The Last Judgment / 最後の審判 / Saigo no shinpan (1965)

Obscure Japanese Film #250

Tatsuya Nakadai

Masao Mishima

Jiro (Tatsuya Nakadai), the manager of a pool hall owned by Asai (Masao Mishima), has been having an affair with Masako (Chikage Awashima) since her wealthy engineer husband went to oversee a construction project in Vietnam two years earlier. The husband in question, Riichiro (Fujio Suga), also happens to be Jiro’s cousin. When he returns from abroad, it becomes very difficult for the lovers to continue meeting, especially as Riichiro is not only a jealous and suspicious type, but has a short fuse to boot.

Fujio Suga

Jitsuko Yoshimura

Meanwhile, Asai wants to sell the pool hall and Jiro wants to buy it but lacks the funds. He also has little time to find them as the local yakuza want to buy the place, but then he thinks of a clever solution to his problems. This will involve both seducing a waitress, Miyoko (Onibaba’s Jitsuko Yoshimura), and getting Riichiro to use his explosive temper against himself. But will Jiro be able to stay one step ahead of dogged police detective Kikuchi? (This latter is played by Junzaburo Ban, who played a similar character in the same year’s A Fugitive from the Past.)

Junzaburo Ban

This Toho production was based on the 1949 novel Heaven Ran Last by William P. McGivern (1918-82), who also wrote the novels on which Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat (1953) and Robert Wise’s Odds Against Tomorrow (1959) were based. Heaven Ran Last, though, was never filmed by Hollywood and, like Kurosawa basing High and Low (1963) on Ed McBain’s novel King’s Ransom, it’s an indication of how much American pulp was being translated into Japanese in the post-war years that it came to the attention of director Hiromichi Horikawa. In this case, apart from transferring the story from America to Japan, screenwriters Zenzo Matsuyama and Ichiro Ikeda have stuck pretty closely to the book – too closely, perhaps, according to some Japanese reviewers who have commented that the characters don’t behave like Japanese people. In any case, I found it to be one of the better plots I’ve seen in this type of film as the twists don’t become too far-fetched, as is so often the case.

Chikage Awashima

Several of the same talents from Horikawa’s excellent 1963 noir Shiro to kuro (‘White and Black’, aka Pressure of Guilt) returned for this one, including Japan’s top film composer Toru Takemitsu as well as cast members Chikage Awashima, Masao Mishima, Eijiro Tono and, of course, star Tatsuya Nakadai. The Last Judgment makes an excellent vehicle for Nakadai, who looks very cool driving around in an MG Roadster in his shades and fur-lined jacket and is obviously having a field day being very bad indeed. However, Jiro is saved from becoming a one-dimensional villain not only by Nakadai’s charismatic performance but the fact that his love for Masako, at least, does seem to be genuine.

One of the great things about Takemitsu as a composer was that he knew when to shut up, an all-too-rare talent which is well in evidence here, while Horikawa makes excellent use of industrial noises to heighten the tension in a number of scenes. Another plus is the dark, shadowy cinematography of Tokuzo Kuroda. All in all, The Last Judgment is a very satisfying noir that has been kept in the dark for far too long.

Thanks to A.K.

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Clouds at Sunset / あかね雲 / Akane-gumo (1967)

Obscure Japanese Film #169

Shima Iwashita

 

1937. After a prologue in which we see two soldiers deserting – one of whom is quickly captured – the story moves to Wajima, Ishikawa Prefecture. Matsuno (Shima Iwashita) is a 19-year-old virgin working as a maid at an inn, where she is best friends with another maid, the older and more experienced Ritsuko (Mayumi Ogawa). When Ritsuko leaves for a better-paid job as a hostess in Yamashiro Onsen 150 kilometres to the south, she invites Matsuno to go with her, but Matsuno decides to stay behind for the time being. 

 

Mayumi Ogawa

Tsutomu Yamazaki

She then meets Kosugi (Tsutomu Yamazaki), a kindly travelling salesman who stays at the inn where she works for a few nights. When she learns that he will also be going on to Yamashiro and can help her find a job there, Matsuno decides to join Ritsuko after all. However, she’s unaware that Kosugi has deserted from the army and has a dogged military policeman (Kei Sato) on his trail… 

Kei Sato

 

Clouds at Sunset was based on an untranslated 1964 novel of the same name by Tsutomu Mizukami (or Minakami), whose work formed the basis for a number of interesting films, including The Temple of Wild Geese, Bamboo Doll of Echizen, A Story from Echigo, A Fugitive from the Past and Lake of Tears. Like the latter two, the film was adapted for the screen by Naoyuki Suzuki, a famously uncompromising screenwriter who frequently collaborated with Tomu Uchida and had won two awards for A Fugitive from the Past. 

