Tag: 1960s

The Lost World of Sinbad: Samurai Pirate (大盗賊, Senkichi Taniguchi, 1963)

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Seemingly drawing influence from the series of Arabian fantasy films from Hollywood, Senkichi Taniguchi’s Lost World of Sinbad: Samurai Pirate (大盗賊, Dai Tozoku), sees the director reunite with Toshiro Mifune who had made his debut in the director’s Snow Trail which could not be more different from this crowd-pleasing adventure movie. The film is loosely based on the life of 16th century merchant Luzon Sukezaemon who eventually fled to Cambodia after all his possessions were seized by Hideyoshi Toyotomi and he was condemned on some trumped up charges.

The film’s opening scenes perhaps reflect this incident as Luzon (Toshiro Mifune) is branded a pirate and set to be burned at the stake, narrowly escaping after bribing an official with drugs. Resentful, Luzon decides he might as well become a pirate after all as he’s pretty sick of Japan and fancies seeking his fortune on the open seas only his ship is quickly destroyed in a storm and all his crew killed while the treasure he was carrying is seized by the fearsome Black Pirate (Makoto Sato). Washing up in a mysterious place aesthetically a mashup between South East Asia and the Middle East, Luzon is cared for by a hermit and then becomes embroiled in intrigue on finding out that the tyrannical king has been seizing local women in exchange for unpaid taxes and imprisoning them within his harem.

Luzon’s dreams are for riches and status so his sudden discovery of a love of justice is a bit of a surprise, but then he’s also most interested in the princess Yaya (Mie Hama) because he spotted one the necklaces from his treasure chest around her neck which suggests she might have a lead on the Black Pirate. Princess Yaya is engaged to a prince from the Ming kingdom which threatens a wider kind of geopolitical destabilisation should anything go wrong with this marriage which is a distinct possibility seeing as the corrupt Chancellor (Tadao Nakamaru) has been colluding with an evil witch to kill the king and seize the kingdom.

Rather than a pure pirate movie the film contains fantasy elements such as the presence of a Western-style castle which is clearly modelled on the one from Disney’s Snow White along with a weird hermit whose powers are weakened every time he sees an attractive woman. It is not, however, the kind of tokusatsu the English title bestowed by the US release implies as it contains no real monsters instead focussing its special effects on the magic used by the witch, who can turn people to stone with her eyes, and the hermit who can turn himself into a fly or disappear in a puff of blue smoke. Despite the prominent inclusion of SFX master Eiji Tsuburaya these effects are repeated several times are really the only ones featured in the film. 

In any case, what’s in play is famous merchant Luzon’s redemption arc in which he recovers the treasure but gives it back to the people, symbolically abandoning his dreams of wealth and status for something a little more community minded in vowing to sail the seven seas pursuing justice throughout the world. Having been a victim of authoritarianism in Japan, he rises up against tyranny abroad while teaming up with a group of local bandits and several times proudly proclaiming himself as Japanese though in a movie conceit everyone speaks his language including the Black Pirate who is later exposed as a snivelling fool tricked by the Chancellor on the promise of a chance to marry the Princess Yaya. Most of the derring do is reserved for the final sequence in which Luzon and the bandits storm the castle to defeat the evil chancellor but the screenplay also packs in genre elements such as trap doors and secret dungeons which keep Luzon busy as he does his best to overthrow an oppressive regime if only to put the rightful king back on the throne in the hope that might be better. Taniguchi certainly makes the most of his elaborate sets and costumes, creating a sense of tempered opulence along Middle-Eastern themes while adding a touch of the mythic in the attempt to weave a legend around the real life figure of Luzon Sukezaemon as a bandit revolutionary selling dreams of freedom on the sea as a pirate more interested in justice than money in otherwise corrupt society.

The Kamikaze Guy (カミカゼ野郎　真昼の決斗, Kinji Fukasaku, 1966)

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The hero of Kinji Fukasaku’s Kamikaze Guy (カミカゼ野郎　真昼の決斗, Kamikaze Yaro: Mahiru no Ketto) is described as cheerful and with a spirited personality though unfortunately not very bright. A vehicle for rising star Chiba, the film was intended as the first in a series starring its bumbling hero, Ken Mitarai, though no other instalments were ever produced. In any case, it seems to echo the lighter side of Nikkatsu’s borderless action line along with Toho’s spy spoofs in its wrong man tale of wartime legacy and corporate duplicity. 

Often called “Mr. Toilet” because of the way his name is pronounced, Ken (Sonny Chiba) is a slightly sleazy private plane pilot who has pinups on the roof of the cockpit. According to the voiceover, there is no bottom to the depths of his crassness which is a sentiment later borne out by his attempt to pick up a woman on a ski slope by uttering the immortal lines “please don’t think I’m a creep, just hear me out.” However, events take a turn for the strange when the pair of them are witness to a murder. Ken valiantly tries to help, but is later brought in as a suspect himself, partly as the police are annoyed by his smugness. The woman, Koran (Bai Lan), turns out to be from Taiwan which is where Ken ends up flying only to discover that his cargo is the body of an old man he also encountered at the slopes. 

