Tag: 1960

Road Warriors (あやめ笠 喧嘩街道, Tai Kato, 1960)

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A penniless wanderer finds himself mixed up in chaos and conspiracy after deciding to help a lady travelling alone for the purposes of revenge in Tai Kato’s Toei chanbara, Road Warriors (あやめ笠 喧嘩街道, Ayame Kasa: Kenka Kaido). Truth be told, the hero isn’t much of a warrior at all and wisely prefers to avoid a fight if possible but is prepared to put his sword where his mouth is when the occasion calls. Still the conspiracy in this instance is small scale and incredibly petty as a trio of ambitious retainers attempt to frame their one time bodyguard for the murder of a lord.

Before all that, however, Gantaro (Ryuji Shinagawa) is as he’s fond of introducing himself a penniless traveller who makes his ends meet through gambling. In debt to local boss Hidegoro (Ushio Akashi) he agrees to act as an intermediary in a dispute with the greedy Onizo (Eijiro Yanagi) who has usurped some of their territory. Gantaro suggests they settle the matter through gambling but is then challenged to combat by the gang’s bodyguard, Akiyama (Shin Tokudaiji). The young man looks noticeably afraid, sweating at the temples and gripping his sword at an unusual angle, but holds his own in the fight until Onizo tries to cheat by sending in one of his minions to finish him off. Noticing what’s happening, Akiyama proves his nobility by ending the fight and accepting defeat. Onizo appears cheerful and even asks Gantaro to join his gang, but seconds after the young man leaves he sends his guys out after him and evidently has no intention of enforcing a truce with Hidegoro.

Meanwhile, Gantaro runs into a melancholy samurai woman, Miyuki (Kyoko Aoyama), chasing after a thief who has stolen something from her far more precious than money. Discovering the thief has robbed him too, Gantaro springs into action and soon discovers that Miyuki is on a quest for revenge against the man who killed her father but that she’s been betrayed by her three retainers and has managed to ditch them to proceed alone. Unsprisingly, the prime suspect appears to be Akiyama but as stabbing a man in the back and running away don’t seem to fit with the noble character he displayed in the fight, Gantaro has an idea that something’s not quite right. 

Of course, he also begins to fall for Miyuki despite the obvious affection held for him by Hidegoro’s daughter Omitsu (Hiromi Hanazono) which he otherwise seems keen to escape. It’s reasonable to assume that loveable rogue Gantaro is the love them and leave them type, though his love for a samurai’s daughter is always going to be an impossibility no matter how much she may come to admire him. Even so, the conspiracy angle along with Onizo’s smug and overbearing duplicity do begin to awaken his sense of justice especially while travelling with an incredibly cynical thief who will sell anything or anyone in search of a quick buck. Even he however eventually comes around to the idea of helping Miyuki get away from her retainers and enact her revenge especially after overhearing the truth while cowering behind some barrels. 

It may be an overly familiar chanbara tale if one enlivened by Gantaro’s wisecracking antics, but Kato brings to it his characteristic sense of uncertainty in the potent mists that seem to surround Gantaro and Miyuki as they travel the mountain paths in search their enemy. Then again, there are shades of unexpected darkness not least in the implication that Gantaro was about to rape Miyuki before she fainted and brought him back to his senses. Nevertheless, her retainers may tell her that she has “no choice” but to obey them, but Gantaro seems to feel differently if abruptly giving up his intention of protecting her on learning that she has someone else in her heart. This is indeed a harsh world for women samurai and otherwise, a mother and daughter are saved by Akiyama after being harassed by Onizo when he annexes the local market while both Miyuki and Omitsu are left to finish their father’s unfinished business in the wake of their untimely deaths. Notably, it is indeed they who finally strike the final blow to eliminate the corruption which surrounds them. Penniless wanderer Gantaro doesn’t have it that easy either, gambling his life away and ending up with debts both financial and moral that may have dangerous consequences while often beset by cynicism even if latterly deciding to help those in need for no reward. In any case, like any good wanderer all he can do is smile and wave as he departs for the next adventure on the violent streets of the Edo-era society.

Get ’em All (「みな殺しの歌」より　拳銃よさらば, Eizo Sugawa, 1960)

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A recently released young man is forced onto a nihilistic path of meaningless violence when his bank robber brother is killed in a hit and run in Eizo Sugawa’s moody post-war noir, Get ‘em All (「みな殺しの歌」より　拳銃よさらば, ‘Minagoroshi no uta’ yori kenju yo saraba). Adapted from a novel from Japan’s hardboiled master Haruhiko Oyabu who also provided the source material for Sugawa’s The Beast Shall Die, the film is as much about defeated aspiration and personal despair as it is about the corrupting influence of money and the futility of vengeance.

After waiting a year to divide the loot from a bank robbery, a random syndicate of crooks is shocked to discover that it has gone missing from its hiding place in an ancestral tomb belonging to one of their members along with a gun connected to the crime which is presumably being kept for insurance purposes. Everyone is convinced someone else has taken it with Tanabe (Tetsuro Tanba), the owner of the tomb, most particular about getting his hands on his share as quickly as possible and directing his suspicion towards the heist’s mastermind, Koromogawa (Akihiko Hirata). 

Koromogawa is currently doing quite well for himself, having recently married and moved into a fancy new flat on a danchi. His brother Kyosuke (Hiroshi Mizuwara) has just been released from prison for an undisclosed juvenile crime and evidently has never met his sister-in-law Mamiko (Yukiko Shimazaki). Strangely buoyant and incredibly naive for someone who’s spent time inside, Kyosuke is determined to go straight and is intending to save money to buy a truck he can use to start his own business. He has no idea that his brother’s newfound wealth is down to robbing banks and is absolutely certain that he is a morally upright person who’d never have anything to do with criminality. When Koromogawa is killed in a hit and run after leaving to meet Tanabe, the suspicion is that he’s been murdered by one of the crooks in a dispute over the money though that would admittedly be quite a counterproductive move as if he really has taken it now that he’s dead no one knows where it is.   