 

Directed by Masahiro Shinoda, like many of his films, Clouds at Sunset stars his wife, Shima Iwashita (in fact, the two are still married at the time of writing, aged 93 and 84 respectively). 26 years old when the film was made, she is nevertheless thoroughly convincing as the young and innocent Matsuno and won both the Kinema Junpo and Mainichi Film Concours awards for Best Actress for her performances in this and Portrait of Chieko. The other principals are also good, especially Mayumi Ogawa as her protective older friend (whom chance always seems to make unavailable at the crucial moment!). 

 

As played by Tsutomu Yamazaki (the kidnapper from Kurosawa’s High and Low), Kosugi never comes across like the scumbag one would expect considering the despicable way he later uses Matsuno to save his own skin. It’s made clear that he does this out of desperation rather than malevolence, and Matsuno continues to love him anyway. Somehow, this escapes feeling like the usual dubious male fantasy and Shinoda wisely leaves it open to question whether Matsuno is merely hopelessly naïve or is actually the only one perceptive enough to recognise Kosugi’s better nature.

 

Although distributed by Shochiku, the company for whom Shinoda had been under contract until 1966, the film was the first independent production by Hyogen-sha, Shinoda’s own company. All the more reason, then, to wonder why this excellent film came to fall through the cracks and become perhaps the least-seen of Shinoda’s works in recent years.

Aesthetically, the film looks and sounds great thanks to its subtle Toru Takemitsu score and the often beautiful cinematography of Masao Kosugi which, appropriately, bursts into colour at each sunset.

Thanks to A.K.

 

The Kii River / 紀ノ川 / Kinokawa (1966)

Obscure Japanese Film #152

Yoko Tsukasa

 

Wakayama, 1899. Hana (Yoko Tsukasa) is a young woman from a highly-respected family who marries slightly below her class as her husband, Keisaku Shintani (Takahiro Tamura), is judged to be a young man of exceptional promise. However, their married life gets off to an awkward start when Hana joins her husband to live in his family home, which is also shared by his brother, Kosaku (Tetsuro Tanba). He takes an instant dislike to her, perhaps because he resents her for being from a family of higher status, or perhaps because he’s secretly in love with her himself. Meanwhile, Keisaku spearheads an ambitious engineering project to build flood defences along the Kii River which will protect the surrounding farmlands in the event of heavy rain.

Takahiro Tamura and Tetsuro Tanba

 

As the years pass, the influence of the West increases and the modernisation of Japan begins. People begin to wear Western clothes more and more, and even express their appreciation of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. We see the introduction of new consumer items such as ready-made cigarettes and bicycles, as well as new ideas, including democracy, communism and the emancipation of women. Kosaku eventually mellows towards his sister-in-law, who has a daughter, Fumio (Shima Iwashita), with whom she has little in common. Fumio is an outspoken rebel who leads a protest when one of her teachers is unfairly dismissed and regards her parents’ ideals as hopelessly out-of-date. But after Fumio has a daughter of her own and Hana enters old age as the family prepare to face the tribulations of World War Two, their animosity too will fade… 

Shima Iwashita

 

Keisaku’s obsession with building flood defences may be symbolic of a desire to control the forces of nature – something which the Shintani family learn on multiple occasions is the one thing their wealth and status will never enable them to do. There is also symbolism of a weirder variety in the motif of the white snake which lives in the attic and will drop dead onto the tatami below at the very moment the mistress of the house expires. 

Yoko Tsukasa

 

Running nearly three hours, this major Shochiku production was based on a 1959 novel of the same name by Sawako Ariyoshi (1931-84), whose work had also provided the source material for Keisuke Kinoshita’s even longer The Scent of Incense (1964), and would go on to form the basis of films such as Yasuzo Masumura’s The Wife of Seishu Hanaoka (1967), Tadashi Imai’s The Time of Reckoning (1968) and Shiro Toyoda’s The Twilight Years (1973). Ariyoshi was from Wakayama, where this story is set, and elements of it are said to have been based on her own family’s history. However, she had little in common with the character of Hana, being more similar to that of Fumio, although neither character should be taken as her alter ego. English translations of her work include this novel (as The River Ki), The Twilight Years, and The Wife of Seishu Hanaoka (as The Doctor’s Wife).  