In keeping wth the growing internationalism of mid-1960s Japanese cinema, the film travels to Taiwan but does so in a rather complicated way as Ken is drawn into a plot concerning three men responsible for the death of a Japanese official shortly after the war killed because he wanted to return 200 billion yen’s worth of diamonds stolen from the local population. While on his travels, Ken runs into a woman who was trafficked to the island at the age of 15 and later cheated out of the money she’s saved to return. The film almost flirts with the awkward relationship between the two nations and Japan’s imperialist past but in the end does not quite engage with it save for the brief appearance of the indigenous community which seems to stand in for layers of historical and contemporary colonialism.

In any case, the murdered man was Japanese as were the two of the three currently being targeted in the assassination plot Ken is being framed for. Ken’s defining characteristic is his bumbling earnestness in which his determination to get to the bottom of the mystery only lands him in further trouble. At one point he even tries to stop the villain escaping by standing in front of the plane with his arms wide open as if it hadn’t really occurred to him that a man who has already killed a number of people is unlikely to be deterred by the thought of killing one more. Nevertheless, it provides the film with one of its more memorable and quite incredible sequences as Ken grabs on to the wing support as the plane is taking off and eventually climbs his way inside.

Chiba reportedly designed the action sequences himself and his martial arts skills are very definitely on display in the unusually well accomplished fight scenes while the film also contains a lengthy and expertly choreographed car chase albeit one occasionally interrupted by random bison and an indigenous parade. Perhaps because of this manly tone, there is an unfortunate strain of semi-ironic misogyny that runs through the film with frequent exclamations that women are too quick to jump to conclusions while Ken later seems slightly put out that Koran is “using her feminine wiles” to combat the bad guys. 

By the same token, there is something a little ironic and subversive in the film’s use of the term kamikaze, self-adopted by Ken to emblematise his devil may care nature while otherwise setting the action in a nation once colonised by Japan that holds a celebratory gala in Ken’s honour for his assistance in retrieving the gold and returning it to the Taiwanese people. Perhaps in another sense, it echoes a new willingness to make restitution with the past even if Ken bumbles his way into it and does so by accident taking on both the new and destructive capitalism of the post-war society and the toxic wartime legacy and freeing himself from them, literally a body flying in midair with no direction but his own.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Yakuza Hooligans (893 愚連隊, Sadao Nakajima, 1966)

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“The world has changed,” an old school street thug is repeatedly reminded after his release from prison into a new Japan amid the tides of rising prosperity. An early effort from Sadao Nakajima, Yakuza Hooligans (893 愚連隊, 893 Gurentai) situates itself in cultural and generational abyss among those who find themselves locked out of the new society and unable to escape the immediate post-war era in part perhaps because they may not really want to.

At least it seems that way for the central trio of “hooligans” who later explain to their sometime mentor that they aren’t doing petty crime because of a lack of other options but out of devilment and a childish rebellion against a world they feel doesn’t accept them. As the film opens, they’re running a petty scam luring queuing passengers into unlicensed cabs for which they are almost arrested, stiffing the cabbie that helps them escape and then conning a takoyaki vendor out of a free lunch. Several times they’re criticised for “bullying the weak,” most obviously in their sideline seducing women and forcing them into sex work or blackmailing men who sleep with them. 

They are, however, fairly weak themselves. They like to describe themselves as a “democratic” institution in which everyone is equal and everything is shared fairly but despite supposedly having no boss they’re bossed around by almost everyone and when challenged by actual yakuza quickly back down. A generation older, failed kamikaze Sugi is released from prison after spending 15 years behind bars for killing a Chinese man as part of a petty crime gang formed in the immediate chaos after the war. Unlike his former associate Kurokawa, Sugi too claims that he doesn’t see the point in having a boss but like the younger men flounders unable to see a place for himself in the new society.

Sugi doesn’t approve of the more immoral sides of their business, particularly the rape and trafficking of women but proves just how out of touch he is when he asks the guys why they can’t just swipe some rice or clothing. In the immediate post-war period, rice and kimono were the only things which held their value but in a newly consumerist Japan they’re in plentiful supply and in fact worth relatively little. While he was inside, his former girlfriend married someone else and had a child, burning the tattoo she once had of his name on her arm clean away. She tells him that she’s sorry, but she’s happy and she doesn’t want anything to disrupt the life she has now. Falling for a middle-aged woman unhappy in her marriage and subsequently forced into sex work by the gang, he dreams of a happy family life and ultimately risks all on a confrontation with his old yakuza pal Kurokawa.

The film seems to suggest that the writing’s on the wall for men like Kurokawa too. His old school world of regimented, authoritarian gangsterdom doesn’t fit in the new Japan anymore than Sugi’s corrupted post-war idealism. A subplot revolving around Ken, a mixed-race member of the gang who hates the way they treat women because his mother was raped by a US serviceman positions the Occupation as another source of corruption leaving nothing behind itself other than moral decline and lasting trauma. But as Nobuko later says as long as you’re alive you have to go on searching for something and if one place is the same as another then you might as well move. 

