The Virgin Witness / 処女が見た / Shojo ga mita (1966)

Obscure Japanese Film #120

Michiyo Yasuda

Kazue (Michiyo Yasuda) is an 18-year-old orphan who has been adopted by her uncle and aunt, with whom she does not get along. Troubled and rebellious, she is prone to violent emotional outbursts which cause her to be expelled from school, leading her uncle to beg the local Buddhist head priest (Shozo Nanbu) to find a suitable temple to take her in. 

 

Ayako Wakao

Kazue is brought to a temple run by Chiei (Ayako Wakao), an attractive young nun who is initially strict and somewhat remote with Kazue, who soon learns that life there will mostly consist of chanting sutras, cleaning, and eating tasteless food. However, Kazue finds herself drawn to Chiei. In one unlikely scene, she manages to persuade Chiei to join her at the concert of a band she is friendly with (they play American-style surf rock in the style of The Astronauts). 

 

Chiei is shocked to find that she enjoys it, and the two women become closer, but – just when it seems that Kazue might find some sort of stability at the temple – the head priest dies and is replaced by a younger man (Lone Wolf and Cub star Tomisaburo Wakayama). 

Tomisaburo Wakayama

 

Unfortunately, he seems to have gone to the Ganjiro Nakamura / Masao Mishima school of Buddhism* and exhibits rather too much enthusiasm for worldly pleasures, quickly developing an inappropriate interest in Chiei, who finds herself in an impossible position…

 

This Daiei production recycles elements of The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (filmed by Kon Ichikawa as Conflagration) and Ayako Wakao’s earlier film The Temple of Wild Geese, but in those stories the troubled youth was a male. Michiyo Yasuda (in her first film for Daiei after starting out in a couple of films for Nikkatsu) is excellent, going from flaming-eyed fury in one scene to moving vulnerability in another before switching to cool calculation towards the end. She does all of these well, and it’s arguably more her film than it is Wakao’s. Following the success of this picture, Yasuda was immediately reteamed with Wakao for the excellent Freezing Point (1966), then went on to play the female lead in Yasuzo Masumura’s remake of A Fool’s Love the following year. 

 

Although Ayako Wakao’s performance is of her usual high standard, there is something of a disconnect between the way she plays her part and the words she has to say in a couple of the later scenes. In my opinion, the script is to blame for this as, despite the fact that Chiei is obviously supposed to be an intelligent woman, her actions are at times too foolish to be plausible. That’s a pity as this is otherwise a pretty good movie, well-made as one would expect from director Kenji Misumi.

  

*Ganjiro Nakamura and Masao Mishima played hypocritical priests in Conflagration (1958) and The Temple of Wild Geese (1962) respectively.

Sanshiro Sugata / 姿三四郎 (1977)

Obscure Japanese Film #48

Tomokazu Miura and Kumiko Akiyoshi

 

Sanshiro Sugata (1943) was, of course, the directorial debut of a certain Akira Kurosawa, who had persuaded Toho Studios to buy the rights to Tsuneo Tomita’s just-published novel of the same name. Sugata is a fictional character based on Shiro Saigo (1866-1922), an early practitioner of judo who became one of the masters of the art. Tomita himself was the son of another judo champ, Tsunejiro Tomita, who had been an associate of Saigo’s. Kurosawa’s commercial instincts had proven sound on that occasion – so much so, in fact, that the studio pressured him into making a sequel, which was released just as the war was coming to an end. Between that film and this 1977 version, there had been a further four remakes, including a 1965 film produced by Kurosawa himself. This was apparently a scene-for-scene remake of the first two films, but it was not well-received by the critics and seems to have all but destroyed the career of its young director, Seiichiro Uchikawa, whose previous film (Samurai from Nowhere) had shown definite promise.

