Shojo yutai / 処女受胎 (‘Immaculate Conception’, 1966)

Obscure Japanese Film #146

Ayako Wakao

 

This Daiei production stars Ayako Wakao as Aiko, a modernist oil painter who has hit a creative wall. Searching for inspiration, she comes to believe that having a child will solve her problems but, having no desire to get married, she decides to try artificial insemination. One of the sperm donors at the clinic she attends is a student, Satoru (Takao Ito), who likes to feel that his sperm is going to beautiful women. When he sees Aiko visiting the clinic and learns she is a patient, he pressures a nurse, Keiko (Sanae Nakahara), to ensure that it’s his seed that Aiko receives…

 

Based on a novel by Jugo Kuroiwa, (who had also supplied the source material for With My Husband’s Consent), this is a silly story in questionable taste and with a very poor ending. The film relies heavily on its star, who I believe has even more costume changes here than she did in Ojo-san – although in this case some of the clothes look like they could have come from Primark. In fact, the whole thing looks like it was shot on the cheap and in a rush, which may partly be due to shrinking budgets at Daiei at the time. However, the film’s short running time of 82 minutes and total lack of name actors other than Wakao also suggests that it was most likely a B-movie which played at the bottom half of a double bill. 

Takao Ito basks in Shima's trademark sunset lighting

 

Director Koji Shima had a weakness for the orange glow of sunset in his colour films, and this is featured in a number of scenes here. He also liked to make dramatic use of harsher kinds of weather, so it’s no surprise to see a rainstorm at one point. Another Shima trademark is his use of symbolic shots, which are mostly absent from this film, apart from this rather clumsy one which again indicates that haste was the name of the game in making this movie:

Sanae Nakahara and Takao Ito

 

I love a good dream sequence, but the one featured here is pretty mediocre and rather obviously shot through a layer of gauze (as are, for some reason, the scenes at the beginning of the film in which Aiko searches for inspiration in a windy field, at a flamenco dance and at a diving pool). 

 

All in all, Shojo yutai is a very shallow treatment of the theme of artificial insemination which tries to redeem itself with some awkward moralising towards the end before getting really weird in the final scene, when talk of Aiko viewing men as mere ‘fertiliser’ causes one character to act in a most peculiar fashion. 

 

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

DVD at Amazon Japan.

Love in the Mountains / わかれ / Wakare (‘Parting’, 1959)

Obscure Japanese Film #145

Haruko Wanibuchi and Isuzu Yamada

Teenager Kimiko (Haruko Wanibuchi) helps out at a ryokan (traditional inn) in Hakone owned by her widowed mother, Kuniko (Isuzo Yamada). One of the regular guests is a writer named Shimizu (Chishu Ryu), who likes to stay there and use the nearby golf course. On one visit he brings a student assistant, Keiichi (Eiichi Sugasawara), with him, and Keiichi and Kimiko fall in love. However, the course of true love never runs smooth, and matters are complicated by a proposal from a rival suitor as well as by a young man who works at the inn, Taiji (Shoji Yasui), who secretly loves Kimiko, and then there’s Keiichi’s domineering mother (Sachiko Murase), who has other plans for her only son… 

Eiichi Sugasawara

 

Although it throws in a couple of sub-plots involving a couple of Kuniko’s employees who have an illicit relationship resulting in a pregnancy and a former employee who now works in a restaurant to pay for her brother’s medical care, this Shochiku production feels a little thin in the story department even though it was based on a 1955 novel entitled Hana mizukara oshie ari (‘Flowers Teach Themselves’) by Jun Takami (1907-65).

Haruko Wanibuchi

 

It’s a sentimental film, and I found Haruko Wanibuchi’s wide-eyed naivety a tad cloying (I assume her character was supposed to be a little older), but it’s also well-shot and has a nicely varied music score by Mitsuo Kato. Chishu Ryu’s character is not much more than a plot device to bring Kimiko and Keiichi together, but he does manage to invest it with some personality. The dramatic highlight of the film, however, is the face-off between Isuzu Yamada and Sachiko Murase, two fine veteran actresses best-known for their work with Kurosawa – Yamada was, of course, the Lady Macbeth equivalent in Throne of Blood, while Murase was the elderly A-bomb survivor in Rhapsody in August. 

 

Isuzu Yamada

Sachiko Murase

 

Of the director, Masao Nozaki, I’ve been able to find out almost nothing, other than the fact that he directed seven films between 1952 and 1960, all for Shochiku. On the basis of this well-made film, I very much doubt that the abrupt end to his career could have been due to incompetence, so perhaps he passed away around 1960 or slept with the studio head’s wife.

Haruko Wanibuchi and Eiichi Sugasawara

 

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.