Kyosuke is shocked by Mamiko’s apparently indifference to her husband’s death, even going so far as openly flirt with him. After discovering a receipt for a coin locker in his brother’s wallet, he opens it and finds a pistol first planting the seeds of doubt in his mind about Koromogawa’s life and death. The gun, however, begins to take him over. After reuniting with old girlfriend Yuriko (Akemi Kita), Kyosuke was beaten up by her new squeeze but when he tries the same thing again and notices the pistol tucked into Kyosuke’s waistband he immediately backs down. With the gun in his hand, Kyosuke is able to completely humiliate him, forcing the man to crawl on the floor like a pig and drink dirty water from a puddle in the road. This new sense of ultimate power fuels his desire for revenge setting him on a killing spree starting with Tanabe in an effort to figure out what happened to his brother, an exercise often frustrated by his killing those concerned before turning up any real information. 

Meanwhile, using the gun is also quite a stupid and naive thing to do as the police already have it on file from a shot that was fired during the robbery bringing the crime back into police consciousness and therefore making it impossible for any of the men to spend the money should they finally get their hands on it. Each has a different reason for wanting the loot, a clockmaker wanting to support a daughter left with disabilities after contracting polio, a former record producer realising that he’s aged out of his industry, a former boxer with a lame leg (Tatsuya Nakadai) dreaming of buying a small plot of land, and a couple of embezzlers looking for ways out along with in one case divorcing a wife to marry a bar hostess mistress. But then as in the last two cases and Koromogawa’s own it is perhaps the allure of rising consumerism that has already corrupted them. So much of the action revolves around big American cars, while we’re also told that the gun was one manufactured in Nazi Germany and was most likely bought or stolen from an American serviceman. 

So drunk is Kyosuke on the power of the gun that he doesn’t really take stock of what he’s doing until it’s already too late, realising he’s become an accidental serial killer and no longer has a possibility of leading a normal life. He had begun to feel that way before, especially in the wake of his brother’s death, as he finds each of his job applications failing when prospective employers learn of his criminal past. He’s repaid his debt to society, but if society refuses to give him a second chance then realistically he has no other avenue than heading deeper into crime. Kyosuke liked it that the gun made people fear him but is confronted by the illusionary quality of its power when a child suddenly grabs it in the middle of a game of cops and robbers, pointing the gun at him believing it to be a toy while passers-by laugh at the amusing sight of this little boy holding a grownup hostage. It seemed to confuse Kyosuke that Yuriko had not been afraid of him even with the gun in his hand, but her sudden terror on realising that he has killed and may yet kill her only shows him what he’s become. 

He wanted revenge for his brother’s death, but what if it really was just an accident? The gang begin to turn on each other after the money disappears, some believing Koromogawa took it for safekeeping to prevent them incriminating each other by spending it too early and others that he just took it for himself while each suspecting one another believing one of them is slowly killing the others to pocket the whole amount for themselves. But in the end it’s all for nothing, they couldn’t spend it anyway and several of them decide they’d rather not have the bother and are ready to live quiet lives in the country only it’s too late for that now. A final revelation confirming his brother’s criminality coupled with the betrayal of a friend’s well-meaning attempt to keep him in the dark lead only to an internecine confrontation with the futility of crime. With its noirish jazz score and photography reminiscent of contemporary American independent cinema Sugawa captures a sense of restless youth but also the latent desperation of those left languishing on the margins of an increasingly prosperous society.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

The Sand City in Manchuria (砂漠を渡る太陽, Kiyoshi Saeki, 1960)

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A pure hearted doctor stands strong against the forces of imperialism if somewhat ambivalently in Kiyoshi Saeki’s wartime drama The Sand City in Manchuria (砂漠を渡る太陽, Sabaku wo Wataru Taiyo). “Why isn’t there just one country? I don’t want a country” a young Chinese woman exclaims towards the film’s conclusion in what is intended as an anti-war statement but also invites the inference that the one country should be Japan and that China is wrong to resist the kind of “co-existence” that the idealistic hero is fond of preaching. 

Dr. Soda (Koji Tsuruta), known as Soh, has been in Manchuria for two years running a poor clinic in a trading outpost on a smuggling route through the desert. He came, he later tells another Japanese transplant, after being talked into it by a pastor who told him about US missionaries who endured hardship in the Gobi desert and lamented that no Japanese people had been willing to take on such “thankless” work in the midst of the imperial expansion. There is a kind of awkwardness in Soda’s positioning as the good Japanese doctor which perhaps reflects the view from 1960 in that he objects to the way the Japanese military operates in Manchuria and most particularly to Japanese exceptionalism which causes them to look down on the local Chinese community as lesser beings, but within that all he preaches is equality and co-existence which suggests that he sees nothing particularly wrong in Japan being in Manchuria in the first place while implying that the Chinese are expected to simply co-exist with an occupying force to which they have in any case been given no choice but to consent. 

Nevertheless, it’s clear that the Japanese are in this case the bad guys. Soda is at one point accosted by a drunken soldier who takes against his choice to adopt Chinese dress while rudely refusing to pay his rickshaw driver. The animosity of some in the town is well justified as we hear that their mother was murdered by a Japanese soldier, or that they were raped by Japanese troops and now have nothing but hate for them to they extent that they would withhold vital medical treatment from a child rather than consider allowing Soda to treat them. Soda’s main paying job is working at an opium clinic hinting at the various ways imperialist powers have used the opium trade to bolster their control over the local population, while it later becomes clear that one of the Chinese doctors has been in cahoots with a corrupt Japanese intelligence officer to, ironically, syphon off opium meant for medical uses and sell it to addicts in a truly diabolical business plan. 

Though Soda is well respected in the town because he offers free medical treatment to those who could never otherwise afford it, he is sometimes naive about their real living conditions. Outraged that a young woman has been sold into sexual slavery, he marches off to the red light district to buy her back but is confused on his return realising her family aren’t all that happy about it because they cannot afford to feed her and were depending on the money she would send them because the father has become addicted to opium and can no longer work. The girl, Hoa (Yoshiko Sakuma), becomes somewhat attached to Soda but he is largely uninterested in her because she is only 17, while her affection for him causes tension with the daughter of an exiled Russian professor which is only repaired once they all start working together for the common good after the town after it comes under threat from infectious disease. 

