A Thousand Cranes / 千羽鶴 / Senba zuru (1969)

Obscure Japanese Film #7

 

Originally published in serial form between 1949 and 1951, then as a single volume the following year, Yasunari Kawabata’s novella A Thousand Cranes was first filmed in 1953 by director Kozaburo Yoshimura. According to IMDb, that version was co-written by Kaneto Shindo and Nagisa Oshima, but this seems highly unlikely as Oshima was still at university then, so it’s probable that Shindo was entirely responsible for the adaptation. The 1969 version also credits Shindo with the screenplay, so it could be that director Yasuzo Masumura was working from the same script as Yoshimura. 

The story deals with the complex relationships between the 28-year-old Kikuji and the two former mistresses of his deceased father. Chikako, a teacher of the tea ceremony, has an ugly black birthmark on her breast which Kikuji once saw as a child; it seems to simultaneously repel and fascinate him. She’s an insensitive, interfering busybody who takes it upon herself to arrange an unasked-for marriage match for Kikuji, although it’s by no means certain that she has the young man’s best interests at heart.  Chikako seems never to have recovered from the insult of being dumped by Kikuji’s father in favour of Mrs Ota, a widow, although she nevertheless remained part of his life on platonic terms after the event. Unwisely, Kikuji embarks on an affair with Mrs Ota, who is almost the polar opposite of Chikako: fragile, sentimental and over-emotional. 

Like Koji Takahashi in Two Wives, Mikijiro Hira (as Kikuji) has the difficult task of playing the stolid male lead between two much bigger female stars. Machiko Kyo gives the best performance as the scheming, impervious-to-insult Chikako, and one can see the schadenfreude written all over her face when tragedy strikes. Ayako Wakao has the lesser part as Mrs Ota, a rather one-note character usually seen either in tears or on the verge of fainting. One interesting difference from the book is that Mrs Ota is portrayed as being less sincere and more manipulative in the film – on two occasions, she appears to surreptitiously check that her tears are having the desired effect on Kikuji. Both women are well-cast, although the then 35-year-old Wakao is ten years younger than the character described in the book and looks it. A Thousand Cranes was the last of 20 films directed by Masumura in which she starred. Apparently, in a 1970 interview, he described her as ‘selfish and calculating’, going on to say that ‘she’s hardly a pure-hearted woman and she knows it,’ [1] so it certainly appears that the two fell out and one wonders whether Masumura’s view of her coloured the portrayal of Mrs Ota in the movie. 

 

I have to admit to having found the Kawabata novella entirely unengaging and Masumura’s film did little to improve matters for me. Although certainly very faithful to the literary original, this unfortunately translates as a series of scenes of people talking in rooms, which seldom makes for exciting cinema. No doubt this meant that only a small budget was required – something which may have been a consideration as the studio responsible (Daiei) was struggling at this point and would go bankrupt two years later. Wakao is good as ever, but A Thousand Cranes is unlikely to satisfy her fans as she has the lesser of the two main female roles and disappears less than an hour into the film.

---

[1] Quoted by ‘manfromplanetx’ in his review of The Graceful Brute (1962) on IMDb. Unfortunately, I don’t know the original source.

Games aka Play / 遊び / Asobi (1971)

 Obscure Japanese Film #6

Based on a short story by Akiyuki Nosaka[1], Asobi tells the story of a 16-year-old girl who meets an 18-year-old boy by chance and falls in love for the first time. However, this is a Yasujiro Masumura film – his last for Daiei before the studio went bankrupt – so it’s by no means as sweet as it sounds. The main story takes place over a period of around 24 hours, but is repeatedly interrupted by abrupt flashbacks, some of which shine a light on the girl’s past and others on the boy’s. She has just finished high school and gone straight into a poorly-paid factory job but is considering going to work as a bar hostess to earn more. Her father is an abusive alcoholic, her sister is sick and confined to her bed, and her mother persistently asks her for money. The boy’s mother (Kurosawa favourite Akemi Negishi) is another alcoholic; he’s fallen in with some extremely nasty yakuza who use him to deceive young girls into going to a hotel where they will be drugged, raped and photographed for pornographic pictures. There is some tension in the story as we wait to see whether the boy will leave the girl in the hands of these creeps.

