The Beast Must Die: Mechanic of Revenge / 野獣死すべし 復讐のメカニック / Yaju shisubeshi: fukushu no mekanikku (1974)

Obscure Japanese Film #247

Hiroshi Fujioka

At the end of The Beast Must Die (1959), Kunihiko Date (Tatsuya Nakadai), a highly intelligent but amoral student leading a double life as a thief and murderer, escapes the clutches of the police and jets off to America. In this sequel (loosely based on author Haruhiko Oyabu’s 1960 sequel to his original book) he’s back from the States and is now a Moby Dick-obsessed literature professor, but is still killing and stealing in his spare time. Although it’s unclear whether exactly 15 years have passed in story terms, it does look like 1974, and he’s now played by the 28-year-old Hiroshi Fujioka (Nakadai – who had been playing a little younger than his real age in the first film – was 41 by this point and perhaps deemed too old. It should also be noted that he does not appear in this film despite a credit on IMDb).

Date, who was already pretty nasty, has become even nastier (burning a man’s face, casually killing a woman who’s helped him, etc) but has also been given a personal motive for his crimes. This time round he’s targeting the businessmen who drove his father to suicide and took over his company. In my view, despite the fact that this element seems to have been present in the book, this was a mistake – Date is someone who simply does not care about other people, so it makes no sense that he would care about his father so much that he would go to all the trouble he does here to get revenge (in the superior first film, Date does what he does because he views himself as a sort of Nietzschean superman above normal standards of morality).

Mako Midori

Hiroshi Fujioka, previously a supporting actor in movies but a star in TV, fails to make much of the character and, while the supporting cast are decent enough, they only have so much to work with. Mako Midori – something of a cult actress in Japan – is among them, but her screen time is limited and she has been better served in other films, such as Yasuzo Masumura’s The Great Villains (1968). Akemi Mari, who plays the other main female role, had been married to this film’s director, Eizo Sugawa, since 1969. She’s fine here, but her film career never really took off, although she had some success on TV.

Akemi Mari

The film is also rather cheap and drab-looking – I suspect that Toho had limited faith in it and only allowed Sugawa (who had also made the first film) a pretty low budget. Incidentally, Sugawa made other unrelated films with the word ‘beast’ in the title, including his previous film, Beast Hunt (1973, aka The Black Battlefront Kidnappers) and the excellent Beast Alley (1965).

On the plus side, the soundtrack features a cool combination of classical and jazz courtesy of composer Kunihiko Murai, who was better known as a producer of pop music, though he also composed the soundtrack for Tampopo (1985). Running a taut 86 minutes, the film also has an appealing leanness about it, and its misanthropic tone is certainly of a piece with its director’s other best-known works so, while it’s certainly not as good as the first film, it’s not a total wash-out. (Incidentally, one of the screenwriters, Yoshio Shirasaka, had also worked frequently with that other great misanthropic director of the era, Yasuzo Masumura).

Starring Yusaku Matsuda, Toru Murakawa’s 1980 remake of the 1959 original is more impressive (if more self-indulgent) than this sequel and recently received the deluxe Blu-ray treatment courtesy of Radiance Films, while a further remake and sequel (neither of which I’ve seen) appeared in 1997 starring Kazuya Kimura as Date.

It’s a bit low-res, but you can watch the film on YouTube with English subtitles here.

Hear part of Kunihiko Murai's original soundtrack on YouTube here.

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When Women Lie / 嘘 / Uso (‘Lies’, 1963)

Obscure Japanese Film #160

L-R: Eiko Takashiro, Junko Kano, Nobuko Otowa

Following the template of their earlier picture A Woman’s Testament (1960), this omnibus comedy from Daiei studios is essentially three separate half-hour films by different directors cobbled together with no linking story, only a loose theme to unite them. 

 

Takashi Nakamura and Eiko Takashiro

Episode 1, ‘Playgirl’, written by Yoshio Shirasaka and directed by Yasuzo Masumura:

Mariko (Eiko Takashiro) is a young woman dating four different men but carefully preserving her virginity as she works out which is the best candidate for marriage. She keeps detailed notes on each one and even adopts a different persona depending on the tastes of the man she is meeting next. However, her cool calculations are upset when she discovers that she has a rival (Kyoko Enami) for her current favourite (Jerry Fujio)… 

Junko Kano

 

Episode 2, ‘Mistress on the Books’, written by Ryozo Kasahara and directed by Kozaburo Yoshimura:

Shinko (Junko Kano) is a soap opera actress dismayed to learn that her character has suddenly been killed off because she’s considered a ‘daikon’ (white radish, meaning ‘bad actor’). She complains to the show’s sponsor, who is also the head of a pharmaceutical company and her sugar daddy, but she’s been milking him for too much money, so he’s considering cutting her loose and sends one of his minions (Keizo Kawasaki) to deal with the situation…

Nobuko Otowa

 

Episode 3, ‘Three Women’, written by Kaneto Shindo and directed by Teinosuke Kinugasa

A woman enters an apartment and shoots a man dead. When she is questioned by a police officer (Ken Utsui), it emerges that the woman, Michiyo (Nobuko Otowa), had left her live-in job at an inn to come and live in the apartment with a salesman, Tashiro (Eiji Funakoshi), and that she had shot him when he wanted to break it off. We also learn that Tashiro had a wife (Mitsuko Mori) who forced him to stop seeing Michiyo. But where did Michiyo get the gun?   

Eiji Funakoshi

 

The English title of this picture seems almost unfair as the men here do quite a bit of lying themselves! In fact, the unifying theme might more accurately be described as infidelity rather than lying, but in any case the tone is one of comic irony with a dash of cynicism. With its moody lighting and camera angles, Kinugasa’s episode briefly threatens to become more serious, but not for long. 

Mitsuko Mori

 

What the picture may lack in depth, it makes up for in entertainment value, and I would certainly recommend it to fans of Daiei movies of this era. The three female stars all acquit themselves well, but Junko Kano in particular gets one of her best roles and proves a dab hand at comedy. She never quite reached the heights of Daiei’s top female stars Machiko Kyo, Ayako Wakao and Fujiko Yamamoto, perhaps partly because she started later (1957) and retired at the height of her popularity in 1963 due to an eye issue which was exacerbated by working under the bright studio lights. At the time of writing, she’s still alive at 88. 

 DVD at Amazon Japan (no English subtitles)

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.