Obscure Japanese Film #182
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| Tetsuro Tanba |
When Kasahara, a teacher from the local school is found dead at the bottom of a cliff on the Noto Peninsula, it’s assumed that he either slipped or committed suicide. However, his old friend Komiya (Tetsuro Tanba), who works as a reporter in Tokyo, smells a rat – he knows that Kasahara was afraid of heights, so he decides to investigate. In the process, he uncovers a complex (but not terribly interesting) web of conspiracy and corruption…
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This Toei production features the type of story more usually associated with Seicho Matsumoto, but which in this case is actually based on a 1959 novel of the same name by Tsutomu Minakami (or Mizukami), known for Bamboo Dolls of Echizen, The Temple of Wild Geese, and Straits of Hunger among others. The Matsumoto resemblance is no coincidence as Minakami himself said that he had been inspired to write the book after reading Matsumoto’s Points and Lines (also known in English as Tokyo Express). It was Minakami’s first big success as a writer, and he soon proved that he was more than a mere Matsumoto imitator. According to Japanese Wikipedia, a critic named Kazushi Shinoda admired Kiri to kage for portraying the ‘anguish of a man cursed by fate, and the depth of the karma of a man who tries to escape his fate but ultimately cannot’.
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It’s a pity, then, that this aspect of the work is absent from Teruo Ishii’s film, which is strictly B-movie stuff. It has been said that Ishii repeatedly attempted to make Naruse-like dramas early in his career, but these projects were all rejected. He later became a cult director, perhaps mainly due to his willingness to make exploitation films with titles such as Horrors of Malformed Men and Inferno of Torture. Kiri to kage is well-shot but largely routine apart from the odd eccentric touch such as giving one of Komiya’s fellow reporters the gross habit of picking his nose with his pencil.
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Despite a reputation for turning up late on set without having learned his lines (and often using cue cards), Tetsuro Tanba was a fine actor, but the early leading role he gets here is the type in which the main thing the actor has to do is simply to find a different way to look surprised each time they receive new information. The remainder of the cast are not especially notable, and Chuji Kinoshita’s unsubtle music score does not help matters either, so I have to mark this one down as another disappointment. If it’s karmic anguish you’re after, watch Tomu Uchida’s adaptation of Minakami’s Straits of Hunger (better-known in English as A Fugitive from the Past) instead.
Watched with dodgy subtitles (I auto-translated from Japanese).