Unfortunately, what could have been quite a moving tale failed to work for me for a number of reasons. The colour cinemascope photography and editing are very well-executed as one would expect from Masumura, but I never believed that these characters were real people. Despite a good performance by Keiko Takahashi, the girl seems naïve to an absurd degree, while debut actor Masaaki Daimon as the boy – who tries desperately to appear older and tougher than he is – shouts every line of dialogue at the top of his voice, even during a visit to the cinema! Daimon is by no means a bad actor, but I felt that Masumura should have asked him to dial it down a bit. These two characters make a tiresome pair and things are not helped by the over-the-top portrayals of the many sleazy characters who surround them. There’s a high slap-count characteristic of Japanese films of this era (especially those of Masumura), and every slap sounds like a whiplash hitting sheet metal, while the score by Takeo Watanabe sounds like something from an Italian giallo. 

The film was likely intended mainly as a vehicle for Keiko Takahashi, Daiei’s controversial young star who had made her debut appearing nude at the age of 15 in the 1970 film High School Student Blues. Altogether, it’s an uneasy combination of sex, violence and sentimentality that fails to gel.

---

[1] Nosaka also wrote Grave of the Fireflies, as well as the novel upon which Shohei Imamura’s The Pornographers was based.

Two Wives / 妻二人 / Tsuma futari (1967)

Obscure Japanese Film #5

In the 16^th of their 20 films together, Yasuzo Masumura directs star Ayako Wakao in a contemporary romantic crime drama closely based on a 1955 novel by Patrick Quentin entitled The Man with Two Wives.[1]  The screenplay is by the prolific Kaneto Shindo, best-known in the West as the writer-director of Onibaba (1964). Apart from the Japanese setting, the main difference between the book and the film is that the former is a whodunit, whereas in the film the identity of the guilty party is never a mystery. Although Wakao is excellent as always, in truth she is somewhat miscast as the character she plays is supposed to be dowdy and Wakao, of course, is the antithesis of that particular quality.

The film opens with Kenzo (Koji Takahashi) running into his old flame Junko (Mariko Okada) one night and finding her down on her luck and shacked up with the sleazy Kobayashi (Takao Ito), who beats her up whenever he gets drunk. Junko was the only person who believed in Kenzo when he was a struggling young writer, but when he abandoned his literary aspirations and went to work for a magazine (Housewife’s World), he caught the interest of the boss’s daughter, Michiko (Wakao), married her, and so abandoned Junko as well. Nevertheless, he still has feelings for Junko.

Michiko is a philanthropist who has set up a fund for disabled children, but she tends to irritate others, especially her rebellious sister, Rie (Kyoko Enami), who sees her as a meddling, self-righteous do-gooder. For her part, Junko clearly never got over Kenzo, and was only attracted to Kobayashi as he, too, is a struggling young writer. At her suggestion, Kobayashi submits a manuscript to Housewife’s World through Kenzo; although it’s rejected, he manages to get himself introduced to Rie and begins plotting to marry her for her money and abandon Junko, just as Kenzo had done (albeit out of weakness rather than cold calculation). However, Michiko sees through Kobayashi and takes matters into her own hands, but her actions unwittingly lead to blackmail, murder and a complicated web of lies which eventually expose corruption among those close to her and give the lie to the magazine’s tagline: ‘Clean! Bright! Beautiful!’