In an echo of our present times, it seems not much has changed in the last 80 years or so, the townspeople quickly turn on Soda once it become clear that he’s putting the town on lockdown to prevent the spread of infectious meningitis after a Russian soldier stumbles in and dies of it. The disease firstly exposes the essential racism even among those Japanese people who have lived in Manchuria longterm such as the mysterious Ishida (So Yamamura) who remarks that diseases like that only affect the Manchurians and they’ll be fine because they are “more hygienic”, while simultaneously painting the infection as a symptom of foreign corruption delivered by the Russian incursion. Soda visits a larger hospital to get the samples confirmed but is told that the disease has not been seen in Manchuria before and so they have no vaccine stocks leaving him dependent on the smuggling network to get the supplies he needs. As the town is a trading outpost whose entire economy is dependent on the business of travellers just passing through, the townspeople are obviously opposed to the idea of keeping them out fearing that they will soon starve going so far as to tear down Soda’s quarantine signs while throwing stones at his house. 

In another irony, it’s Ishida’s pistol that wields ultimate control immediately silencing the mayor’s objections in a rude reminder of the local hierarchy. Many of the townspeople including inn owner Huang (Yunosuke Ito) and Hoa’s sister Shari (Naoko Kubo) are involved with the resistance to which Soda seems to remain quite oblivious and in any case adopts something of a neutral position but gains a grudging respect from Huang thanks to his humanitarianism that eventually saves him from brutal bandit Riyan (a rare villain role for a young Ken Takakura). In any case, as the corrupt Japanese officials pull out to escape the imminent Russian incursion, Soda decides to stay in part to atone for the sins of the Japanese in an acceptance of his responsibility as a Japanese person if one who has not (directly) participated in the imperialist project even if he was in a sense still underpinning it. Essentially a repurposed ninkyo eiga starring Koji Tsuruta as a morally upright man surrounded by corruption but trying to do the right thing to protect those who cannot protect themselves, there is an undeniable awkwardness in the film’s imperialist ambivalence but also a well intentioned desire to look back at the wartime past with clearer eyes and a humanitarian spirit. 

The Wild, Wild Rose (野玫瑰之戀, Wong Tin-lam, 1960)

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A free-spirited nightclub singer’s dreams of love are shattered by fragile masculinity and an unforgiving society in Wong Tin-lam’s take on the classic opera Carmen, The Wild, Wild Rose (野玫瑰之戀, yě méiguī zhī liàn). Where similar films of the era may paint the heroine’s plight as punishment for her subversion of societal norms, Wong’s musical noir implies that perhaps she was too good, too pure-hearted for the increasingly selfish and judgemental society around her while the man she loves is simply too weak to accept her transgressive femininity. 

It’s with the man, Hanhua (Chang Yang), that we first enter the world of the EW Ritz cabaret bar. An “elite” English graduate, Hanhua has fallen on hard times and unable to find teaching work has been forced to take a job he sees as sordid and degrading as a pianist in a nightclub. He and his teacher fiancée Suxin (So Fung), literally the girl next-door, joke about it outside, Hanhua asking her if she’s worried about all the “pretty bad women” in such establishments and pointing at his engagement ring as an amulet of protection against predatory femme fatales. Once inside, however, he’s instantly captivated by the alluring singer, Sijia (Grace Chang), who nevertheless takes against Hanhua because unbeknownst to him he’s displacing her regular piano player, Old Wang (Lui Tat), who’s being let go by the greedy boss for showing up late because his wife is seriously ill. 

Unable to accept such callous behaviour, Sijia tries to use her position to speak up on Wang’s behalf and almost loses her own job in the process while irritating her stage rival and the boss’ squeeze Meimei (Shen Yun). While Meimei sings a quiet romantic ballad on the dance floor, Sijia embarks on a crowd-pleasing, gender-bending routine in the bar which proves both that she is the star in this establishment and that she can bend the crowd to her will turning them on whoever she sees fit. After a fight breaks out, Hanhua finds himself physically restraining Sijia to prevent her from stabbing Meimei with an icepick. Though this originally annoys her, Sijia is quite clearly turned on watching Hanhua fight off all of the other men who rose up to defend her honour. Once he is wounded, she again asserts her authority by calling them off and proceeding to flirt with Hanhua who leaves with Suxin vowing never to return. 

But as Old Wang had said, it’s tough to find a job these days and faced with his mother’s excitement about his new career prospects Hanhua has no choice but continue working at the Ritz. We can perhaps tell something of Hanhua’s background from the interior of his home which though modest has a large classical portrait on one wall and is otherwise neat and well organised. He evidently envisaged a conventional middle-class life for himself and is humiliated to have been reduced to a mere piano player in a backstreet bar, the kind of place that he sees as sordid and dangerous and would not ordinarily think of himself visiting. He sees Sijia in much the same way but perhaps stops short of admitting her danger, refusing to look at her or only with contempt while furiously denying his barely controlled desires of the kind which were perhaps unleashed by the fight at the bar. 

Yet all the qualities which attract her to him are the ones he eventually wants to destroy in her rebellious goodness and refusal to follow the unjust rules of her society. She tells him point blank not only in her song but repeatedly to his face that she is a fickle woman who believes there are no good men and is essentially in this only for a good time for as long as it lasts. In fact, her interest in him largely stemmed from a bet with a guy at the bar that she couldn’t seduce him in 10 days, stung by his rough rejection of her after the fight. But Hanhua is too conventional a man to understand or accept her. He gives in to his desires after discovering that she slept with a rich man only to get the money for a life saving operation for Old Wang’s wife, witnessing her self-sacrificing goodness and therefore deciding that she is “worthy” of him after all. Ultimately he expects her to play the role of a conventional housewife, refusing to allow her to continue singing in nightclubs even while he is unable to find another job having served time in prison for bludgeoning her abusive ex. His fragile masculinity had also caused him to blow up at Suxin when she went to the headmaster at her school and asked him to give Hanhua a less degrading job, humiliated to have a woman beg for him just he is humiliated to be supported by Sijia and especially by her doing a job he thinks is somehow improper. 