The hooligans, however, seem stuck in the past. They can’t stand up for themselves or mount any real resistance to their circumstances, continuing to “bully the weak” in an attempt to mask their own weakness until racing headlong towards a confrontation with the yakuza along a bridge which quite literally hasn’t been finished yet symbolising their mutual inability to progress into the new society. Shooting with a heavy dose of irony enhanced by the whimsical jazz score, Nakajima captures a sense of contemporary Kyoto as an alienating environment caught between the ancient and the modern in which men like Sugi and the hooligans are permanently displaced yet lack the desire to escape because the newly consumerist society has little to offer them. 

Original trailer (no subtitles)

A Bloodthirsty Killer (殺人魔 / 살인마, Lee Yong-min, 1965)

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Clearly influenced by the classic Japanese ghost cat movie and the work of Nobuo Nakagawa, Lee Yong-min’s nightmarish slice of gothic horror The Bloodthirsty Killer (殺人魔 / 살인마, Salinma) winds a tale of female revenge though somewhat incongrusouly positioning the vengeful spirit’s oblivious husband as the hero who must attempt to save his family by exposing the corruption at its centre. That corruption is intensely and exclusively female but informed mainly by entrenched patriarchy along with growing anxieties amid increasing wealth disparity. 

As in Nakagawa’s The Lady Vampire, a woman makes a surprise reappearance 10 years after being declared dead looking exactly as she had the last time her husband saw her while also featuring in a painting though this time not in the nude but melting as soon as the confused hero, Simok (Lee Ye-chun), picks it up for a closer look. Lee opens with an incredibly gothic, dreamlike sequence in which a creepy man watches Simok walking in the rain before taking him to a gallery that turns out to be entirely empty. A security guard informs him that the exhibition is over, the painting of Aeja (Do Kum-bong) the only one remaining. It also transpires that Simok has made his trip on the one day a year ghosts roam the earth, as the creepy taxi driver points out gesturing towards a field which appears to be full of white-clothed figures. Eventually he arrives at an eerie house in the woods where he meets the main who painted the portrait only to see him murdered by Aejan while the painter survives long enough to hand him the painting and explain that it contains “a secret”.

This secret will relate closely to Simok’s family which on his return home we can see is affluent and apparently happy. Simok lives in a large, Western-style house that is perfectly primed for gothic horror. When he tries to explain to his wife, Hyesuk (Lee Bin-hwa), what he thinks has happened, a cabinet door mysteriously opens on its own before the couple begin hearing the screams of Simok’s mother who claims a ghost tried to strangle her in her room. All things considered, it does not actually take them very long to agree that ghosts are real and they’re being targeted by one though the reason remains obscure to all, or perhaps to all but Hyesuk whose demeanour immediately changes. Despite having gone into a frenzy when her eldest daughter Mihwa was snatched by the ghost, she quickly makes her way to her hidden stash exclaiming that she’s still “young and rich” and plans to enjoy the rest of her life. The ghost can take her kids, but it won’t get her. 

This is of course entirely contrary to contemporary codes of motherhood especially as we realise that one of the causes of Aeja’s downfall was her childlessness. Three years into her marriage with Simok, she had born no children and earned the animosity of her mother-in-law (Jeong Ae-ran) who it seems did not really like her and felt that she did not live up to her traditional ideas of idealised femininity. Perhaps partly for aesthetic reasons seeing as she is a ghost, Aeja dresses exlcuvely in hanbok in contrast to Hyesuk who in flashbacks is seen in only Western clothing and declares herself jealous and resentful not only of the couple’s material comfort but of how happy they seem to be. A kind of poor relation, Hyesuk plots revenge on societal unfairness in wilfully disrupting Simok’s household by manipulating patriarchal social codes in causing Simok to believe Aeja has been having an affair during his lengthy business trips to Japan.

By the same token, she also takes advantage of the grandmother’s affair with a married doctor (Namkoong Won) which is taboo on several levels the first simply being the existence of sexual desire in a middle-aged woman. Later, once she has been possessed by the ghost cat, Simok’s mother will similarly manipulate him in claiming that she has spent all her life in his service clinging to the memory of her dead husband who left her widowed at 30 as an advocation of idealised womanhood. Though Simok has realised that she was no longer his mother but a ghost cat on catching sight of her reflection, he was unable to kill her because of all her reminders about her maternal suffering. It’s the desire to maintain this facade that encourages her to reject Aeja after Hyesuk engineers her walking in on her mother-in-law and the doctor, insisting that Hyesuk, who is pandering to her, would make a much better daughter-in-law than the righteous and wronged Aeja. 

Aeja’s revenge is also against all of these oppressive social codes that have contributed to her demise though it was other women who eventually brought it about in their enforcement and manipulation of the codes of femininity. Recalling a moment from Hajime Sato’s Ghost of the Hunchback in a which a shamaness drops in having spotted all the evil emanating from the house, another woman later turns up and seems to want to help giving Simok a magic talisman he eventually uses to save his kids who have been imprisoned, perhaps for their own safety, inside some Buddhist statues. In contrast to Aeja’s rage, Hyesuk’s greed, and the mother-in-law’s shame, the mysterious woman is gentle and self-assured if a little eerie. Just as a cross can stop a vampire, so a Buddhist rosary can fend off a ghost cat while it’s an appeal to Buddha that eventually helps to break the curse transforming the portrait into a lotus instead. 

