The Last Trump Card / 最後の切札 / Saigo no kirifuda (1960)

Obscure Japanese Film #193

Keiji Sada

 

Tatsuno (Keiji Sada) is a clothing store owner who has an unusual side hustle – he pretends to be part of a ‘New Religion research group’ with his sidekick Yoshimura (Seiji Miyaguchi), and together they extort money from religious organisations by offering to save them from potential scandals (mostly created by Tatsuno) for a price. In other words, they are blackmailers, and their only motivation seems to be greed. As if this weren’t sleazy enough, Tatsuno also dabbles in a little pimping and procuring on the side, and is having affairs with multiple women including nightclub singer Sonoko (Miyuki Kuwano from The Shape of Night) and TV actress Tsuruko (Keiko Hibino), both of whom he treats with contempt… 

 

Miyuki Kuwano

 

Based on a 1957 novel entitled Niku no boku (‘Servant of the Flesh’ or ‘I am Flesh’) by Hideo Shirasaki (1920-92) and with a screenplay by Kurosawa regular Shinobu Hashimoto, this Shochiku production was directed by Yoshitaro Nomura, who had been an assistant to Kurosawa on Scandal (1950) and The Idiot (1951), and it features a whole host of character actors familiar from Kurosawa pictures, including Miki Odagiri (the girl from Ikiru), Jerry Fujio, Seiji Miyaguchi, Eijiro Yanagi, Taiji Tonoyama and Koji Mitsui. And just when you think Ko Nishimura’s not going to be in it, his macabre little face finally pops up to deliver the rather gruesome ending - it's the sort of role usually played by Michael Ripper in Hammer horror films. However, in my view screenwriter Hashimoto sometimes produced sub-par work when not undert the guidance of a really great director like Kurosawa or Masaki Kobayashi, and here he allows the story to become too talky and complicated (even when watched with pretty good subtitles) while forgetting to give us anyone to root for, resulting in a mostly unengaging movie. 

 

Ko Nishimura

 

Usually cast in nice guy roles, leading man Keiji Sada probably relished the opportunity to play a complete scumbag for a change, something he would go on to do again in his final film, Sweet Sweat (1964). Talking of sweat, there’s also a lot of that in this movie, which is set in Tokyo during a heatwave and has everyone dripping throughout. Director Yoshitaro Nomura – best known for his Seicho Matsumoto adaptations (often adapted by Hashimoto) such as Castle of Sand (1974) – was a very good director, but this is not one of his best and I couldn’t help feeling it’s the sort of material that would have been better in black and white. For all its cynicism, at heart this is a superficial film – if watching a nasty guy do nasty things for 90 minutes before getting his comeuppance is enough for you, you might enjoy it, but it’s really got nothing to say. I doubt that it was a box office success, especially as it appears to be the only film adaptation of a Hideo Shirasaki novel and Japanese film companies tended to raid an author’s work repeatedly if they had made any money from it.

 

Sada with Seiji Miyaguchi

 

Alternative titles: The Grave Tells All / The Cards Will Tell

Thanks to A.K.

Structure of Hate / 黒い画集 第二話 寒流 / Kuroi gashu dainibu: Kanryu (1961)

Obscure Japanese Film #178

Ryo Ikebe

 

Okino (Ryo Ikebe) is a hard-working Tokyo bank employee who is entrusted with a promotion to manager of the Ikebukuro branch by his boss, Kuwayama (Akihiko Hirata, the one-eyed scientist from the original Godzilla). However, Okino is disliked by his wife (Michiko Araki) and two children because he’s so focused on his work that he largely ignores them. Soon after starting his new job, he’s approached for a bank loan by restaurant owner Nami (Michiyo Aratama) and a mutual attraction soon leads to an affair. As such a relationship with a customer of the bank could cost Okino his job, he must be especially careful to keep it a secret – something that becomes increasingly difficult when Kuwayama meets Nami and decides to pursue her himself. Then Okino begins to wonder if Nami has just been using him for her financial benefit…

 

Michiyo Aratama

 

The Japanese title of this Toho production translates as ‘Black Art Book Episode 2: Cold Current’ as ‘Cold Current’ was the title of Seicho Matsumoto’s story first serialised in the Weekly Asahi in 1959 before being included in the collection Black Art Book 2, published later that year.* Harenchi Gakuen helpfully explains on Filmarks.com that, ‘The cold current refers to the side streams and those who have been demoted.’ This makes perfect sense as Okino certainly finds himself sidelined in this film version by screenwriter Tokuhei Wakao and director Hideo Suzuki. Unfortunately, the original story is not available in English, but apparently the ending was changed significantly. It’s a little different from your typical Seicho Matsumoto tale – there’s not even a murder – and the plot went off in directions I failed to anticipate, but did enjoy, culminating in a highly unusual ending in which we are deliberately kept in the dark about exactly what happened.

 

Akihiko Hirata

 

It’s a refreshingly unsentimental film which takes a pretty dim view of human nature. Having said that, the two main characters are not entirely despicable. It’s common in Japan for men to put work before family as Okino does here, and although Nami is the business-minded, pragmatic type, she’s put in a difficult position with which it’s hard not to sympathise, while it’s also clear that their relationship begins to trouble her conscience. In this role, the underrated Michiyo Aratama delivers the film’s best performance and it’s good to see her show what she could do when given a meatier part than the typical ‘nice girl’ roles she’s better-known for in films such as The Human Condition. 