It is not Sijia who ruins Hanhua, but Hanhua himself and the toxicity of conventional social codes that feed into his sense of resentment. His obsessive desire to possess Sijia, to dominate and tame her, drives him to drink and uselessness to the point he completely degrades himself, pathetically pleading with Sijia not to leave, prepared to allow her to return to work or even take other lovers if only she does not abandon him. Sijia meanwhile is in a sense tamed by her love for Hanhua in that she decides that love is sacrifice, that she must live a more conventionally proper life as Hanhua’s wife and eventually that she must separate from him in order to preserve his future. In this she is redeemed in the eyes of Suxin and Hanhua’s mother who realise that she is a good woman who genuinely cared for Hanhua, but is finally done in by her goodness. Her morality cares nothing for properness and all for humanity, her kindness to Old Wang and her best friend eventually repaid while all Hanhua can think of is a redemption of his masculinity through violence driven just like Don José to the peak of madness in obsessive love. But there’s more than just inevitable tragedy in Sijia’s fate, there is a deep sense of injustice and that Hanhua’s actions were as much about stifling her transgressive goodness as they were about vindicating himself as a man which in any case is only pathetic in its unrighteousness. Masterful in its musicality, Wong’s romantic noir positions its heroine as dangerous but only because she is better than the world around her and the world around her knows but does not want to see. 

The Wild, Wild Rose screens in Amsterdam on 27th/29th/31st October as part of this year’s Imagine Fantastic Film Festival.

Lust of the White Serpent (蛇精の淫, Morihei Magatani, 1960)

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The lingering inequalities of the feudal society are manifested in a snake woman’s thwarted desire for love in Morihei Magatani’s Shintoho horror Lust of the White Serpent (蛇精の淫, Jasei no In). Not quite as salacious as its title may imply, Magatani’s film takes a sympathetic view of the classic snake lady painting her as a tragic heroine betrayed by the codes of the mortal world with its persistent classism and misogyny while offering the conflicted hero caught between the old and the new only a compromised escape in spirituality. 

In what the opening voiceover describes as a local legend that has been passed on “since ancient days” though seemingly taking place in the relatively recent past, village boy Minokichi (Hiroshi Asami) hears a woman’s screams while walking along a mountain path and investigates to find her writhing around in the long grass. Having been attacked by a snake, the woman, Kinu (Kinuko Obata), seems confused though Minokichi recognises her as the daughter of the village headman and offers to carry her home. Unfortunately Kinu’s retinue immediately jump to the conclusion that filthy peasant boy Minokichi must have abducted her, roundly beating him for having dared to lay his hands on such a fine lady. “Even if you try to interact with them, they won’t treat you as an equal. This our fate” his mother reminds him cautioning him against any further attempts at interclass friendship. 

The problem is that the half-crazed Kinu has apparently imprinted on Minokichi and insists that she will marry only him or else die. This is unwelcome news for her father who had been considering marrying her off to the son of a local businessman who has learning difficulties on the promise of a seat on the prefectural council. As for Minokichi, he is technically betrothed to childhood friend Kiyo (Yumiko Matsubara) but is growing resentful having fallen for Kinu but knowing that their romance is impossible because of the barrier of social class. In a surprising move, Kinu’s father chooses his daughter’s happiness over both the current social order and his own financial gain in formally offering Kinu to Minokichi who is then conflicted, at first reassuring Kiyo that he cannot accept only for her to tell him that he must on hearing the rather naive conviction of the local policeman that this taboo-breaking interclass union will liberate the villagers from their subjugation by the townspeople and they’ll never be looked down again. 

As it turns out, Kinu has been possessed by the spirit of a snake woman, Sakurako, who fell in love with Minokichi after he saved her when she became trapped on a rock. The pair had had a brief affair a year earlier which Minokichi’s mother had put a stop to fearful that Minokichi was falling victim to a curse and that Sakurako meant to drain him of his energy and move on. “My background doesn’t matter, does it?” Sakurako had ironically asked having explained to Minokichi that she was just “a poor girl with no one to turn to” echoing the forbidden quality of Minokichi’s romance with Kinu. Yet their relationship is also transgressive in spanning two worlds. “Intimacy with an animal is non-Buddhistic behaviour” Minokichi is later scolded by an intense priest though still finding himself drawn to Sakurako despite the entreaties of his mother and Kiyo trying to drag him back to the village and his “proper” place in the contemporary social order. 

As for Kinu little thought is given to this reckless usurpation of her body, Sakurako seemingly having chosen her to appeal to Minokichi’s desire for social advancement. Once everyone knows she is possessed by a snake spirit things get even stranger with some of the men in the village believing that the only way to tell is to sleep with her. Having tried a shinto shamaness who confirmed a diagnosis of possession by a white snake, Kinu’s father tries a Western doctor branded a “horny weirdo” by the villagers. Despite everyone knowing this and that he is clearly drunk, the doctor is left alone in a room with Kinu and proceeds to rape her while the servant Sakuzo who had beaten Minokichi merely for touching his mistress watches silently from outside. When Sakurako strangles the doctor, winding her snake body around his chest, it is read as an expression of the snake’s curse, everyone instantly understanding what the doctor had done but merely covering up the crime while later petitioning Kinu’s father to have her sent away to save them from the havoc she is wreaking with storms, droughts, and floods in protest at her unhappy fate. 

Minokichi who was supposed to unite two worlds and dissolve barriers finds himself in a liminal state no longer a member of either, Kiyo’s father refusing to welcome him back into the village while having separated from Kinu on realising she is a snake woman denies him a place in the town. While he tells himself that he should know his place, reintegrate himself into the village and accept his proper social role by settling down and marrying Kiyo as he was supposed to do he cannot let go of his desire for Sakurako/Kinu and in the end cannot resist following her even if or perhaps precisely because it may lead to his death. When the “curse” is broken he is led away once again only this time by the priest as a new devotee of Buddhism reinforcing a spiritual message but ironically also implying that Minokichi’s fault was in trying to help others, firstly the snake and secondly Kinu, when he should like his mother advised have minded his own business and refrained from interacting with those outside of his immediate community be they beautiful noblewomen or alluring snake spirits. Though light on effects, Magatani ups the atmosphere with copious fog while employing a series of dissolves for the snake women’s transformations and some superimposition for their wrathful curses. The message may be know your place or you’ll end up nowhere, but the film nevertheless has unexpected sympathy for the lonely Sakurako beaten into submission by a cruel and misogynistic society. 

