Woman Unveiled / 女であること / Onna de aru koto (‘Being a Woman’, 1958)

 

Yoshiko Kuga

 

Masayuki Mori and Setsuko Hara

Sadatsugu (Masayuki Mori), a lawyer, and his wife Ichiko (Setsuko Hara) are a childless couple who are looking after the daughter of one of Sadatsugu’s clients, who is facing a death sentence, though we never learn precisely what for. The daughter, named Taeko (Kyoko Kagawa), appears to be in her late teens, and is sensitive, timid and rather gloomy, perhaps mostly due to her father’s situation.

 

Kyoko Kagawa

Sadatsugu and Ichiko then find themselves having to look after another young woman of a similar age, Sakae (Yoshiko Kuga), who has run away from home and is the daughter of Ichiko’s best friend. Unlike Taeko, Sakae turns out to be a spoilt, insensitive troublemaker with no filter and no control over her emotions. It’s not long before she’s annoying Taeko with her directness, flirting with Sadatsugu and even coming home drunk and kissing Ichiko on the lips. Meanwhile, Ichiko has a chance meeting with old flame Goro (Tatsuya Mihashi), whom she hasn’t seen for 17 years. Then Sakae finds out and starts sticking her oar in… 

 

Tatsuya Mihashi

 

This production by Tokyo Eiga (a subsidiary of Toho) was director Yuzo Kawashima’s first for them after leaving Nikkatsu. It was based on an untranslated novel of the same name by Yasunari Kawabata originally serialised in the Asahi Shinbun during 1956. Despite the fact that it’s not considered one of future Nobel laureate Kawabata’s most notable works, Kawashima – along with his collaborators Sumie Tanaka (female) and Toshiro Ide (male) – is said to have gone to a great deal of trouble over the screenplay. By all accounts a pretty faithful adaptation, nevertheless Kawashima apparently regarded the film as a failure, feeling that he had failed to make of it any more than an illustrated version of the novel’s key scenes. It’s also likely that some important aspects had to be implied in the film version due to censorship – for example, that Sadatsugu and his wife haven’t slept together much in their ten years of marriage, and that Ichiko’s interest in sex is revived partly due to her kiss with Sakae and partly as a result of meeting Goro again. There’s also some suggestion that Sadatsugu sleeps with Sakae, but it’s not really made clear. However, what’s more frustrating is that we learn nothing of the crime for which Taeko’s father is facing a death sentence and, in fact, never even lay eyes on him – it’s simply a convenient device to give her something to feel troubled about. It seems to me that the inclusion of such a story element rather obliges the writers to expand a little (I would assume that Kawabata went into more detail in his book).

 

Masayuki Mori

 

The film opens with a montage sequence of Yoshiko Kuga shot from behind riding around on her bike and shouting out greetings to various passers-by. This is followed by Akihiro Miwa, the drag queen from Black Lizard (1968), dancing and singing the title song (i.e. ‘Being a Woman’) over the opening credits before two American military planes go roaring overhead, scaring Kyoko Kagawa’s pet bird. It’s hard to know what to make of this opening – apart from whimsy on the part of Kawashima – as none of it seems to bear much relation to what follows. 

 

Setsuko Hara

Though by no means a bad film, Woman Unveiled also features a disappointingly corny, Hollywood-style score by Toshiro Mayuzumi and wraps things up in mostly conventional fashion, although the change undergone by Kyoko Kagawa’s character is somewhat unexpected. The posters promoted Setsuko Hara as the main star, but it’s Yoshiko Kuga who steals this one – the term  ‘charm offensive’ springs to mind here, as she simultaneously manages to be both charming and offensive. Incidentally, the role is strikingly similar to the one she played in the previous year’s Banka (aka Northern Elegy), in which she also caused trouble for a middle-aged and married professional played by Masayuki Mori. For all its flaws, Woman Unveiled remains a well-made and intelligent film arguably more in the Naruse mould than the Kawashima one (if such a thing existed) with a trio of very different but interesting and well-rounded female characters at its centre.

Thanks to A.K.

DVD at Amazon Japan (no English subtitles) 

 

 

Home Sweet Home / 我が家は楽し / Waga ya wa tanoshi (1951)

Obscure Japanese Film #67

Isuzu Yamada and Hideko Takamine

This Shochiku production stars Hideko Takamine as Tomoko, the eldest child of office worker Kosaku Uemura (Chishu Ryu) and housewife Namiko (Isuzu Yamada). As she has three younger siblings, there are a total of six members of the family living together. They are struggling to make ends meet on Kosaku’s modest salary, so Namiko works from home as a seamstress. A cheerfully self-sacrificing woman, she eats bread to save money while serving her family rice and never complains even though her slightly bumbling and absent-minded husband has not exactly set the world on fire.