 

Jun Hamamura

 

Seiji Miyaguchi

The film has some wonderful cameos by familiar faces such as Jun Hamamura as a doctor who looks like he could use some of his own medicine, Seiji Miyaguchi as a private detective who looks like he hasn’t had a client for years, Tetsuro Tanba as a yakuza boss and, best of all, Takashi Shimura as a shark-like banking bigwig who exudes an aura of self-confidence and power and is appropriately trailed everywhere by his silent, pilot-fish-like mistress (Machiko Kitagawa). 

 

Tetsuro Tanba and friends

 

Takashi Shimura

This is the only film I’ve seen so far by director Hideo Suzuki (1916-2002), who worked as a contract director first for Daiei (1947-52), then Shintoho (1953) and finally Toho (1954-67) before finishing his career in TV. Although he is said to have had a limited amount of choice in the films he was assigned to direct and he worked in a variety of genres, he is apparently highly regarded by some for his thrillers and suspense movies, and on the evidence of Structure of Hate, I, for one, am keen to see more, especially as there’s more to this film than mere suspense. It’s also a portrait of a sick society in which people have become foolishly obsessed with position and material wealth while forgetting what’s really important in life. 

 

Michiyo Aratama

 

UPDATE: I've since watched Suzuki's Woman of Design (Sono basho ni onna arite, 1962), an equally unsentimental picture about women struggling to compete in the male-dominated advertising industry. It shows a similar disregard for the usual conventions of movie plotting, but for me it was a film to be admired rather than enjoyed as I found it a tad boring. It's also burdened with an odd score by composer Sei Ikeno which might have worked if used more sparingly but is repeated ad infinitum even over many of the dialogue scenes.
 

*Toho had made Black Art Book: An Employee’s Confession aka The Lost Alibi the previous year and Black Art Book: A Certain Disaster aka Death on the Mountain earlier in 1961. Structure of Hate was the final entry in the series.

Thanks to A.K.

DVD at Amazon Japan (no English subtitles)

The Naked Executive / 裸の重役 / Hadaka no juyaku (1964)

Obscure Japanese Film #151

Hisaya Morishige

Hidaka (Hisaya Morishige) is a widowed office manager with a grown-up daughter, Keiko (Yuriko Hoshi). Now 50 years old, he has a reputation for strictness and is, in fact, a bit of a bastard who has no sympathy for those less fortunate such as Hamanaka (Seiji Miyaguchi), an employee nearing retirement age who begs to be kept on as he has a sick wife to support. 

Yuriko Hoshi

 

Seiji Miyaguchi

When Hidaka gets promoted to senior manager and is to be sent on a lengthy business trip abroad, he reluctantly agrees to help Hamanaka before he departs, but seems to have an ulterior motive. Hidaka has learned to his horror that Keiko has been seeing Okuda (Kiyoshi Kamoda), whom he regards as his most useless employee, and he wants Hamanaka’s help in ending their relationship. 

Kiyoshi Kamoda (not Kodama)

 

However, upon his return, Hidaka is disconcerted to find that Keiko has not only stubbornly refused to cut ties with Okuda, but encouraged him to marry her in spite of her father’s opposition. Hidaka realises he has no choice but to accept the situation, but as a result he finds himself humbled in the eyes of the big boss (Eijiro Tono) and loses his self-confidence. Beginning to suffer from insomnia and depression, he finds unexpected solace in the arms of streetwalker Sakiko (Reiko Dan)…

Eijiro Tono

 

This Toho production is the sort of Japanese film not shown very often in the West, probably because Westerners used to marrying whoever they want and not having to kow-tow to their bosses to the extent we see here may find it hard to relate to. An awful lot of arse-kissing goes on in Hidaka’s office, although it’s simply portrayed as perfectly normal and not satirised at all. In fact, I was surprised to see barely a hint of true criticism of the money- and career-obsessed world Hidaka inhabits. However, the very uber-Japaneseness of the film does lend it a certain cultural curiosity value. 

Hisaya Morishige

 

It’s unusual to see a character like Hidaka as the protagonist of a movie. The fact that he’s played by Hisaya Morishige led me to expect a comedy, but I think this is supposed to be a drama, toothless as it may be. Morishige is an actor little-known abroad, but who played leads for director Shiro Toyoda in Marital Relations (1955) and Shozo, A Cat and Two Women (1956). Hidaka is a character who undergoes a complete, almost Scrooge-like transformation by the end of the film. The problem is that none of it is at all convincing. We are in some weird kind of male-wish-fulfilment fantasy land here with the vivacious Reiko Dan as a highly unlikely streetwalker. It’s not Dan’s fault, though, it’s just a whitewashed portrait of someone reduced to this profession – the contrast with Miyuki Kuwano in the same year’s The Shape of Night could not be more pronounced. 

Reiko Dan

 

From an original screenplay by regular Naruse collaborator Toshiro Ide, The Naked Executive is competently but rather blandly directed by Yasuki Chiba, a veteran who was then under contract to Toho. He seems to have been well-regarded in his time, but the only other film I’ve managed to see by him so far is a rather wonderful comedy entitled Tokyo Sweetheart (1952) starring Toshiro Mifune and Setsuko Hara. 

Yuriko Hoshi