In any case, Lee adds a playful irony to the genre as the grandmother in particular begins to take on feline mannerisms, hissing and pawing at the Buddhist statues while licking her granddaughter’s face in a way even her grandson Woong realises is “disgusting” and not something his grandmother was usually accustomed to doing. In a nod to Yotsuya Kaidan, Aeja’s metamorphosis into a vengeful ghost is accompanied by a loss of her hair, symbolising her loss of femininity, along with a large disfigurement over her eye that has become closely associated with that of Oiwa. Then again, he also has fun with a transformation scene as the grandmother is defeated and turns back into a cat complete with a tiny dress that shrinks with her. What he otherwise conjures is however an eerie sense of dread hanging over a superficially happy home with a terrifying secret at its centre, though what it does in the end suggest with its ambiguous messaging is that the father will eventually have to take responsibility for his family and play an active role in the domestic space if he is to escape this very particular curse of familial corruption.

Female Slave Ship (女奴隷船, Yoshiki Onoda, 1960)

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Playing out much more like a classic serial than war movie, Yoshiki Onoda’s Female Slave Ship (女奴隷船Onna dorei-sen) takes a curiously flippant approach to the conflict along with a moral perhaps a little at odds with similar films of the time. Adapted from a novel by Jun Funazaki, the film begins as spy thriller but ends up drifting into pirate territory as a Japanese solider with an incredibly important mission is shot down on his way to Tokyo, rescued by a freighter carrying women en route to being sex trafficked in Shanghai, and then captured by pirates who want to sell him to a Chinese spy working for the Americans. 

It’s right at the end of the war and Japan is losing quite badly they think because of advancements made in radar by the Allied forces. They’ve been passed blueprints for a better radar system by a German contact and so Lt. Sugawa (Bunta Sugawara), stationed in Malaya, has been charged with bringing them back to Tokyo disguised as a photo of a pretty young woman they’re going to say is his sister. Perhaps the most surprising thing about the film is that Sugawa abandons his mission quite quickly and instead devotes himself to rescuing the women, vowing not to return to Tokyo without them despite the fact that this vital information he’s carrying could supposedly turn the tide of the war.

Even so, this manly chivalry defines his code of heroism. He is constantly trying to escape and defiantly stands up both to the captain of the tugboat, who is not actually in charge, but also to the pirate captain (Tetsuro Tanba) who doesn’t really seem to be doing much of anything. Among the crew of pirates is a Japanese man who later confirms that he’s a deserter but alternately switches sides, first offering to team up with Sugawa because he’s fed up with the discrimination he faces from the other pirates, and then betraying him before doing the same thing again but claiming that he feels bad about deserting and wants to do something for Japan now that his Japaneseness has been truly awoken.

It was indeed other Japanese people who were operating the slave ship, chief of them being the Queen (Yoko Mihara) who rules the boat with an iron hand but then uses her sex appeal to curry favour with the pirate captain while simultaneously developing feelings for Sugawa who is equally drawn to a meek young woman, Rumi (Utako Mitsuya), who was tricked onto the boat on the promise of a nursing job in Manchuria. Most of the other women, few of whom are actually given any characterisation, are established sex workers and resolved to their fates but all feel bad for and protective of Rumi. Though she’s the one Sugawa is closest to, it’s quite refreshing that the women are otherwise treated as equals rather than looked down on because of their occupation with Sugawa insistent on rescuing them all before they can be sold in Shanghai. 

As is usual for these kinds of films, the chief villain is Chin (Shuji Kawabe), a Chinese man apparently with ties to the Americans who has somehow found out about the radar plans, even knowing that they’re presented on a photo of a woman, and wants to capture Sugawa to get his hands on them. The bounty causes a rift between the pirate captain and Chin with the pirate captain wanting in on the deal and Chin not really willing to share, though there is a clear implication that these mercenary pirates are on the wrong the side in working with the Chinese and Americans while the slave ship was more on the level of not being okay but definitely not as bad. 

In any case, it comes down to a battle of masculinity between the monkey-loving pirate captain and his trusty whip, and Sugawa’s good old-fashioned chivalry. Surprisingly chaste given its racy title, even the pirates are more of the drunken and lascivious type than violent and rapacious, the film has a rather odd sensibility landing somewhere between jungle adventure and wartime escapade in which an earnest young man bravely carries the weight of the nation on his shoulders while doing his best to address a more immediate threat and rescue 12 captive women from the evils of Japan’s imperialist expansion. 

Original trailer (no subtitiles)

Volunteering for Villainy (悪人志願, Tsutomu Tamura, 1960)

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Tamotsu Tamura is best known as a screenwriter who worked closely with Nagisa Oshima, though he did actually direct a film himself at the beginning of his career. Having originally planned to become a reporter, Tamura was offered a job at Sankei Shimbun but his employment was postponed for medical reasons and he decided to retake the entrance exam for Shochiku joining the studio in 1955. Unfortunately Volunteering for Villainy (悪人志願, Akunin Shigan, AKA The Samurai Vagabonds) was not successful at the box office and Tamura soon left Shochiku along with Oshima and became a screenwriter at his independent production company. 