I found the male lead, Koji Takahashi, a little wooden, but he may well have been instructed to play the role in stoic fashion and keep it low key. He seems to have been a TV star who never really made it in the movies and in any case I suspect that Masumura wasn’t too concerned with having a strong male actor in the role – as the title suggests, this film is more about the women. Wakao’s co-star, Mariko Okada, is another fine actress of equal stature who had appeared in the films of Ozu, Naruse and Kinoshita; she later married the director Yoshishige Yoshida, for whom she made many films. Okada also played Oida to Tatsuya Nakadai’s Iemon in Illusion of Blood (1965) and later gave a fine comic performance opposite Nakadai in I Am a Cat (1975). Unfortunately, the nature of the plot means that Wakao and Okada have only two fairly brief and rather tame scenes together towards the end. Overall, despite her miscasting, Wakao makes it work and there’s never a false note in her performance. The same can be said of Okada, who seems more suitably cast as the unfailingly sweet-natured Junko.[2] Kyoko Enami, best-known as the star of the Woman Gambler film series, is also good value as Michiko’s bad-girl sister.  

The film benefits from Masumura’s typically no-nonsense direction and tight editing, clocking in at around 90 minutes as virtually all of his films do. The widescreen cinematography and muted colour scheme, while not exceptional, look good throughout, and there’s a classy string quartet score by Tadashi Yamauchi. In the latter stages, the plot becomes increasingly complex in quite a clever way, but Masumura keeps it plausible, wisely focusing on the characters rather than the plot twists. Being Masumura, he also introduces some discordant elements such as the dissolute aristocratic voyeur. However, although Arrow Video have released some excellent DVD editions of the director’s films recently, I suspect that the comparative lack of sex and violence along with other typical cult movie elements in Two Wives means that this particular film is unlikely to receive such a release. Furthermore, I personally did not feel that Two Wives could in any way be placed in the suspense genre as some have described it. The omission of the novel’s mystery element and the string quartet score – which lends an air of detached melancholy to the proceedings – are evidence that this was not the intention. Instead, it seems to me that Shindo and Masumura were more interested in making a thoughtful adult drama examining lives built on shaky foundations which are easily caused to crumble.

Wakao and Okada played love rivals again the following year in Tadashi Imai's The Time of Reckoning (Fushin no toki), although their roles were reversed, with Okada playing the wife and Wakao the mistress. 

[1] Patrick Quentin is actually a nom de plume of the British writer Hugh Wheeler.

[2] As there is no indication that Junko was ever married to Kenzo, the title seems something of a misnomer.

Flic (2005)

Obscure Japanese Film #4

At one point in Flic, a minor character says he joined the police because he saw a French film called Un Flic (A Cop), thus explaining the title of this film. However, Masahiro Kobayashi’s film has little in common thematically or aesthetically with Jean-Pierre Melville’s ice-cool 1972 thriller, and the protagonist here, Detective Murata (Teruyuki Kagawa), could not be further removed from the suave policeman played by Alain Delon. 

Murata has not been to work since the murder of his wife six months earlier. He has tried to resign, but his boss won’t let him. His partner, Namekawa (Seiichi Tanabe), comes to his apartment telling him it’s time to get back to work. Murata reluctantly agrees to join him on an assignment to Tomakomai, an industrial town in Hokkaido, where they are to meet the disabled brother of a murder victim and bring him to Tokyo in order to identify his sister’s body. The victim had been killed with a chainsaw in a love hotel shortly after arriving in Tokyo from Tomakomai, but the murderer is still at large. When they arrive in the town, Namekawa is keen to complete their task as quickly as possible, but Murata goes beyond his remit and begins conducting his own investigation. As Murata is the senior of the two men, there is little Namekawa can do about this, even though the local police dislike such interference. Things become complicated when Murata uncovers clues suggesting that the woman may not have been the victim of a random psychopath after all. However, he is also battling with his own demons – Murata is an alcoholic who has been suffering from insomnia since his wife’s murder, and he finds it increasingly hard to tell the difference between reality and the fantasies playing out in his mind.

This is the kind of film guaranteed to annoy those who like a conventional narrative with everything neatly wrapped up at the end, but those open to something more ambiguous should find this thoroughly absorbing despite the slow pace. Kobayashi often keeps his camera on his actors when they’re not doing anything in particular, and rarely uses close-ups. This has the effect of making you feel you’re watching something real rather than a cleverly-staged scene. And while Flic cannot really be described as a thriller, the story is certainly compelling and goes off in some unexpected directions.

