managed to escape naked through the bathroom window.

The film proved to be a huge hit at the Japanese box office, leading not only to a sequel two years later, but to a remake (with its own sequel) a mere six years after the original as well as a number of TV adaptations. 

Ken Tanaka

 

Shot in academy ratio, the film looks pretty good, making effective use of real locations and suggesting close attention to historical details in the dressing of the sets, etc. However, I found the character of Shinsuke unsympathetic and many of the performances too broad, while I felt that the writing never rose above the standard of melodrama, the music was uninspired and the whole thing too vulgar and sentimental. In fairness, though, I should point out that a lot of people seem to like this movie and other opinions are available… 

 

Watched with dodgy subtitles.

Thanks to A.K.