In any case, the film is very reminiscent of New Wave filmmaking both in terms of theme and aesthetic. It repurposes a moribund quarry town as an almost literal purgatorial space casting the protagonists into a deep hole from which they are eternally unable to escape. As the film opens, a collection of children are taunting a young woman, Hide (Kayoko Hono), calling her a murderer and castigating her for failing to die, though it later transpires that they’ve been hired by a henchmen of Tatsuo (Masahiko Tsugawa), the brother of the man she was involved in double suicide with who is determined to become some kind of local dictator.

But even he is in some ways rebelling against his powerlessness as the son of a local politician he brands as phoney and corrupt. Tatsuo claims he hates people who claim to be good but aren’t, in much the same way as Hide claims she can no longer trust anyone. Tatsuo seems to want revenge for the death of his brother for which he holds Hide responsible but insists he doesn’t want to settle it with money nor is he in favour when a shady local man makes vague allusions to having her bumped off.

When a new recruit, Yasuo (Fumio Watanabe), joins the quarry he becomes its latest kicking bag not least because it was Hide who escorted him into town. Yasuo has a stammer and incredibly meek manner that leans towards obsequiousness. “You’re as obedient as a dog,” people often remark with Tatsuo later astutely observing that he’s the sort of person who can’t do anything without someone telling him to do it. Yet it later seems as if his desire to obey, to be liked and accepted by those around him, has led him to commit a terrible crime claiming that he only did what everybody wanted done even if they were too afraid to say so.

Ashamed of himself and his corrupted masculinity Yasuo alternately rebels and overcompensates. He refuses to hit Hide when ordered to by Tatsuo, and to sleep with her when forced by the other men, but later hits and sleeps with her possibly not quite consensually when his masculinity is challenged. The irony is that Tatsuo who claimed he wouldn’t tolerate anyone defying him cannot control Hide’s free spirit and is therefore unable to overcome his powerlessness. He bullies and harasses her insisting that she leave town, but Hide refuses to go and is continually unbothered by the way she’s treated. Hide also eventually rejects Yasuo for his cowardice, severing her ties to him on realising that he informed on one of the other men who was fugitive from justice to curry favour with Tatsuo and take the heat off himself. She tells Tatsuo that though he’s always wanted things his own way, she’s always decided for herself, infuriating him with her free decision to leave having realised how petty and meaningless it was to stay in this petty and meaningless purgatory of broken and hopeless men. 

Tamura shoots with a roving and curious camera that takes on a life of its own swooping through the dorms but lends a degree of mythic eeriness to the final confrontation in the quarry as the workers begin to dot the skyline looking down at Hide below in a scene somehow reminiscent of L’Avventura. The town’s only bright spot is presented by Tatsuo’s younger sister Kiyoko (Chiaki Tsukioka) as the voice of reason even as she  brands everything boring and meaningless but thereby suggesting that it might not have to be this way. Her words, however, fall on largely deaf ears save those of Hide perhaps finally awake to her own agency only to have it immediately crushed by fragile masculinity.

The Sands of Kurobe (黒部の太陽, Kei Kumai, 1968)

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Kei Kumai’s three-hour epic of human engineering The Sands of Kurobe (黒部の太陽, Kurobe no Taiyo) opens with a titlecard to the effect that the film testifies to the courage of the Japanese people who brought the nation back to life after the war. Partly produced by Kansai Electric Power along with the production agencies of stars Toshiro Mifune and Yujiro Ishihara, the film is therefore somewhat conflicted, part bombastic celebration of Japanese engineering skill and ambivalent critique of the wilful decision to place success above all else including the welfare and safety of ordinary workers.

This critique is most evident to the flashbacks to the construction of Kuro 3 in 1938 which as many point out was conducted by the military under brutal and primitive conditions. The construction of the new Kurobe hydroelectric dam, by contrast, is a much more modern, enlightened affair in which workers have proper equipment and are not simply hacking at rocks with pickaxes wearing only a vest. But then as the conflicted Takeshi (Yujiro Ishihara) points out, it’s all effectively the same. Just because no one is pointing a gun at their heads, it doesn’t mean the men actually building the dam aren’t being exploited rather simply pressured by a vague notion of national good that they should be ready to lay down their lives. Could it be that “prosperity” is worse thing to die for than “patriotism”, especially when it appears as if your employer cares little for your physical wealth and economic wellbeing simply pledging that they will support the families of men killed during the dam’s construction. 

That there will be deaths seems inevitable. The man placed in charge of building a tunnel through the mountain, Kitagawa (Toshiro Mifune), is haunted by the vision of a man falling from a cliff that he witnessed when they first hiked to the dam site. He originally described the project as “crazy” and wanted to resign but was convinced to stay on. Kitagawa is himself fond of insisting on safety first where others are minded to cut corners, but also troubled by domestic issues in the film’s sometimes insensitive use of his daughter’s terminal leukaemia as a mirror for the dam project in considering what is and isn’t possible through human endeavour. The suggestion is that Kitagawa wants to believe the miracle of the dam is possible because needs to keep believing in a scientific miracle that can save his daughter, though obviously even if it is ultimately possible to build this dam that’s designed to fuel the post-war rocket to economic prosperity there are limits and unfortunately decades later we have still not found a cure for cancer though treatment may be more effective. 