It’s an unsettling film, thanks in large part to Teruyuki Kagawa’s performance. As Murata, he is quite creepy at times, and seems to be in such a pit of despair that social conventions have become meaningless to him. He is rude to his colleagues, and tends to stand too close to people, unnerving them with his thousand-yard stare. At one point there’s a long-held shot of him staring directly at the camera which is truly haunting.

Presumably in order to illustrate Murata’s fractured state of mind, Kobayashi uses repeated pan shots, some of which are exact repeats, some not. I don’t think I’ve ever seen this disorienting technique in another film and, in fact, it’s difficult to think of films with which Flic could be easily compared, although there were certainly times when I was reminded of the work of David Lynch.

A peculiarity of this film is that it’s divided into two ‘chapters’, with the end credits sung by a lone guitarist (Wataru Takada) at the end of each chapter. I’m uncertain whether the film was originally released like this, or whether this is some kind of TV edit of the film. At the time of writing, Flic can be viewed with English subtitles on Youtube at the links below:

https://youtu.be/mrYnuuk-rcw

https://youtu.be/bcbbCLPLqA0

The Old Bear Hunter / Matagi (1982)

Obscure Japanese Film #3

A film from 1982 about an old hunter trying to kill an especially large and vicious black bear sounds likely to be another schlocky Jaws rip-off in the manner of Grizzly (1976). However, the story actually owes more to Moby-Dick in that Heizo, the hunter in question, was attacked by the bear some years previously and left with a bad facial scar as a result. As played by Ko Nishimura, he seems too level-headed to seek revenge on an animal for this reason alone, but further motivation is provided as the film progresses. One of the many surprising things about The Old Bear Hunter is that the thinness of the plot turns out to be something of an asset, providing a decent enough excuse for a film which is as much a fascinating portrait of the little-known matagi as it is an adventure movie.

The matagi, traditional hunters often accompanied by specially-trained Akita dogs, have been active in northern Honshu for over 400 years hunting bear and other game. They consider these as gifts from the mountain gods, and are careful not to waste any part of the animal or kill more than they need.

The film opens with a sequence on a snow-covered mountainside in which a bear is shot dead and the hide removed. This appears to have been done for real, and The Old Bear Hunter is certainly a problematic film for animal lovers. As in the case of the kangaroo hunt in the Australian film Wake in Fright, the filmmakers perhaps attempted to justify this scene by saying that the hunt was not staged specifically for them, and they simply received permission to film a hunt that was going to happen anyway. In any case, it certainly lends the picture a remarkable degree of authenticity. Even more uncomfortable to watch are the scenes of Heizo training his Akita – he slashes at it with a bear claw, force-feeds it bear meat smeared with big dollops of bear fat, and even dons an entire bear hide before attacking the hapless dog. Worse still, there is a sequence featuring a matagi dog-training competition in which a number of Akita are forced to attack a chained bear. This scene goes on for some time and there is clearly no fakery involved. However, if one can get past the brutality of these sequences, this is a thoroughly absorbing and extremely well-made film.

This is also a film which shows, rather than tells, and is therefore light on dialogue, something which works very much in its favour. Director Toshio Goto makes full use of his snow-laden, mountainous locations to often breathtaking effect, and the fact that nothing appears to have been shot in a studio lends a sense of documentary-like realism, while the esoteric details about bear bile, etc, suggest that the ways of the matagi were thoroughly researched in advance. Goto also skillfully manages to avoid lapsing into melodrama and, when the climactic battle between old man and bear finally arrives, it’s not only entirely convincing, but steers well clear of the sense of triumphant revenge found in many ‘bad animal’ movies.

The Old Bear Hunter was Goto’s first film as director. Born in 1938, he worked as an assistant director under Satsuo Yamamoto in the ‘70s. On IMDb, his filmography has been mistakenly merged with another Toshio Goto who worked as an editor on some of Kurosawa’s early films. However, the fact that he subsequently made a Russian-Japanese co-production set in the wilderness of Sibera entitled Under the Northern Lights immediately brings to mind Kurosawa’s 1975 film Dersu Uzala.

