Waga ai / わが愛 (‘My Love’, 1960)

Obscure Japanese Film #232

 

Ineko Arima

Niizu (Shin Saburi) is a newspaper reporter who drops dead in the street after a night of heavy drinking. At the wake, his wife (Yatsuko Tan’ami) is surprised when a mysterious guest turns up to pay her respects. This is Kiyo (Ineko Arima), a young woman who has been Niizu’s mistress for the past three years while he was in the mountains working on a labour of love, a book entitled A History of the Chinese Salt Industry (sounds riveting!). 

 

Yatsuko Tan'ami

In flashback, we learn how Kiyo first met Niizu during the war when she was a teenager and was living with her aunt and a geisha named Hideya (Nobuko Otowa), who Niizu regularly slept with. One night, Niizu, Hideya and Kiyo were all sharing the same room when Niizu made love to Hideya while Kiyo kept her head turned away and covered her ears. When they were finished, Hideya went to use the bathroom and Niizu took the opportunity to say to Kiyo, ‘When you grow up, let’s have an affair.’ Instead of being creeped out by this, she fell in love with him and started keeping a scrapbook of his newspaper articles. When they met again a few years later, it was she who initiated their affair...

 

Arima

This Shochiku production involved many of the same talents that made the previously-reviewed film The Hunting Rifle (1961). Like that later picture, it was directed by Heinosuke Gosho, shot by Haruo Takeno, scripted by Toshio Yasumi based on a Yasushi Inoue story, scored by Yasushi Akutagawa and featured Shin Saburi and Nobuko Otowa. It’s safe to assume, then, that Waga ai was a commercial success as Shochiku would not have green-lit The Hunting Rifle otherwise. However, it suffers from several of the same fatal flaws as that later picture and I doubt it would be well-received by audiences today, which is perhaps why the only way to see it is via an old VHS transfer.

Shin Saburi

Nobel Prize nominee Yasushi Inoue was a very talented writer but, like many Japanese authors of the 20th-century, he was extremely prolific and divided his efforts between writing highbrow literary material and more commercial works to pay the rent, so that the quality of his work varied greatly. Without an English translation, I’m not sure how the 1952 story ‘Tsuya no kyaku’ (‘A Guest at the Wake’) which provided the basis for this film sits on that spectrum, but, for me anyway, the story is the fundamental problem here, consisting as it mostly does of  sentimental claptrap meets male wish-fulfilment. Indeed, it’s a complete mystery why Kiyo would fall in love with a craggy-faced, middle-aged, married drunk old enough to be her father and basically insist on becoming his uncomplaining slave; feminism must have been a completely alien concept to the people responsible for this film. Perhaps if Niizu had been played by someone more charismatic than Saburi, it might have helped a little, but probably not much – the picture is also sabotaged by the cloying clichés which make up Yasushi Akutagawa’s dreadful score.

The Tycoon / 傷だらけの山河 / Kizudarake no sanga (1964)

Obscure Japanese Film #144

Ayako Wakao and So Yamamura

Having delivered a mega-hit for Daiei studios with Shinobi no mono (1962) and also directed its first sequel the following year, director and lifelong Communist Party member Satsuo Yamamoto was in a strong position to make what he wanted, and so chose the latest novel by Tatsuzo Ishikawa, a writer who shared his political sympathies and had previously provided the source material for Yamamoto’s The Human Wall (1959). 

 

Adapted by one-man scriptwriting machine Kaneto Shindo, The Tycoon stars So Yamamura as the titular character, Kappei Arima, a business magnate with his fingers in numerous pies who has plans to build a new railway line and buy up as much land as possible around the proposed locations of the rail stations. Protests by residents are dealt with through bribery or intimidation. Although married, Arima also has two mistresses, and his wife and both mistresses each have a grown-up son. However, he feels that these women are all past their prime so, when he notices an attractive young woman, Mitsuko (Ayako Wakao), working in his office as a poorly-paid bean counter, he hatches a plan to make her his new mistress. 

Keizo Kawasaki

 

Mitsuko is living with Sakai (Keizo Kawasaki), a struggling artist who believes that he could be successful if he could only study in Paris. She is largely supporting him on her meagre salary, and is thoroughly fed up with living in poverty. One day, she finds herself unexpectedly summoned to Arima’s office and receives a shocking proposal: Arima offers to pay to send Sakai off to France for three years and provide Mitsuko with an apartment and an ample allowance if she will be his mistress while Sakai’s away. Understandably shocked, she initially refuses, but, after talking it over with Sakai, thoughts of the money encourage them to take a more pragmatic view, and they decide to accept the offer. Meanwhile, Arima’s illegitimate sons have both become dissatisfied with their status and decide in their different ways to do something about it…   

Mitsuko makes her Faustian pact

 

Arima’s avarice and selfishness leave a trail of broken lives in his wake, which explains why the Japanese title translates as something like ‘Mountains and Rivers of Wounds’. The character was loosely based on the real-life Yasujiro Tsutsumi, who passed away at the age of 75 just three weeks after this film was released. Oddly, opera singer Yoshie Fujiwara (1898-1976) was originally cast as Arima at the suggestion of producer Masaichi Nagata. According to Satsuo Yamamoto in his autobiography, it quickly became apparent that Fujiwara could not act, so he was replaced by So Yamamura – who had actually been Yamamoto’s first choice but was unavailable, then luckily became available again. Yamamura proved to be the perfect choice and won a Kinema Junpo Best Actor Award for his performance. The strength of his portrait is the way in which it shows Arima not as a mere bully, but as a charismatic man of some humour and charm who knows how to persuade people to come round to his way of thinking, as he does very effectively with Mitsuko. 