Chishu Ryu

 

Tomoko is in her early 20s and has ambitions to be a painter. Her fiancé, Saburo (Keiji Sada), is a war veteran with tuberculosis; she goes to visit him regularly in the sanatorium where he is a patient. Tomoko’s 18-year-old sister Nobuko (Keiko Kishi in her film debut) has started to become very popular with the local boys, something which causes some concern for her parents. Meanwhile, Tomoko feels she should probably give up painting and get a job to ease the financial burden on her family, but when Kosaku gets a bonus at work, it seems as if all their problems will be solved. However, just at the moment their hopes have been raised, they hit a run of bad luck and everything starts to go wrong…

Hideko Takamine and Keiko Kishi

 

Cinema audiences of the time must have related strongly to the problems faced by the Uemura family in a Japan that was yet to have recovered economically from the war. As portrayed here by a remarkable cast of then-present and future stars, the whole family are so likeable that you really feel for them when bad luck strikes.

Keiji Sada

 

This is the only film I’ve seen by director Noboru Nakamura (not to be confused with the more Roger Corman-like Nobuo Nakagawa!). Apparently, this was the first film of Nakamura’s to receive a considerable amount of positive attention from the critics of the day. I can’t say that I noticed anything exceptional in his direction, but the film compares well to similar domestic dramas by such filmmakers such as Ozu and Naruse – in fact, screenwriter Sumie Tanaka often wrote for Naruse – and I would certainly recommend it to anyone who enjoys their work.

UPDATE: I've since seen director Noburo Nakamura's Koto (1963), a really excellent film featuring a great dual performance by Shima Iwashita. I haven't reviewed it as I felt I had little to add to Japan on Film's review, which you can read here.

 

Night Butterflies / 夜の蝶 / Yoru no cho (1957)

Obscure Japanese Film #33

Machiko Kyo

 

Opening in documentary style as it takes us on a whistle-stop night-time tour around the upmarket bars of Tokyo’s Ginza district, Night Butterflies features intermittent narration by the world-weary Shuji (Eiji Funakoshi, best known for his leading role in Fires on the Plain), a failed musician turned ‘hostess-broker’. He finds bar hostess jobs for young women, many of whom have come to the capital due to the difficulty of earning a decent wage in the country. More spiv than pimp, Shuji treats the girls reasonably well and does not take advantage of them. 

Fujiko Yamamoto

One of his best clients is Mari (Machiko Kyo), a bar owner from Osaka, where people are said to be more outspoken and down-to-earth than in Tokyo, and this is certainly true in her case.  Mari’s bar is thriving, but she is displeased to hear the news that Okiku (Fujiko Yamamoto) has just arrived in the area and will shortly be opening a bar of her own. Okiku is originally from Kyoto, a city often seen as the polar opposite to Osaka and whose inhabitants have something of a reputation for pretentious and snobbish behaviour. The two women have a history revealed in black-and-white flashbacks – seven years previously, Mari had discovered that her late husband was cheating on her with Okiku. Initially, the two rivals are frostily polite to each other, but their mutual loathing simmers away beneath the surface before eventually boiling over, leading to tragedy. 

Machiko Kyo and Eiji Funakoshi

 

Like the previously-reviewed Beauty is Guilty, Night Butterflies was based on a novel by Matsutaro Kawaguchi[1] and adapted by Sumie Tanaka, although the two films seem to mark the extent of their collaborations. Director Kozaburo Yoshimura (1911-2000) was a well-respected filmmaker who specialised in drama but occasionally experimented with comedy, as in The Fellows Who Ate the Elephant (1947). An Osaka Story (1957) is perhaps the most impressive of his accessible films. While well-executed, Night Butterflies is interesting mainly for its story, subject matter and two female stars. Shot in academy ratio during the last days of that format in Japan before widescreen became standard, it left me feeling that the latter format usually makes for more arresting compositions even in dramas of this sort, despite Fritz Lang’s famous apocryphal quote that Cinemascope was only good for photographing funerals and snakes. If Yoshimura’s film had been shot in widescreen, it would closely resemble the work of fellow Daiei director Yasuzo Masumura, especially in its misanthropic outlook (although a Masumura version would probably have featured Shuji slapping the girls around and taking advantage of them).  

