Totsugu hi made / 嫁ぐ日まで (‘Until Your Wedding Day’, 1940)

Obscure Japanese Film #231

 

Setsuko Hara

Yoshiko (Setsuko Hara) lives with her widowed father (Ko Mihashi) and younger sister Asako (Akira Kurosawa’s future wife, Yoko Yaguchi, in her film debut). She’s being courted by Atsushi (Heihachiro Okawa), but feels that she cannot get married until her father finds a new wife to look after him and Asako. A suitable woman is found in the person of Tsuneko (Sadako Sawamura), but Asako is still very attached to the memory of her late mother, so will she accept another woman filling this role? 

 

Yoko Yaguchi

This domestic drama from Toho Eiga seems to prefigure the post-war films of Ozu, even down to the choice of Setsuko Hara as star. It’s well-made and features very natural performances from an impressive cast that also includes Haruko Sugimura as a piano teacher, but it’s arguably a little too low-key for its own good. It also features a couple of rather awkward ellipses and I must say that I found the ending completely unsatisfactory, perhaps largely because writer-director-producer Yasujiro Shimazu chose not to set it up in any way, so that when it comes it’s so out of the blue it feels almost random. 

 

Ko Mihashi

Shimazu, who died aged 48 of stomach cancer just after the war ended, was one of Japan’s most acclaimed directors of the 1930s. Credited with pioneering a new emphasis on realism and the lives of everyday people, it’s likely that he would have been much better known today had he survived and been able to continue directing for another decade or two. Keisuke Kinoshita, one of several fine directors who apprenticed under Shimazu, considered him a tyrant yet admitted he had learnt a great deal from him. 

 

Heihachiro Okawa

Intriguingly, there is a scene in which Asako’s school friends discuss going to see the 1938 French film about a reformatory school for teenage girls, Prison sans barreaux, which had recently been released in Japan, although it was unclear to me whether this was intended to say anything Asako's rebellion, mild as it is.  

 

Sadako Sawamura

 

Watch on my YouTube channel with English subtitles

https://BUYMEACOFFEE.com/martindowsing 

Kenka tobi / 喧嘩鳶 (‘Fighting Firemen,’ 1939)

Obscure Japanese Film #222

 

Kazuo Hasegawa

 

This Toho Eiga production was based on a newspaper serial novel by Kanji Kunieda (1892-1956), who specialised in stories set in the Edo period and also wrote the source novel upon which Mizoguchi’s  Utamaro and His Five Women (1946) was based. The story of Kenka tobi concerns the genuine historical phenomenon of the samurai firefighting gangs of the Edo period, who were often in fierce competition with each other. 

 

Isuzu Yamada

 

The film features four of the big stars of Japanese cinema in the late 1930s: Kazuo Hasegawa, Isuzu Yamada, Ranko Hanai and Yataro Kurokawa. Directed by Tamizo Ishida, who also made Fallen Blossoms (1938) and the previously-reviewed Flower-Picking Diary (1939), it was a big budget production originally released in two parts and featuring impressively large sets (much of which goes up in flames) and hundreds of extras. 

 

Ranko Hanai

 

Kenka tobi zenpen (‘Fighting Firemen Part 1’) ran 73 minutes and, while I was unable to find a reliable running time for Part 2 (Kenka tobi kohen), I think it’s safe to assume it was a similar length. What we are left with is an 89-minute version cobbled together from the two original parts, so it’s likely that nearly an hour has been chopped out, and there are certainly elements of the story that are a little unclear. 

 

Yamada and Hasegawa

What remains has Kichigoro (Hasegawa), a firefighter from the Kaga-tobi gang, coming to the rescue of Omon (Hanai) when some villains try to abduct her in the street. Omon is the sister of the Ha-gumi gang’s Jirokichi (Kurokawa). She falls in love with Kichigoro, but this is complicated as he belongs to the rivals of her brother’s gang (shades of Romeo and Juliet) and also because Koina (Yamada), a geisha who knows him as a client, is already in love with him…

 

Hasegawa and Yataro Kurokawa

 

Although it’s a meller aimed squarely at the box office, there’s a good deal of subtlety in Ishida’s direction here, and it’s really very well staged and shot throughout, while performances are free from the hamminess you might expect from this type of material. With so few early Japanese talkies available in such good quality before it mostly became military propaganda, Kenka tobi is a rare treat. I doubt that we’ll ever get to see the original two parts in full and would not be surprised if they no longer exist – it was quite common in the Japanese cinema at the time for studios to make two-part films, then edit them down to a single feature and apparently bin the rest. Other examples that spring to mind are Kon Ichikawa’s 365 Nights (1948) and The Burmese Harp (1956), and The Spider Man (1958).

A remake appeared in 1961 under the title Edokko-hada, directed by Masahiro Makino. 

 

Thanks to A.K. 

Watch on my YouTube channel here (with English subtitles)