Kihachi Okamoto (right) on set

 

Kihachi Okamoto was an eccentric and often brilliant director whose work suffered a sharp decline in quality as the ‘60s ended and the ‘70s began. The reasons for this are debatable, but in my opinion none of his films from 1970 onwards really work, and his talent became less and less evident as time went on. This is a pity, because his mid-period movies such as Sword of Doom, Oh Bomb! and The Human Bullet are stunning. Unfortunately, his remake of Sanshiro Sugata (newly released on DVD in Japan) proves not to have been a return to form. In fact, it copies a great deal from the Kurosawa original, from the blurry point-of-view shot seen through the eyes of a nearly knocked-out opponent to the climactic fight on the windswept hill. There is one scene in which Okamoto subverts our expectations – in the original, Sugata had thrown away his geta (wooden sandals) when volunteering to drive judo master Shogoro Yano’s rickshaw; Kurosawa had used this to create a striking montage sequence in which we see what happens to one of the geta with the passage of time. In Okamoto’s version, he is about to throw them away, but thinks better of it and ties them to the rickshaw handle. Some of the fight scenes could be said to be an improvement on Kurosawa’s, but the shot of an opponent flying through the air worked in 1943 because it was so brief, whereas Okamoto makes it completely absurd by extending the shot and adding a ridiculous sound effect. Indeed, this Sanshiro Sugata, with its pop song theme tune, jaunty score and broad performances suggests that the intended audience was 10-year-old boys. Incidentally, the lame music is by none other than Masaru Sato, who had once given us one of the great film scores of all time for Kurosawa’s Yojimbo. 

Tatsuya Nakadai

 

That Okamoto assembled an all-star cast mostly goes for very little. Tatsuya Nakadai is fine as Sugata’s teacher, Shogoro Yano (played by Toshiro Mifune in 1965), but it’s hardly one of his better roles. Nevertheless, he clearly did some of his own stunts and looks more convincingly formidable than Denjiro Okochi did in the 1943 film. We also get Kumiko Akiyoshi as the love interest, Tomisaburo ‘Lone Wolf’ Wakayama as her father (Takashi Shimura in the original), Kyoko ‘Woman in the Dunes’ Kishida as an older woman who tries to seduce Sanshiro, Atsuo Nakamura as Gennosuke Higaki (the main villain of the piece), Kunie Tanaka as Sanshiro’s best friend and Tetsuro Tanba in an especially thankless role as a senior member of Yano’s school. 

 

Daisuke Ryu

Nakadai’s real-life acting student Daisuke Ryu also makes his film debut as one of the attackers whom Nakadai hurls into the canal. The lead is played by the boyish Tomokazu Miura, a teen heartthrob type who could act a bit; he’s adequate, but never really convinces as a man of the 19^th-century and I prefer Susumu Fujita in the original. 

Kunie Tanaka, Akiyoshi and Miura

 

The film was mostly shot with a handheld camera long before it became de rigeur, but I can’t say it adds much and it’s really only the fact that it’s in Panavision that prevents this looking like a TV drama. The screenplay was co-written by Okamoto and Nakadai’s wife, Yasuko Miyazaki. The first hour and 40 minutes follow the first Kurosawa film, while the final 40 minutes feature the karate-schooled brothers of Gennosuke Higaki who are out for vengeance and appeared in Kurosawa's 1945 sequel. The role of the heroine has been greatly expanded (the character was little more than a cipher in Kurosawa’s films) and the new character of Sanshiro’s best friend is given quite a few scenes, in one of which he is brutally attacked by Gennosuke Higaki and left with a permanently twisted arm. No longer able to fight, he later turns up with a gun! One wonders if this role was created especially for Kunie Tanaka, who must have been double-jointed as his broken limb is so convincing and is, in fact, the highlight of this otherwise disappointing movie. 

Watched without subtitles. 

 

Chutaro of Banba /番場の忠太郎/ Banba no Chutaro (1955)

Obscure Japanese Film #8 

Isuzu Yamada and Tomisaburo Wakayama

Based on a play by Shin Hasegawa entitled Mabuta no haha (which translates rather awkwardly as ‘Mother of the Eyelids’), Chutaro of Banba stars Tomisaburo ‘Lone Wolf’ Wakayama in one of his first film appearances as the title character. Having already been a famous kabuki actor before quitting the theatre in 1953 to concentrate on judo (becoming a black-belt in the process), Wakayama’s cinema career saw him go straight into starring roles in action pictures.