There is one extremely jarring transition in the film – around 50 minutes in, we suddenly find ourselves observing a new character, a doctor (Hiroshi Akutagawa), squeezing blood out of a prostrate rabbit while his lab assistant fiancée (Mieko Kondo) reluctantly helps. It’s like suddenly finding yourself watching a completely different movie, although the connection to the main story does become apparent in the end. Otherwise, the film holds no major surprises, but the climactic tragedy is well-staged and it’s an effective cautionary tale about the dangers of pursuing revenge. It’s also worth viewing to see the face-off between Osaka and Kyoto personified by two of Japan’s top female stars.

---

[1] Kawaguchi’s novel had the same title and was published the same year the film was released. It was based on the real-life rivalry between Rumiko Kawabe (1917-1989), proprietress of a bar called Espoir, and Hide Ueha, also known as Osome (1923-2012), who owned a bar of the same name financed by a politician. Matsutaro Kawaguchi was a regular customer at Osome. However, the feud between Kawabe (the model for Mari) and Okiku (the model for Osome) did not end in tragedy and it was even said they eventually became friends. Ueha appeared as herself in Yuzo Kawashima’s The Balloon (1956).

Beauty is Guilty / 美貌に罪あり / Bibo ni tsumi ari (1959)

Obscure Japanese Film #29

Ayako Wakao

Ayako Wakao’s fourth film for director Yasuzo Masumura is the sort of soapy drama that would soon disappear from cinema screens in Japan and be produced for TV instead. Nevertheless, it has a very strong cast and some depths which may not be immediately apparent.   

Haruko Sugimura

Fusa (Haruko Sugimura) is a widow who owns an orchid farm near Tokyo which has been the family business for 150 years but is now struggling financially. Another difficulty is the fact that her two grown daughters have other ideas about what they want to do with their lives. The eldest, Kikue (Fujiko Yamamoto), wants to be a dancer. She is the protégé of dancer and teacher Kanzo (Shintaro Katsu), and the two become romantically involved with the result that Kanzo’s patroness and former mistress, restaurant owner Okume (Chieko Murata), throws them out in a jealous rage. The two are forced to move into a small apartment and dance at parties to make ends meet.

Fujiko Yamamoto

Meanwhile, Kikue’s younger half-sister Keiko (Ayako Wakao) becomes an air stewardess and abandons her childhood sweetheart Tadao (Hiroshi Kawaguchi), who is employed on her mother’s farm. Keiko begins running with a more sophisticated, urban crowd but narrowly escapes being raped by a smooth-talking embezzler she meets at a party. 

Hiroshi Kawaguchi

Tadao’s younger sister, Kaoru (Hitomi Nozoe), is a deaf-mute who also works on the farm and is treated by Fusa as a third daughter. She has a crush on orchid expert Shusaku (Keizo Kawasaki), but unfortunately he is in love with Kikue (and unaware she is already in a relationship with Kanzo).

Hitomi Nozoe

Beauty is Guilty is about coming to terms with a changing world. Kikue, played by an actress said to have embodied the ideal of Japanese beauty, studies and performs classical Japanese dance and represents traditional values. In contrast, Keiko (played by an actress with more contemporary-looking features) clearly has her eye on the future in going to work for an airline and represents modern values (Ayako Wakao even speaks English a couple of times here).

Shintaro Katsu

Kaoru, continually having her hair stroked or being patted on the head by those around her, is a less convincing character (through no fault of Nozoe) as I doubt someone in her position would, in reality, appreciate being treated as if she were a puppy. Playing a dancer, Shintaro Katsu is so well-groomed he may be unrecognisable to anyone who has only seen him as Zatoichi. As the kind but somewhat resigned matriarch, Haruko Sugimura gives her usual quietly impressive performance and the spontaneous dance she performs with Fujiko Yamamoto is a strangely moving highlight.

Beauty is Guilty was based on a novel[1] by Matsutaro Kawaguchi (1899-1985), who frequently wrote for Kenji Mizoguchi and was the father of Hiroshi Kawaguchi, who appears here as Tadao. The novel was adapted by Sumie Tanaka (1908-2000), a female playwright who later became a screenwriter, notably for directors Mikio Naruse and Kinuyo Tanaka (no relation).

I would be surprised to see a DVD release of this one in the West as it fails to tick any of the cult boxes of those Masumura films which have surfaced over here.

Watched without subtitles. 

DVD at Amazon Japan 

---

[1] I haven’t been able to find any details of the novel even in Japanese, so it may actually have been a short story or published under a different title.