Original trailer (no subtitles)

The Approach of Autumn (秋立ちぬ, Mikio Naruse, 1960)

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For a small boy in post-war Japan, childhood’s summer is already over in Mikio Naruse’s at times uncharacteristically cheerful The Approach of Autumn (秋立ちぬ, Aki Tachinu) . In truth, the Japanese title is the slightly more depressing “autumn has begun” echoing the dismal circumstances that the hero eventually finds himself in while working his way towards an understanding of the disappointments and loneliness of adulthood. Abandoned by his mother he remains alone, in a sense homeless, trapped between the new Japan and the old in a liminal space shrinking by the hour as the construction of modernity encroaches all around him. 

The amazement on Hideo’s (Kenzaburo Osawa) face is palpable as he exits a train station in the middle of Tokyo peering up at the high rise buildings amid busy city streets. He and his mother Shigeko (Nobuko Otowa) have travelled by train from rural Nagano following the death of his father intending to stay with his mother’s brother (Kamatari Fujiwara) who owns an old-fashioned grocery store in Ginza. What Shigeko has not really explained to her son is that they will not be living there together as she has taken a job as a live-in hostess at a nearby inn. 

Plunged into this unfamiliar world all alone, Hideo cannot help but feel awkward in the house of relatives he has never before met. His grown-up cousins playfully argue in front of him about having to share a room, while he makes a point of not eating too much at dinner though as Harue (Hisako Hara) jokes perhaps he doesn’t like the food seeing as his penny pinching uncle mainly feeds the family on fruit and veg from the store that’s gone past its best. Meanwhile, he struggles to make friends with the local children who mock his country bumpkin accent and use him as a scapegoat when it looks like they might get in trouble. His only companion is the precocious daughter of the owner of the inn where his mother works, Junko (Futaba Hitotsugi), who instantly takes to him and even goes so far as to beg her mother to adopt Hideo as an older brother. 

Junko is in a similarly liminal position herself as we later find out. Her mother (Murasaki Fujima) is the mistress of a wealthy businessman who only visits them every so often and appears to be well aware of the precarity of her position. Junko’s father, awkwardly inviting her out on a playdate with his other two children born to his legal wife who apparently knows everything and at least pretends to be alright with it, urges her mother to take advantage of rocketing Ginza land prices and sell the inn to buy a fancy new apartment but she is understandably wary. Running an inn is all she knows how to do and should he die or simply decide to drop her she’d be in trouble fairly quickly. Hideo’s cousins similarly nag their father to sell the shop, reminding him that with the increasing gentrification of the area there is no longer sufficient footfall to support it, and suggesting they use the money to buy larger premises in suburbia. Both Hideo and Junko are in a sense orphans of these liminal spaces, relics of a disappearing Japan soon to be eclipsed by endless office buildings symbols of the nation’s increasing economic prosperity. 

All of the sites on which the children play are earmarked for construction, Junko later explaining that the docks where they eventually head looking for the sea are built on reclaimed land big enough to build a baseball field. Like Hideo she longs for the country with clean air and unpolluted rivers though as Hideo points out it’s all the same to him, his mother isn’t in either place and so neither has any meaning for him. Her strange idea of adopting Hideo is in a way an attempt to anchor herself with family, assuring her mother that she’s old enough to understand but struggling to parse her family circumstances while deeply hurt on discovering she does have siblings after all only they don’t want to know her. She is looked down upon because of the choices her mother has made, as is Hideo especially after his mother leaves abruptly with a customer from the inn (Daisuke Kato) abandoning him with his uncle in search of romantic fulfilment which it seems she probably did not find considering a later telegram explaining she’s working as a maid at a hotel in the resort town of Atami. 

Shigeko is made out to be the villain, but she too is only chasing safety in a changing society hoping to find it in the arms of a reliable man be he a husband or not. Hideo may be an obstacle to that, but her anxiety is mostly maternal, unwilling to rely on her brother’s goodwill and knowing she will need to find a way to support her son even if she is not with him. Hideo’s cousins meanwhile are the youth of the new society. Harue has rejected the old-fashioned family grocers and now works in a department store while her former student protestor boyfriend is certain of getting a salaryman job seeing as there’s a massive labour shortage. Shotaro (Yosuke Natsuki), who is always kind to Hideo, runs around town on his scooter ferrying girls to the beach sometimes forgetting his melancholy cousin in favour of transitory pleasures. He envisages taking over the store and selling it to open up somewhere new, reassuring Hideo that there will always be a place for him there even while letting him down in the present. 

In the end, Hideo’s only friend is a beetle packaged in a box of apples from his grandma in the country which his uncle selfishly claims for the shop under the rationale that he can’t eat them all himself. A symbol of an older, rural Japan as well of the idyllic childhood for which Hideo’s longs, the beetle is as out of place in central Tokyo as he is the pair of them looking down on the sprawling city and out towards the barely visible sea from the roof of a department store which holds no sense of promise for them. Despite the bleakness of the ending, Naruse’s depiction of an ordinary childhood is deceptively cheerful perhaps implying that Hideo is merely enduring a period of adjustment only to leave him with the crushing weight of impossibility, trapped between the new society and the old with no home to go to. 

French release trailer (French subtitles only)

Devotion to Railway (大いなる驀進, Hideo Sekigawa, 1960)

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In the early 1960s, Japan’s rail network might have felt a little uneasy with the Shinkansen already on the horizon. Hideo Sekigawa’s Devotion to Railway (大いなる驀進, Oinaru Bakushin) is in part a celebration of this essential service, the conductor and steward ever fond of reminding us that most passengers probably don’t realise that the Sakura sleeper service on which they are travelling from Tokyo all the way to Nagasaki is operated by only seven or eight people (though they don’t seem to be counting the staff from the dining car which hints at a minor source of division among the crew). While the Japanese title which means something more like “the great dash” might hint at a little more excitement, the film is less thriller than gentle ensemble drama in which the passengers and crew must come together to solve the improbable number of crises arising on this otherwise ordinary journey. 

