The Law of Hell / 地獄の掟 / Jigoku no okite (1982)

Obscure Japanese Film #76

Tatsuya Nakadai

 

This TV remake of the 1971 film known in English as Inn of Evil, which also starred Tatsuya Nakadai, was very much a family affair for the actor. Based on a Shugoro Yamamoto story entitled ‘Fukagawa Anrakutei’, the scripts for both were written by Nakadai’s wife, Yasuko Miyazaki, under her pen name of Tomoe Ryu. The other important personal connection for Nakadai is that most of the cast were students from his acting school, Mumeijuku (a notable exception is Hideo Murota, who plays the mysterious drunk portrayed by Shintaro Katsu in the earlier film). 

 

Nakadai was approaching 50 by the time of this remake, which is presumably why this time round he chose to play Ikuzo, the owner of the Anrakutei inn on a tiny island in Fukagawa (hence the title of Yamamoto’s story), rather than repeat his earlier part of Sadashichi the Indifferent, played effectively here by his student, the late Daisuke Ryu. 

Daisuke Ryu and Nakadai

 

One issue I have with Yamamoto’s story is that it rather wants to have its cake and eat it in the way we are expected to accept that a gang of hardened criminals turn into a bunch of sentimental softies as a result of hearing one hard-luck story. However, if you can swallow that and make allowances for the fact that this is not a 2-hour Masaki Kobayashi movie, but a 90-minute TV drama, this is a pretty decent effort. Having watched a few of Nakadai’s early ‘80s made-for-TV movies now, I’ve been quite impressed by how well-lit, shot and staged they are in comparison to the often visually drab television drama served up during this period in the West. The director for many of these was Akira Inoue (1928-2022), who had been a feature film director in the 1960s, making pictures such as Zatoichi’s Revenge (1965), but who worked mostly in television from the 1970s on. Nakadai is of course excellent as the philosophical father figure here, giving a mostly restrained performance until things heat up in the climax, when he even gets to engage in a little swordplay. 

Nakadai and Daisuke Ryu

 

Yasuko Miyazaki later adapted the story once more, this time for the theatre. It was first staged in 1997, a year after her death, with Nakadai again playing Izuko, and Nakadai has revived it several times since. 

Thanks to Samurai Vs Ninja for making this available on YouTube here.

Daisuke Ryu

 

Magistrate of the Floating World / 着ながし奉行 / Kinagashi bugyo (‘The Magistrate who Dresses Informally’, 1981)

Obscure Japanese Film #72

Tatsuya Nakadai

This Fuji TV movie is a period comedy-drama directed by none other than Kihachi Okamoto and starring his frequent leading actor Tatsuya Nakadai. Koheita Mochizuki (Nakadai) is the new magistrate appointed to clean up Horisoto, a town district on a small island connected to the rest of the town by a single footbridge. Criminals operate freely there, and the town has lost three magistrates in the space of a year due to their inability to deal with the situation. Mochizuki is an eccentric character who takes a radically new approach and decides it is better to be underestimated. Before his arrival, he has somebody spread a rumour that he is better at cavorting with women than he is at martial arts. In fact, although he is a womaniser, he is also a martial arts expert. The staff are awaiting his arrival at the magistrate’s office, but he arrives incognito, avoids the office and begins making friends with the criminals…

 

If the idea of a crime-riddled island sounds familiar from Inn of Evil, this is no coincidence as Magistrate of the Floating World is also based on a story by Shugoro Yamamoto (‘Machi bugyo nikki’, or ‘Town Samurai Diary’). There’s a clever narrative device in use in this version, which has the main action interspersed with scenes featuring a dialogue between two scribes awaiting the arrival of Mochizuki at the office. Functioning almost like a Greek chorus, these two characters discuss the situation throughout and provide useful exposition.