As Heizo, the diminutive Ko Nishimura is miscast in a role that would have been better suited to a more physically powerful actor such as Toshiro Mifune (perhaps Mifune turned it down). Considering this, he does very well in the part and deserves respect for taking on what must have been a physically arduous role at the age of 59. Nishimura made over 200 movies beginning in 1953, and will be a familiar face to most Japanese film fans, popping up as he does in parts large and small in such classics as Sword of Doom and Red Beard.

If it were not for the scenes of animal cruelty, I would wholeheartedly recommend this film to anyone.  

If you enjoy this blog, feel free to Buy Me a Coffee. 

The Life of a Horse-Trader / Bakuro Ichidai (1951)

Obscure Japanese Film #2

Toshiro Mifune and Takashi Shimura

One year after Rashomon, Daiei Studios decided to reunite stars Toshiro Mifune, Machiko Kyo and Takashi Shimura in The Life of a Horse-Trader, based on a novel by Masao Nakayama. Although the film has little else in common with Rashomon, it should delight fans of Kurosawa regulars Mifune and Shimura and, as a bonus, features another of that director’s favourites, Bokuzen Hidari – he of the Noh-mask-like face. The film also features an excellent score by Kurosawa’s regular composer, Fumio Hayasaka.

Set in Hokkaido just before the arrival of automobiles, it tells the story of Yonetaro Katayama (Mifune), a horse-trader who is good at his job but much given to drinking, fighting and gambling. As a result of these pastimes, he neglects his wife and young child and is in an ongoing feud with Rokutaro Kosaka (Shimura), a carriage-driver turned money-lender with political ambitions.  However, when his wife dies, Yonetaro must change his ways in order to care for his son. Meanwhile, Yuki (Kyo), who works as a waitress at the inn he frequents, is in love with him and patiently waiting for him to notice.

Although The Life of a Horse-Trader is an old-fashioned and sentimental drama, the use of real locations alongside meticulously detailed sets lend it a welcome air of realism unusual for 1951. Mifune gives one of his most committed performances outside of a Kurosawa film and, in one memorable sequence, even performs in three bouts of sumo one after the other to great effect. Equally pleasing is the fact that Shimura has one of his best roles as the villain of the piece, who may not be quite such a bastard after all. Kyo is less well-served as her role is not as interesting, but she makes the most of it and has some amusing moments.

Director Keigo Kimura seems forgotten today, but the only other film I’ve seen by him (Diary of a Mad Old Man) is also good, and this one is extremely well-made, with first-class black-and-white cinematography by Shigeyoshi Mine.

A word of warning for horse-lovers: there is a scene in which Mifune and his son are encouraging their sick horse to stand up, and we see the horse flailing around. There is then a very odd cut and the scene ends abruptly, after which we are told that said horse did get back on its hooves after all. I suspect the reason for the strange cut is that they had the horse tied down or something like that. Worse still, there is a horse racing sequence in which a horse takes a tumble in such a way it made me gasp, and I very much doubt it could have survived.

Aside from the horse abuse, The Life of a Horse-Trader is an entertaining film which should be of great interest to fans of Mifune and Shimura at least. It must have been successful at the time, as there was a sequel the following year (albeit one made by a different director and without Mifune, Shimura or Kyo), plus a remake in 1963 with Rentaro Mikuni.  

Funnily enough, the film has a remarkably similar ending to the one in The Saga of Tanegashima (see previous post). In typical Japanese-film style, it ends with the parting of two of the main characters, who shout each other’s names over and over again as each recedes into the distance.  