Even so considering the film is directed by the left-leaning Sekigawa best known for his anti-war films such as Hiroshima and Listen to the Voices of the Sea, not to mention scripted by Kaneto Shindo, it is a little ironic that the central thrust of the drama revolves around junior steward Yajima’s (Katsuo Nakamura) rediscovery of his own devotion to the railway after at the beginning of the film declaring this will be his final journey. Mimicking the dilemma at the centre of Yoshitaro Nomura’s Stakeout, Yajima’s problem is that he has been engaged for two years and is sick of waiting to get married but his girlfriend Kimie (Yoshiko Sakuma) is the main breadwinner in her family and though his salary could support them as a couple it won’t stretch much further. Kimie, however, is dead against him taking the counter-productive decision to quit the railways even with the suggestion of going into business with a friend who owns a cafe, partly because it’s better to stick with a steady job than take a chance on something less certain, and partly because she knows he likes his work and all his experience will be wasted if he suddenly opts to switch careers. 

Despite its positive warmhearted message of people pulling together to overcome crisis, the film does skew a little conservative in essentially turning Kimie into a minor villain as if she were in a sense responsible for making Yajima doubt his devotion to the railway. After jumping aboard to make sure he doesn’t suddenly quit before the end of the line, she eventually has a heart to heart with the sympathetic conductor Matsuzaki (Rentaro Mikuni) that forces to her to admit that perhaps she’s just nervous about the nature of married life and has been making trouble where there needn’t be any, now certain that it’s better to just get married as soon as possible and let the rest figure itself out. 

Meanwhile, there’s additional tension seeing as a waitress from the diner car has an obvious crush on Yajima and is quite resentful on being presented with his fiancée, but even this is eventually solved with the two women becoming accidental friends during the climatic crisis, a landslide caused by a typhoon, that grants each of the passengers an epiphany about what it is they really want out of life. While waiting for the maintenance crew from the next station to arrive, Yajima, still in a bad mood, stands around doing not much of anything until coaxed into action by Kimie and Matsuzaki, Kimie too eventually jumping off the train to solve this literal roadblock in their relationship followed by the dining car girls and a young woman only on the train to transport blood to a hospital needed urgently by 2pm the next day. This sense of collective endeavour opening the way gives everyone on board a new sense of positivity, allowing Kimie and Yajima to repair their relationship and a man who tried to take his own life in the night to gain a new sense of hope for future. 

Several times Yajima is reminded that he has the lives of the passengers in his hands which is undoubtedly true given that there is always the chance of disaster yet also perhaps going a little far seeing as most of his job is checking tickets and providing travel information. Nevertheless, there is a lot going on on this train from eloping couples to yakuza assassins, not to mention the twin sights of a newly wed couple and a pompous politician momentarily disembarking at each stop to be feted either by workers at their factory or the local members of their political party. The snooty politician even gets a minor comeuppance from a famous pickpocket who steals his watch as a joke and then gives it back only to dismissively ignore his thank you message while eating a giant apple. 

Surprisingly handsome for a Toei programmer, Sekigawa’s deft direction lends a claustrophobic sense of dread to the interior of the train stalked by a vengeful assassin, while simultaneously making it an essentially safe space guarded by the ever solicitous crew keen to help an anxious young woman with a long journey ahead of her arrive on time to get home to her chronically ill mother. An effective piece of advertising for the Sakura sleeper service (which ran until 2005 albeit in slightly different forms), Devotion to Railway may surprise in its insistence that the hero rededicate himself to his employer but is nevertheless a charming ensemble drama which finds a new sense of positivity in the solidarity between friends and strangers coming together to overcome crisis through common endeavour. 

Original trailer (no subtitles)

The Last Gunfight (暗黒街の対決, Kihachi Okamoto, 1960)

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“Times may change but there’s always a bunch of greed-blinded old men to rip you off” according to the sidelined noble yakuza pushed into the shadows of Kihachi Okamoto’s anarchic gangster romp The Last Gunfight (暗黒街の対決, Ankokugai no Taiketsu). Another of Okamoto’s early crime movies, Last Gunfight, adapted from the novel by hardboiled king Haruhiko Oyabu, as its name implies finds a stranger in town arriving at the tail end of a gang war in which the wrong side seems to have won hoping to offer a course correction for the post-war future. 

Branded a “dirty cop” and demoted to small-town Kojin, Fujioka (Toshiro Mifune) is a maverick officer exploring the local landscape by getting into fights with foot solders from differing outfits, quickly finding out that the Ooka gang are currently in the ascendent while old school Kozuka flounders. Improbably enough, the local flashpoint is over control of the gravel dredging business currently operated by Kozuka but contested by Ooka. Fujioka meanwhile is caught in a complex web at the nexus of which is Tetsu (Koji Tsuruta), a former Kozuka man who now runs a bar while he plots revenge for the death of his wife in a traffic accident he suspects may have been foul play possibly at the hands of Ooka man Niki, brother of brassy bar girl Sally (Yoko Tsukasa). 

Arriving on the same train as dodgy lawyer Tendo (Akihiko Hirata) and an exotic dancer destined for the club, Fujioka keeps his cards close to his chest leaving his loyalties all but clear. The station are less than thrilled to have him, especially as he spends his first night in town in one of their cells after starting a bar fight, waking up right under a sign which reads “stop violent crime”, while another earnest young officer reminds him that “policemen should never be involved in violence”. Fujioka continues to play both sides, cosying up to both Ooka and Tetsu, walking the line between cop and thug while seemingly scoping out the terrain on either side of the tracks. 