Eitaro Ozawa

 

Kihachi Okamoto also co-wrote the script (with Toshiaki Matsushima), but this was apparently a troubled production as he treated it like a feature film and became so fed up with constantly being told he could not do certain things due to budgetary constraints that at one point he threatened to quit. Considering this, the final result turned out pretty well and I feel that it’s not only better than most of Okamoto’s post-1960s work, but also superior to Dora-heita (2000), Kon Ichikawa’s lacklustre later version based on a screenplay by himself, Keisuke Kinoshita and Akira Kurosawa (written around three decades before the film was finally made). It’s not always as funny as Okamoto seems to think, but it’s dynamic and fast-moving enough that the weaker comic moments are soon forgotten. 

 

Taiji Tonoyama

Nakadai is clearly enjoying himself here in a rare comic role, while other notables among the cast include Eitaro Ozawa and Taiji Tonoyama, the latter as the sidekick constantly reminding Mochizuki to wash his hands. Also featured are several students from Nakadai’s acting school, including Koji Yakusho, who later starred as Mochizuki in Dora-heita. Other adaptations of Yamamoto’s story include Kenji Misumi’s 1959 version starring Shintaro Katsu and Eiichi Kudo’s 1987 film with Ken Watanabe. 

Thanks to Samurai Vs Ninja for making this available on YouTube here.

 

The Fir Tree Remains /樅ノ木は残った / Momino ki ha nokotta (1983)

Obscure Japanese Film #69

Tatsuya Nakadai

 

In this Fuji TV movie, Tatsuya Nakadai stars as Kai Harada (1619-71), a samurai magistrate involved in the Daté Uproar (aka the Kanbun Incident), a factional squabble which erupted into violence when the young head of the Daté clan, Tsunamune Daté, was exiled as a punishment for debauchery and replaced by a 2-year-old. It was rumoured that Tsunamune’s punishment was a ruse by the shogunate, who wanted to weaken the power of the feudal lords. 

The Fir Tree Remains is based on an untranslated novel of the same name by Shugoro Yamamoto, a favourite writer of Akira Kurosawa, whose films Sanjuro, Red Beard and Dodes’ka-den were all based on Yamamoto stories. Yamamoto was also a favourite of Yasuko Miyazaki, the former actress who married Tatsuya Nakadai and later became a screenwriter under the name of Tomoe Ryu. Her first script had been a television adaptation of Yamamoto’s Tsuri shinobu back in 1966, while her screenplay for Masaki Kobayashi’s Inn of Evil was based on another of his novels, which she re-adapted for television in 1982 as Jigoku no okite and later as a stage play.

Here we have a complex story to tell in 90 minutes and one that I can’t say I found terribly engaging, although it’s certainly got a few things going for it. One of several period dramas Nakadai made for television under the direction of Akira Inoue around this time, for a 1983 TV movie, it’s surprisingly well-lit and photographed. The acting is also pretty decent on the whole, with Nakadai’s confident restraint being especially effective as the unflappable Kai Harada, who – like the fir tree in his garden – keeps his own counsel while those around him are (literally) losing their heads. According to Japanese Wikipedia, Harada had usually been depicted as a scheming villain prior to Yamamoto’s story; here, he’s portrayed as a sympathetic character with pure motives. 

Eitaro Ozawa

 

Also popping up among the cast are Eitaro Ozawa, one of Nakadai’s acting teachers from his student days, and a young Koji Yakusho, one of his students from his teaching days. 

Some of the music’s a bit clichéd and the subtitles are sometimes a bit odd (“I am sorry about this ruckus. Go away please.”), but on the whole I’d say this is worth a look for Nakadai fans. 

Yamamoto’s novel had previously been filmed for the cinema in 1962 by Kenji Misumi under the title Aobajo no oni (Aoba Castle Demon) in a version starring Kazuo Hasegawa, while other television adaptations were made in 1964, 1970 (with Mikijiro Hira), 1990 and 2010. 

Thanks to Samurai vs. Ninja for making this available on YouTube here.