 

Like many Yamamoto films, The Tycoon is rather long (152 minutes), and in this case it feels it. There’s no real development of the main protagonist – Arima is a greedy capitalist bastard at the beginning of the film, and he’s still a greedy capitalist bastard at the end – and it all gets a bit repetitive as he lights another big cigar and steamrollers the opposition in yet another board meeting. The sons do not make for very compelling characters, and Mitsuko’s chance meeting with Arima’s only legitimate son, Akihiko (Koji Takahashi), which leads to an affair, just seems like a clumsily contrived excuse to pile on the melodrama. That’s not the silliest part, though – that prize must be reserved for the scene in which Sakai explains to Mitsuko that he has been visited by a private detective wanting to investigate the two of them without saying why and Sakai has told him everything he wanted to know instead of telling him to sod off as any sane person would do. 

 

Yamamoto was a good (but in my opinion not great) director, and this is a well-made film, but sometimes his ideological stance veers too close to communist propaganda, and I feel that The Tycoon is a case in point. It’s certainly true that people like Arima exist, but it’s not clear what the film has to tell us other than that greed is bad, so the two-and-a-half-hour running time feels unwarranted. Wakao manages to give her part more depth than most would have managed, and we can see how conflicted Mitsuko is, but still, it’s a supporting role and the focus is not on her for the most part. However, despite its flaws, the film was well-received at the time and ranked 7^th on Kinema Junpo’s best films of the year list. 

Yatsuko Tan'ami as one of Arima's mistresses, with a Noh mask of Ko-omote perhaps representing her long-lost innocence

 

Thanks to A.K., and to Coral Sundy for the English subtitles which can be found here.

DVD at Amazon Japan.

The Blue Beast / 青い野獣 / Aoi yaju (1960)

Obscure Japanese Film #140

Tatsuya Nakadai

Yasuhiko Kuroki (Tatsuya Nakadai) is an ambitious young man working for a magazine publishing company run by Ogawa (Jun Tazaki). When a pay dispute breaks out, the union calls a strike and Kuroki serves as a spokesman for the workers. However, he’s actually a mole working for the management, who are paying him in exchange for inside information. 

Ichiro Nakatani

 

Keiko Awaji

Going for a drink with fellow union member Goda (Ichiro Nakatani), Kuroki is surprised to find his old flame from his student days, Yoshie (Keiko Awaji), working at the bar. It’s the first time they’ve seen each other for 6 years and their former passion is soon rekindled, but Kuroki is unaware that Goda has become suspicious and asked Yoshie to keep an eye on him. 

Yatsuko Tan'ami

 

Meanwhile, Kuroki has been having an affair with Ogawa’s wife, Yoriko (Yatsuko Tan’ami), whom he was hired to tutor part-time while still a student. She had used her influence on her husband to get Kuroki his job, but now she’s just in his way, so he breaks it off by telling her in brutal fashion that she’s too old to be attractive any longer. 

Yoko Tsukasa

 

Koreya Senda

Kuroki next sets his sights on Fumiko (Yoko Tsukasa), the daughter of powerful financier Eto (played by Nakadai’s real-life mentor, Koreya Senda). He knows that if he can get Fumiko to marry him, he’ll be made for life… 

Keiko Awaji and Nakadai

 

Yasuhiko Kuroki is an amoral social climber in the tradition of Stendhal’s Julien Sorel in his 1830 novel The Red and the Black, Dreiser’s Clyde Griffiths in An American Tragedy (upon which the 1951 film A Place in the Sun starring Montgomery Clift was based), and especially John Braine’s Joe Lampton in Room at the Top, filmed in 1958 with Laurence Harvey as Joe. That film was released in Japan in July of 1959, and very likely inspired this one as the similarities are obvious, although the two films end quite differently.

 

The Blue Beast, a Toho production, was written by Yoshio Shirasaka, who wrote a number of films for Yasuzo Masumura, but – more significantly – had also written the screenplay for  The Beast Must Die (1959), in which Nakadai had starred as a similar (though more deadly) antihero. Although the ending of that film seemed to leave things wide open for a sequel, it also called for location shooting in a foreign country, which is probably why it never happened. I’m unsure of the significance of the colour blue, but it seems highly likely that the inclusion of the word ‘beast’ in the title here was intended to tell audiences that this was their opportunity to see Nakadai being... well, 'beastly' again (especially to women).

 

For Nakadai, this was the first of four collaborations with director Hiromichi Horikawa, but it’s not as good as the other one I’ve seen, Shiro to kuro (1963), and it’s also less interesting than The Beast Must Die. It feels rather oddly lacking dramatically, partly because it unfolds all too predictably, but also because – unlike Julien Sorel, Clyde Griffiths and Joe Lampton – Yasuhiko Kuroki lacks anything resembling a sympathetic side. He’s a pretty one-dimensional character, really, and that’s also probably why Nakadai’s not at the top of his game here. Sei Ikeno’s soundtrack, which prominently features the vibraphone and recalls the Modern Jazz Quartet, may also have been too mellow a choice for this type of drama. 

 Thanks to A.K.