Meanwhile, the town is mired in a battle for its soul as the amoral Ooka gang slowly take over. As Kozuka foot soldier Yata (Makoto Sato) puts it, his boss is the sort who won’t have anything to do with yakuza who don’t obey the code which is why he won’t simply cut a deal with Ooka. According to Kozuka (Jun Tazaki), others might lump him in with “fools and trash” but he’s the old school kind of yakuza providing a genuine service to the community. He dredged the river to stop it flooding and was given the gravel business as a thank you so he resents having it stolen out from under him by the likes of Ooka who makes his money primarily through the drugs trade trafficking “China White” and has seemingly corrupted the entire city council. 

Then again, as Kozuka points out ties based on greed are the most fragile of all and it appears Ooka has secrets he’d rather weren’t exposed. Living in a Western-style mansion complete with open fireplaces and hunting trophies on the walls Ooka is laying claim to a fiefdom as the new inheritor of the feudal legacy. Tetsu’s bar, meanwhile, seems to have a Wild West theme which perhaps speaks of his love of freedom and independence as opposed to Ooka’s elitist authoritarianism. As a representative of legitimate authority Fujioka walks a tightrope between the two but eventually shuns a potential love interest in bargirl Sally, currently Ooka’s squeeze but playing her own game hoping to find out what happened to her brother, in favour of a bromance with the wounded Tetsu.  

Like Okamoto’s other gangster movies from this era however and in contrast to the heaviness of the title, Last Gunfight is imbued with a strong sense of irony and the director’s characteristically cartoonish sense of humour with its ridiculous fight scenes, elaborate production design, and playful subversion of gangster movie tropes right down to the frequent musical numbers starring a trio of minions clad in black suits and lip-syncing to songs about killing the moon. Ending as it began, Okamoto’s elliptical narrative sees the strangers leaving town, job done, but laying themselves bare as they go now shorn of their cover identities and headed back into the heart of corruption in search of new destinations.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

The Husband’s Secret (丈夫的秘密, Lin Tuan-Chiu, 1960)

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Emotional pain flows out of wronged love, according to the gently judgemental voiceover cutting in at random moments throughout Lin Tuan-Chiu’s familial melodrama The Husband’s Secret (丈夫的秘密). A tale of changing gender roles and a conservative society, Lin’s film finds a frustrated female solidarity but also insists on the repair of the traditional family even when that family may not take the form one expects or in fact be entirely healthy while romantic love which destabilises the social order must be suppressed in order to preserve the maternal which only reinforces it. 

The film opens with Tshiu-Bi (Wu Li-Fen) meeting some of her old friends from college at a reunion only to be accidentally shamed by another woman boasting about her already large family. Despite being apparently happily married to rising executive Siu-Gi (Chang Pan-Yang) and living a financially comfortable life in a large Western-style home with a live-in maid, there is discord in the marriage because the couple have no children. A moment of crisis presents itself when Tshiu-Bi runs into her old friend Le-Hun (Chang Mei-Yao) who had been missing from the reunion and learns that the reason for her absence was shame. Seduced and betrayed, Le-Hun is now a single mother living in desperate poverty, forced to pawn her coat in the middle of winter and pound the streets amid the falling snow looking for work. She is always turned away, prospective employers complaining that she looks like a drug addict because of her shivering in the cold, sunken cheeks, and hollow expression. When her young song Ah-Siong is ill and she needs money for hospital treatment, she is forced to swallow her pride and ask Tshiu-Bi for help. Tshiu-Bi gives her a diamond ring to pawn, bringing her into conflict with her husband who is stunned to hear the name and realise that Le-Hun maybe the girlfriend he broke up with to agree to an arranged marriage with Tshiu-Bi to further his business prospects. 

Tshiu-Bi of course knows nothing of this, bringing Le-Hun to stay with them after she is found passed out in the street and hurt when she abruptly leaves after realising that Siu-Gi and her old friend are now a married couple. As Siu-Gi later acknowledges, much of this is all his fault in the moral cowardice that saw him abandon a woman he loved to make an advantageous match. He may have tried to be a good husband and is not a bad man, but he has perhaps behaved badly and the consequences of his bad behaviour are visited on the women in his life alone. Siu-Gi wants to make amends, but is also overwhelmed by old emotions. Perhaps he envisages a solution in which he could have it all, protect Le-Hun and the son he suspects may be his while maintaining his married life and his wife none the wiser. 

Unlike Tshiu-Bi, Le-Hun has certainly been unlucky, ruined by an early failed affair with a bad man who turned out to be a petty criminal and forced her to become a bar hostess to support him. She left Sing-Liat after discovering him with another woman, but he continues to pursue her, damaging her earlier relationship with Siu-Gi and disrupting every opportunity she takes to make a life for herself, seemingly never allowed to forget that she is a “fallen woman” as if haunted by her transgression. Le-Hun is even evicted from her flat when the landlady’s drunken husband tries it on while she is half-conscious with fever, the landlady choosing to blame her rather than the husband in a theme which will be repeated when the prior relationship between Le-Hun and Siu-Gi eventually comes to light. Tshiu-Bi’s uncle, who had arranged the marriage, reminds her that boys will be boys and having a mistress is perfectly normal, keen that she not cause further scandal with a divorce over something as trivial as a husband’s infidelity. Running into Le-Hun by chance after she had fled to another town, Siu-Gi gives in to his passion and spends the night with her, justifying himself that what they have done is perfectly natural while the judgemental voiceover cuts in to ask how educated people could behave in such an uncivilised manner. 

As a result of their night of passion, Le-Hun becomes pregnant and finds refuge with a close friend and fellow bar girl who helps her to raise Ah-Siong, but once the pregnancy is discovered the uncle reassumes control and lays claim to the baby. He orders Le-Hun never to see Siu-Gi again, to which she agrees already overcome with guilt in having betrayed her friend by sleeping with her husband, but also makes the completely unreasonable demand that he will take the baby away after it’s born, apparently intending to put it out for adoption. Tshiu-Bi, meanwhile, sees he obvious solution and wants to keep the child as her own which angers the fiercely patriarchal uncle because it would mean that the mistress’ son inherits the estate (Siu-Gi had married into their family which is why he has a different surname to the one he used when he was with Le-Hun, perhaps explaining his feelings of resentment and emasculation in the reversed power balance of his marriage). 