Yoko Tsukasa

 

Director Noboru Nakamura had already made three films with Shima Iwashita at this point, including the excellent Koto (1963). Her performance is sometimes a little on the broad side here, whereas Yoko Tsukasa’s is quite understated. It was Tsukasa who won most of the major Japanese film awards for her performance in The Kii River, largely (I suspect) because she is convincing in regards to the ageing of her character from around 20 to 70. This is reminiscent of the transformation of Machiko Kyo in A Woman’s Life (1962), another female-focused period family saga of a type which seems to have been popular in Japan around this time. Personally, though, I felt that the strongest performance here comes from Tetsuro Tanba as the surly brother-in-law, although the reasons for his change of attitude towards Hana are not entirely clear. 

Tetsuro Tanba

The Kii River is beautifully shot by cinematographer Toichiro Narushima, whose credits are few but who also shot Koto, The Shape of Night (1964, again for Nakamura) and Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence (1983). I’ve rarely seen a film with so few close-ups, and one thing I’ve always liked about Japanese cinema is that close-ups are generally used far more sparingly than in Hollywood. Another strength of the film is the score by Toru Takemitsu, which is also used sparingly, and features his brilliant modernist take on traditional Japanese music. 

 

Yoko Tsukasa

When made into films, such sagas spanning periods of many years are often limited in the amount of depth possible in regard to their characters and can rely too much on skipping from one melodramatic incident to the next. The film in question is also guilty of this to some extent – there seem to be a lot of sudden deaths occurring sporadically throughout – but the aesthetics of the film are of such a high standard that it remains a true cut above the rest. For these reasons, The Kii River may fall slightly short of masterpiece status, but certainly deserves recognition as a classic of the Japanese cinema.

Shima Iwashita

 

Downpour / 土砂降り/ Doshaburi (1957)

Obscure Japanese Film #100

Mariko Okada

This Shochiku production stars Mariko Okada as Matsuko, a young office worker in a relationship with a colleague, Kazuo (Keiji Sada). They’re a model couple and their boss approves of the match so much that he encourages them to get married. They agree, but there’s a problem – Matsuko has lied to Kazuo about her background, saying that her father is dead and her mother runs an inn. In fact, her father (So Yamamura) is very much alive, but mostly absent because Matsuko’s mother, Tane (Sadako Sawamura), is actually his mistress. Furthermore, the inn she runs, where Matsuko also lives together with her younger brother (Masami Taura) and sister (Miyuki Kuwano) is actually more like a love hotel, used by most of the guests simply as a convenient place for their illicit liaisons. When the truth comes out, the young couple’s plans are derailed, leading to tragedy. 

 

Keiji Sada

The subject matter of Downpour was considered risqué at the time, and it received an adults-only classification as a result. Based on a 1952 play by Hideji Hojo, it shows the devastating consequences that having children by a mistress can have on those children. However, one of the strengths of the film is its refusal to make a villain out of Matsuko’s father, Okubo. He’s portrayed as a decent man who is himself something of a victim here – both of circumstances and of his own poor decisions. Perhaps the real cause of the tragedy that unfolds is not Okubo, but the judgmental nature of the society within which all of the characters are trapped. The inn where most of the family live is in fact hemmed in on one side by the railroad tracks, and steam trains seem to be an important metaphor or symbol which runs throughout the movie, perhaps representing an unstoppable force which cannot be resisted, or possibly a portent of doom. 

 

The cast is uniformly excellent, and it’s especially satisfying to see the great Mariko Okada in a well-written role which makes good use of her talent as the Matsuko we see towards the end of the film is very different from the one we saw at the beginning. While watching, I thought that Shin Saburi was giving a surprisingly non-wooden performance for a change, but then I realised it was actually So Yamamura. These two actors look so similar that I’m sure I can’t be the only one who confuses the two.

So Yamamura

 

For me, this was a stronger film from director Noboru Nakamura than the previously-reviewed Home Sweet Home or Portrait of Chieko, and the non-intrusive music by Toru Takemitsu and dark, shadowy cinematography of Hiroyuki Nagaoka were both excellent choices. 

Okada with Sadako Sawamura