Takeshi meanwhile has a similar battle with his hard-nosed father whose devotion to the dam project he describes almost like an addiction, suggesting that he values nothing outside of tunnelling and is willing to sacrifice everything in its name including the lives of himself and others. A flashback to to 1938 reveals that he asked his own teenage son to place dynamite and inadvertently caused his death though lax safety procedures which is the understandable reason why his wife eventually left him taking Takeshi with her. But the strange thing is for all his original opposition, Takeshi too is later captivated by the immensity of the challenge if also wary that the workers are falling victim to the same sickness as his father and are still being exploited by those like him who expect them to offer up their lives while paying them a pittance and complaining when the project does not proceed along their schedule. 

The almost nationalistic, bombastic quality of the film seems at odds with some of Kumai’s previous work save the discussion of the building of the 1938 tunnel though this largely serves as a contrast to imply that this time is different because they’re doing it for love of country rather the forced patriotism of the militarist past. Kitagawa justifies himself that if they don’t build the dam, economic prosperity will stall, companies will go bust, and people will lose their jobs but it seems somewhat hollow in the knowledge many men are certain to die while building this dam. Kumai undercuts the bombast with a series of scenes shot like a disaster movie in which supports collapse and the tunnel floods, or men are hit by falling rocks, eventually closing on an ironic Soviet-style statue dedicated to the labour of the workers that seems to question the immense loss of life along with the destruction of the natural beauty of Mount Kurobe but cannot in the end fully reconcile himself, torn between a celebration of human endeavour and its equally human costs. 

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Green Rain (草雨 / 초우, Chung Jin-woo, 1966)

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The false promises of the post-war era are brought home to two romantic youths dreaming of an illusionary future in Chung Jin-woo’s Green Rain (草雨 / 초우, Chou). At that time the youngest director to debut at just 25 years old with 1963’s The Only Son, Chung was a proponent of the “Cine Poem” movement which, in direct contrast to the literature film, sought to communicate through image alone minimising dialogue as much as possible. Heavily influenced by the French New Wave, particularly Godard’s Breathless and Louis Malle’s Elevator to the Gallows, Green Rain is essentially an anti-romantic melodrama in which each of the lovers deceives and is deceived only to be awakened to the final truth that romantic salvation is nothing more than a childish fantasy. 

Chung opens with an excitable sequence in which the heroine, Yeong-hui (Moon Hee), introduces us to her “home”, which is in actuality that of a diplomat who has just been appointed Ambassador to France and so is currently living in Paris. Yeong-hui had hoped that the family would take her with them, but Mrs Kim and her daughter who is suffering from an otherwise unexplained illness and uses a wheelchair, have been left behind alone and she with them. Yet Yeong-hui loves everything about the idea of Parisian sophistication, overexcited when a package arrives from abroad that turns out to contain the latest French fashions for the two Kim ladies. Yeong-hui looks on wide-eyed, but the daughter is petulant and resentful. She doesn’t want her father’s presents and views them as insensitive because it’s not like she has anywhere to show off nice clothes when she’s stuck at home ill. The two women debate giving the clothes away but can’t decide who best to give them to before Mrs. Kim casually offers Yeong-hui the stylish raincoat which is in its own way about to change her life. 

As she later puts it, putting on the raincoat turns her into someone else. She waits eagerly for a rainy day and steps into a hip jazz club, somewhere she wouldn’t usually go, where she attracts instant attention precisely because of the coat. The women look on with scorn, noting the mismatch between the coat and the rest of her appearance, while the men swarm on her unpleasantly. Luckily, Cheol-su (Shin Seong-il) comes to her rescue and offers to drive her home believing that Yeong-hui is the ambassador’s daughter while she fails to disabuse him. He meanwhile tells her he’s a chaebol son, but really he’s a mechanic and sometime university student currently in a compensated relationship with a stylish older woman who we later learn to be some kind of gang leader. 

They fool themselves into thinking they’re falling in love, deceiving themselves as well as each other in playing at innocent romance. They meet every time it rains and go on charmingly innocent dates to parks and boating lakes shot with a dreamy romanticism, but also, in contrast to Barefooted Youth, indulge in stereotypically “low” forms of entertainment such as boxing and horse races without ever managing to blow their covers as they simultaneously both pretend to like Tchaikovsky because they’re trying to live up to an image of upperclass sophistication. 

Yet, there are cracks in their connection. They talk idly of the kind of future they’ll have with Cheol-su wanting an “enormous concrete home” while Yeong-hui claims she’s fine with somewhere small so long as there’s sunlight because she wants her life to be “real, not for show”. It’s an ironic statement under the circumstances, one which is perhaps brought home to her by the otherwise kindly old washerwoman across the way who is forever complaining about her “fake” coal that won’t light and moans about “fakes passing themselves off as the real thing”. Yet she continues to believe in her fairytale romance with Cheol-su, even while declaring it to seem “like a dream”, terrified that he’ll find out she’s just a maid and leave her. He, meanwhile, is less invested in the idea of romantic love, describing her first as a “business opportunity”. On their first meeting he finishes with the older woman, drops out of the “third class uni” he thinks is more trouble than it’s worth, and continues to push his luck with his boss by repeatedly “borrowing” customers’ cars because he thinks he’s on to a sure thing with the ambassador’s daughter and no longer needs to worry about keeping the job. He presses his friends for money, pawns everything he can get his hands on, buys a fancy suit and tries to convince Yeong-hui he’s upperclass only to be pushed into a corner when she declares she wants fancy crockery in her simple home. To get his dream life, Cheol-su commits a robbery only to be surrounded by an angry mob a la Bicycle Theives and receives the first of many beatings. 