The Saga of Tanegashima / Teppo Denraiki (1968)

Obscure Japanese Film #1

This is an interesting film about the introduction of the firearm to Japan. American actor Rick Jason plays Pinto, a Portuguese captain whose ship is caught in a storm and badly damaged off the coast of Japan in 1543, when Japan was still officially closed to foreigners. As a result, he is forced to make his way to shore and ask the local lord for permission to stay until his ship can be repaired. Having never seen one before, the lord becomes interested in Pinto’s musket and asks him to demonstrate how it works. Pinto obliges and then offers the weapon as a gift in exchange for a safe harbour. The lord instructs his best blacksmith and weapon-maker, Kinbei (Eijiro Tono), to take the gun apart, find out how it works and duplicate it. Meanwhile, Pinto falls in love with Kinbei’s daughter, Wakasa (Ayako Wakao).

I’m not aware of any other films telling the story of how guns arrived in Japan, so the film has that on its side to begin with. There are some surprisingly lengthy, detailed scenes showing Kinbei’s attempts to reverse-engineer the musket, which involves a great deal of hammering red hot pieces of iron into shape. These parts look very authentic and I found them quite interesting. As a matter of fact, the film probably has a potential fan-base consisting of blacksmiths, antique-weapons fanciers and fans of the TV show Forged in Fire. I appreciate it when scenes of this kind are not faked or skipped over in films – a particular favourite of mine is the long scene in Le Trou where the prisoners knock a hole in the floor.

Japanese films which require Western actors in major parts have often had difficulty in finding good ones, as anyone who has seen Masahiro Shinoda’s Silence will be able to attest.  However, in this case, that is not a problem as Rick Jason turns out to be pretty decent as Captain Pinto in an Errol-Flynn kind of way, even if I had never heard of him beforehand. A quick bit of research reveals that he was an American TV star who had played a couple of leads in very minor films in the late ‘50s. I cannot believe that anyone in Japan had ever heard of him, so it was very generous of them to give him top billing over Japan’s major star Ayako Wakao. Or perhaps somebody had persuaded the Japanese that Jason was a big star in America – it’s not like they could Google him in those days.

In my opinion, Wakao is one of the most talented and versatile actresses in film, not to mention one of the most beautiful. Watch her performances in Satsuo Yamamoto’s Freezing Point, Kenji Mizoguchi’s Street of Shame, Keigo Kimura’s Diary of a Mad Old Man, and the films of Yasuzo Masumura and you will see that she was much more than a pretty face and could portray any type of personality with no apparent effort. While she has little to challenge her in The Saga of Tanegashima playing a traditional Japanese woman who finds herself falling in love with a foreigner against her better judgement,  she nevertheless gives her usual flawless performance.

The other main actor is Eijiro Tono, a familiar character actor who must have been thrilled to be given such a juicy role at the age of 60. If you’ve seen any Japanese films from the ‘50s or ‘60s at all, you’ve probably seen Tono, so frequently does his ugly mug turn up. He was especially good at playing characters you’d like to push over a cliff, and initially he seems to be one of those in this film. However, Kinbei turns out to be the most interesting character as he’s the one who undergoes a change and begins to question the wisdom of his actions.

Having watched a lot of Japanese films, I’ve noticed that sad endings are far more common than in Hollywood ones, and this can only be because Japanese audiences prefer them for some reason. It would take someone with more insight than myself to explain the reasons for that, but I’m convinced that a Hollywood studio would never have gone with the ending used here. This film could easily have had a happy ending, but a perfunctory tragedy occurs whose only purpose seems to have been to provide the sad ending Japanese audiences seem to crave. These endings often feel just as contrived as the upbeat ones in Hollywood films can do, and frequently involve somebody dying before their time or people who love each other being forced to part, and are usually accompanied by a lot of pointless shouting of the departed / departing one’s name. Unfortunately, this film is no exception and the ending spoiled it a bit for me, which is a shame as I otherwise greatly enjoyed this film.

The director was Kazuo Mori, who does not seem to be a great artist by any means, but certainly knew how to make a movie. I’ve seen one other by him – A Killer’s Key – which was also well-made, although I enjoyed it less as the script was ridiculous. He also directed the first Zatoichi film.