Chutaro of Banba has an autobiographical element as original author Hasegawa had himself been separated from his mother at an early age and the hero of his story is a matatabi (wandering yakuza) searching for his long-lost mother. Along the way, Chutaro gets into fights with less honourable yakuza, picks up a couple of waifs and strays, makes a few friends and falls in love. The opening fight scene may seem a little tame as, pre-dating Yojimbo by several years,  it’s too early for spurting blood, hacked-off limbs and even the sound of clashing swords, but Wakayama moves pretty fast for a chubby guy and is even better in a later fight scene when he fends off multiple opponents with a water dipper. 

 

The film boasts a strong supporting cast, three of whom have Kurosawa connections. Chutaro’s friend Hanji is played by Koji Mitsui, who appeared in seven Kurosawa films from Scandal to Dodes’ka-den, most notably as the gambler in The Lower Depths, where he got to deliver the memorable last line, ‘Idiot…you ruined the song.’ He rarely played a leading role, but specialised in acerbic character parts in which his wonderfully rasping voice and expressive facial features made an indelible impression. The English Wikipedia page for Mitsui is surprisingly detailed and well worth a read.

 

Koji Mitsui

Hanji’s sister, who supplies the love interest in the film, is played by Yoko Katsuragi, who was Takashi Shimura’s sick daughter in Kurosawa’s Scandal and also popped up in the Kurosawa-scripted The Portrait (1948), directed by Keisuke Kinoshita, although she has a better part in Kinoshita’s A Broken Drum (1949) as an aspiring actress playing Hamlet. 

Yoko Katsuragi

 

Most notably, however, Isuzu Yamada appears as Chutaro’s mother. Yamada was one of the greats and appeared in three films for Kurosawa, always in villainous roles - most memorably as the Lady Macbeth equivalent in Throne of Blood. In her youth she had been a beauty, often playing romantic leads, and she had in fact appeared in the first version of Mabuta no haha in 1931 – not as the mother, but as Otose, the half-sister Chutaro never knew he had (played in the 1955 version by Sanae Mitsuoka). 

 

Isuzu Yamada

The 1931 film was a silent directed by Hiroshi Inagaki and starring Tomu Uchida favourite Chiezo Kataoka (Bloody Spear at Mount Fuji / Swords in the Moonlight / Killing in Yoshiwara). Kataoka repeated the role for a 1936 version, while a third appeared in 1938 starring Kazuo Hasegawa (Gate of Hell / An Actor’s Revenge), making the 1955 film the fourth but not the last: in 1962, Tai Kato directed a remake with Kinnosuke Nakamura.

This 1955 Shintoho version is directed by Nobuo Nakagawa, remembered mostly for his horror films and sometimes referred to as ‘the Roger Corman of Japan.’ His best-known film nowadays seems to be Jigoku (Hell, 1960) – a shame, as I personally thought that was easily the worst of the five Nakagawa films I’ve seen. Much better were The Ghost of Yotsuya and a couple of female-focused films noir, Death Row Woman and A Wicked Woman. 

Hisaya Morishige, Tomisaburo Wakayama and Yoko Katsuragi

 

Chutaro of Banba has a lot going for it – the strong cast, which also includes an enjoyable guest star appearance by Hisaya Morishige as a surprisingly genial law enforcement official; Kagai Okaido’s dynamic camerawork and excellent sense of composition, and a pretty decent music score by Yasuji Kiyose. The story may be sentimental but there are quirks enough to keep things interesting all the way to the finale, when we are treated to one of those unnecessarily  sad endings that Japanese audiences seem to crave (see my earlier review of The Saga of Tanegashima for more thoughts on this phenomenon).

The film can be bought in a good quality print with excellent subtitles (by Merlin David) here: https://samuraidvd.com/chutaro-of-banba/