This sense of frustrated humiliation might explain the unexpectedly traumatic closing scenes which contrast so strongly with gentle romanticism with which the film opened. Cheol-su risked everything for a mistaken ideal and he’s failed. He realises Yeong-hui has been deceiving him too, but rather than a cute romantic resolution that returns them both to the grounding of their original social class, he reacts with hypocritical rage and anger. Yeong-hui reemphasises that she loves him anyway, clinging fast to her dream of love, but he ruins her, consumed by toxic masculinity in his sense of hopelessness and inferiority as a working class man with no prospect of improvement now that his dream of marrying up has dissolved. In another film he might be the hero, reinforcing duplicitous ideals of societal misogyny, but in this one he is the fool and the villain. “Without an ounce of sorrow I understood what it was to be a woman” Yeong-hui adds bitterly, finally understanding her romantic fallacy for what it was, learning a painful lesson in naivety and self-deception and striding boldly back to her old life, wiser if perhaps less hopeful whereas Cheol-su runs away still chasing an easy fix to a more prosperous future. At once a criticism of the increasingly consumerist society, its deeply entrenched social inequalities, and its patriarchal social codes, Green Rain is most of all an anti-romantic melodrama in which love is nothing more than childish fantasy incapable of offering salvation in a world of constant impossibility. 

The Magic Serpent (怪竜大決戦, Tetsuya Yamanouchi, 1966)

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Something of an oddity, Tetsuya Yamanouchi’s The Magic Serpent (怪竜大決戦, Kairyu daikessen) puts a tokusatsu spin on the classic ninja movie in a jidaigeki tale of revenge that ends ultimately in revolution rather than the restoration of the feudal order. A big screen monster movie from Toei, the film was released around the same time as the studio embarked on its signature line of tokusatsu serials such as Captain Ultra which aired the following year.

Drawing inspiration from the Tale of Jiraiya, the hero Ikazuchimaru (Hiroki Matsukata) later even giving himself Jiraiya’s name and indeed riding a giant toad, The Magic Serpent nevertheless seems to have been influenced by contemporary wuxia films from Hong Kong and Taiwan right down to the appearance of martial arts master with a flowing white beard and a distinctly philosophical way of speaking. At one point, Ikazuchimaru even rides an animated cloud much like the Monkey King in Journey to the West.

In any case, set in the pre-Edo feudal era the revenge tale revolves around treacherous lords as the ambitious Yuki Daijo (Bin Amatsu) teams up with evil ninja Orochimaru (Ryutaro Otomo) to kill his master, Ogata, and take over his castle. Daijo orders that Ogata’s son, Ikazuchimaru, be murdered so that he won’t cause them any problems in the future but the boy is rescued by a servant and makes his escape at which point Orochimaru transforms into a giant dragon and capsizes his boat. Luckily, a giant bird then arrives and pecks Orochimaru on the nose, rescuing Ikazuchimaru and taking him to the mountain retreat of ninja master Goma Douji (Nobuo Kaneko) where he trains for 14 years in preparation for his revenge.

To this point, it might be said that the corruption is to the feudal era rather than of it though through his travels Ikazuchimaru comes to see how the ordinary people suffer as a result of Yuki Daijo’s oppressive rule. He comes to the rescue of a small family who in turn help him to overcome Yuki Daijo’s checkpoints as they search for him having become aware that he has survived and is intent on his revenge. But unbeknownst to him, Orochimaru is also potting to exploit the threat posed by Ikazuchimaru by stealing his identity to oust Yuki Daijo and take over the castle himself as its “rightful” heir.

Meanwhile, Ichikazu meets his opposite number, Tsunade (Tomoko Ogawa), who is searching for a father she has never met and can identify only by a keepsake from her now departed mother. In a shocking turn of events, it transpires that her grandmother is also a ninja master and gives her a magic hairpin she can use to call for help. Both searching for their birthright, the two eventually wind up at the castle and a confrontation with a corrupted feudalism. The surprising thing is in this case that Ikazuchimaru rejects his place as the heir and declines to rebuild the clan. With the castle now destroyed by the fight between his giant toad, Ochimaru’s dragon, and a mystery third party, the feudal order itself has been ruined. “There are only beautiful fields for you farmers left to create,” he tells the surviving members of the family that helped him. “Stay healthy and cultivate great lands.” He leaves with Tsunade, who is returning to her grandmother, and vows to travel to the place where his master lies or symbolically to the place of his spiritual rather than biological father.

Yamanouchi went on to work more in television than movies, apparently a devotee of period drama in both his personal and professional lives yet, makes fantastic use of special effects on an otherwise limited budget even briefly switching to black and white when the ghosts of Ikazuchimaru’s murdered parents appear to torment the usurping Yuki Daijo. Thunder, lightning, and ninja tricks mix seamlessly with tokusatsu action as the giant monsters finally approach their showdown yet perhaps in keeping with the surprisingly progressive outcome Ikazuchimaru struggles against the evil powers of Orochimaru and in the end cannot win alone but only with the help of those around him as they rise to challenge not only Orochimaru’s evil subversion of morals both feudal and spiritual in his betrayal of his master, but the evils of the feudal order itself and finally free themselves from its oppressive yoke.