Yet the illicit affair provides a point both of fracture and of healing which turns the single point of crisis into two definitively separate yet viable branches. While the relationship between Le-Hun and her friend seems perhaps transgressively close and hints at an alternative family born of female solidarity of the kind that Tshiu-Bi tried to offer to Le-Hun but was frustrated by romantic crisis, Le-Hun is eventually forced to reunite with her no-good gangster boyfriend who has apparently reformed after a spot in jail and now bitterly regrets his treatment of her. Wayward men are brought back into superficial conformity in being forced to assume a degree of responsibility as husbands and fathers, while women are expected to suppress their emotions and stoically endure the consequences of male failure. Nevertheless, even while Le-Hun’s friend is seemingly left out in the cold, the social order is preserved in the repair of two “happy” families cauterising the wound of transgression through the reinforcement of the conservative.

The Husband’s Secret streams in the UK 18th to 27th September as part of the Taiwan Film Festival Edinburgh.

Clip (English / Traditional Chinese subtitles)

Restoration trailer (English / Traditional Chinese subtitles)

Late Autumn (秋日和, Yasujiro Ozu, 1960)

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“It’s people who complicate life. Life itself is surprisingly simple” according to a puffed up old man having just hugely overcomplicated an admittedly delicate situation in Yasujiro Ozu’s Late Autumn (秋日和, Akibiyori). A reinterpretation of his classic Late Spring, Late Autumn once again stars Setsuko Hara but this time as a widowed mother far more enthusiastic about marrying off her only daughter while enduring the sometimes unwelcome assistance of a group of middle-aged men stepping into the decidedly female realm of matchmaking and of course concluding that they are doing a fantastic job. 

The action opens at the seventh memorial service for Akiko’s (Setsuko Hara) late husband, Miwa, attended by his three old high school friends, Taguchi (Nobuo Nakamura), Hirayama (Ryuji Kita), and Mamiya (Shin Saburi) who’s turned up fashionably late in the hope of skipping most of the sutras. At the refreshments afterwards, talk turns to the marriage of Miwa’s daughter Ayako (Yoko Tsukasa) who is now 24 which is actually edging towards the late side by the standards of the time. The three old men offer to help find prospective matches with Taguchi instantly proposing an acquaintance to which Ayako smiles demurely but is later relieved to discover is already taken. Mamiya too has a lead, a nice young man from his office, Goto (Keiji Sada) who graduated from a good university and is not bad looking either. Though Akiko is excited, she’s surprised to discover that her daughter wants to shut the offer down immediately before even exchanging photos. She feels she’s not ready for marriage and is happy the way things are. Of course, if she fell in love it might be a different matter, but to her mind there’s no rush to get married just for the sake of it. 

Generally speaking, it’s other women who mostly enforce these restrictive patriarchal social norms, after all a daughter’s marriage is ironically the one area of a woman’s life over which she usually has total control. In this case, however, Ayako’s marriage becomes a kind of hobby for three eccentric old men who each have problems of their own they don’t seem to be in a big hurry to deal with. They each have a latent crush on Akiko from their youth though it was obviously Miwa who later married her. Hirayama is widowed with a teenage son, but Mamiya and Taguchi have wives and daughters of their own, Taguchi’s already married but apparently experiencing frequent bouts of “frustration” with her husband, and Mamiya’s still in school, while their wives are fully aware of their lingering affections for Akiko but mostly content to laugh at their ridiculousness. They are all certain that Ayako “needs” to get married as soon as possible and that they are “helping” her towards “happiness” though what they’re mostly doing is a father knows best routine in which they resolutely ignore her repeated desire for things to go on as they are until she decides that they shouldn’t. 

Ayako isn’t interested in arranged marriage, but does become interested in Goto after accidentally meeting him at Mamiya’s company and then discovering they have a mutual friend, all of which makes their relationship both “arranged” and “not”, giving Mamiya cause to think he’s responsible when he’s really just incidental. Thinking things aren’t moving fast enough, the guys decide the problem is Akiko and if they can persuade her to remarry then Ayako will be less reluctant to leave home. Their behaviour is in fact quite manipulative, something they are later called out on by Ayako’s feisty friend Yuriko (Mariko Okada) who is also trying to help but determined to do it in a less problematic way. The gang’s suggestion to Ayako that her mother is considering remarriage when in fact she had no such intentions at all places a rift between the two women with Ayako left feeling hurt and betrayed, as if her mother has offended her father’s memory and done something improper behind her back. 

Ayako is not alone in her lingering prejudice against second marriage even if Yuriko tries to explain to her that she’s being unreasonable. Hirayama too originally objects to the gang’s plan to get him to marry Akiko on the grounds that it would be “immoral” to marry his old friend’s wife, but is brought round when he puts the idea to his son and finds him wildly enthusiastic if only in part because he’s already thought ahead to his own marriage and is worried his dad will want to live with them and that would inconvenient for everyone. When it comes to Akiko’s marriage, there seems to be more wiggle room. Everyone wants her to be “happy” and so there’s a greater freedom to explore various options while completely ignoring her preference to remain a widow. As we see from Akiko’s life, she is already financially independent and really has no “need” to remarry unless she happened to fall in love though she remains attached to her husband’s memory. As she later confesses to Ayako, she has no desire to “climb that mountain” again, and in fact will be happier living in freedom as an independent woman. 

As so often, however, while remarriage is optional marriage is not. Ayako has to marry, she never really has the option to remain single even that was what she wanted. She falls in love with Goto and indeed wants to marry him if perhaps worried about leaving her mother behind, making the three old men partially correct in their conviction that her reluctance was more anxiety than it was opposition. Unfortunately, their “success” emboldens them towards the next match and possibly more unhelpful meddling, complicating what should be simple with their increasingly outdated ideas fuelled by a desire to rebel against their sense of impending obsolescence. “In marriage you just give up” an exasperated wife admits, but wouldn’t it be something if you didn’t have to?

Late Autumn is currently streaming on BFI Player as part of the BFI’s Japan season.

Original trailer (no subtitles)