The Starting Point (원점, Lee Man-hee, 1967)

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A hired thug and a sex worker dreaming of a new life are set on a collision course at mountain retreat in Lee Man-hee’s noirish thriller, Starting Point (원점, Wonjeom). A melancholy existential drama, the film nevertheless has a darkly comic absurdity and becomes for a time almost a satire of changing sexual mores and the anxiety surrounding the post-war population explosion while simultaneously hinting at corporate corruption in economically straitened times. 

Played in near total silence, the opening pre-credits scenes find the otherwise unnamed (the name given in the promotional material is never spoken) lackey (Shin Seong-il) raiding an office building with the intention of retrieving some mysterious documents the people who hire him later claim threaten to expose their “seven-year-secret”. The Lackey takes time to smoke a cigarette and read through some of the papers before putting them into a briefcase to make his escape but is soon met by a man with a rifle who challenges him. A fight ensues on the staircase from which the Lackey is able to escape, activating a rolling gate to get out of the building. But the other man keeps coming after him, managing to cling on the briefcase while his neck is crushed by the unstoppable motion of the shutter. 

Mirroring him, the unnamed Sex Worker (Moon Hee) is also intruded in a wordless sequence shot with the kind of realism seen in American independent and European arthouse cinema as she stares forlornly at the pretty dresses behind the glass in a small boutique before sadly making her way towards a streetlight near the Choseon Hotel where she wordlessly picks up a customer through suggestive looks and gestures. 

The Lackey knows too much, which is why his bosses want to take him out but for unclear reasons Mr Choi comes up with a bizarre and convoluted scheme which involves hiring the Sex Worker to pose as the Lackey’s wife during a honeymoon getaway to Mt. Seorak. What the Lackey thinks is going on or why the mountain is important is never really explained just like the nature of the seven-year-secret, but once there the film changes tack becoming a kind of ensemble mystery as the various guests each become suspicious of one another while the Lackey and the Sex Worker slowly fall in love for real perhaps bonding their mutual sense of existential peril and outsider status. 

In the liminal space of the mountain, both fear rejection by those around them who come to represent mainstream society, the Lackey because he has killed and Sex Worker because of her profession. Ironically, one of the other guests is a dodgy gynaecologist who makes a point of saying that most of his clients are sex workers from around the Choseon Hotel at least implying that he regularly performs abortions. He recognises the Sex Worker as a previous patient and tries to take advantage of her sexually but commits a breach of medical ethics by leaking her profession to the rest of the group who then shun her. When the planned camping trip encounters a snag seeing as only two tents have been provided and the obvious solution is for men to take one and the women the other, the women all immediately leave on the Sex Worker’s arrival refusing a share a space with a “fallen woman” in case they are somehow tainted by her shame. 

But then, the goings on at the mountain inn are strange in themselves. A middle-aged man who inexplicably doesn’t seem to have encountered a transistor radio before accidentally tunes into a news broadcast discussing the effectiveness of the contraceptive pill while the young people dance with wild abandon to music they don’t really understand. Meanwhile, the gynaecologist wades in when another of the women experiences terrible stomach pains insisting that he is “familiar with women’s issues” and informs the husband that his wife is pregnant which is confuses him because they only married the day before and he’s been a good boy so the news is perplexing. He spends the rest of the film counting dates on his fingers and at one point attempts to hang himself certain that his wife must have slept with another man before their wedding instead of maybe considering that the dodgy gynaecologist may be mistaken.  

When the couples are divided into separate tents, one guest quips that it’ll be good for keeping the birth rate down hinting at an anxiety about a new sexual freedom among the young coupled with the impact of the ongoing baby boom and its economic implications. The gynaecologist’s wife is the first to join in with the youngsters, but she’s also a rabid penny pincher making sure the newlywed husband pays for her husband’s treatment of his wife while intensely jealous constantly trying to keep the randy doctor’s attention off the other women. The sense of economic anxiety is echoed in the Sex Worker’s melancholy longing onto looking into the shop window while dreaming of opening her own hair salon though sex work is the only way she can support herself and leaves her with intense shame that like the Lackey exiles her from mainstream society. 

As she says while embracing her covert identity as a cheerful newlywed, she’s been looking up all her life and would like to look down for once which she ironically does atop the stairway on which the Lackey fights his existential battle with Choi and his minions. They each want to find a way to get off the mountain and return to the world, but are prevented from doing so by the forces that pursue them and will not let them go. Finally questioned, the Sex Worker is forced to admit that she knows nothing about the Lackey, not his name or where he lived or what he did for a living, only that he did not hate her which is as close to a declaration of love as it might be possible to get in this cold and dark world of exploitation and violence. Lee films with a noirish intensity and melancholy fatalism as the pair attempt to fight back against the forces which constrain them with the pureness of their love but later discover that, as they feared, all that is left to them are painful memories of momentary happiness.