Tag: 1961

Procurer of Hell (地獄の饗宴, Kihachi Okamoto, 1961)

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By 1961, the Japanese economy had largely recovered and the nation was emerging into an era of rising prosperity, but there were also those who were left behind or could progress into the new Japan. Shot with Okamaoto’s trademark irony, Procurer of Hell (地獄の饗宴, Jigoku no Kyoen) is a darkly comic tale of one such man who could have quit while he was ahead and started a new life if only he hadn’t been so greedy or perhaps so hung up on revenge. 

In a sign of the newly international society, Tobe (Tatsuya Mihashi) runs a shady business that claims to provide “English lessons” with blonde women are that are in reality appointments with sex workers. He also peddles pornographic images and dabbles in blackmail. When he finds a roll of film at the station, he gets it developed and discovers it contains photographs of his sergeant during the war, Itami (Jun Tazaki), who raped the Chinese woman he wanted to marry back in Manchuria. Tobe was unable to help her after getting his hand impaled on a tree branch from which he could not free himself. The scar he still bears on his hand is a mark of his corruption and a reminder of the moment which seems to have soured him on humanity and turned him into a cynical and amoral man. He decides to use the photographs to torment and blackmail Itami to get the money to help a widowed single mother he’s interested in secure a better future for herself by taking over a coffee shop from the owner who plans to retire.

As such, he does it for “good” reasons and Kazuko (Junko Ikeuchi) and her son Saburo represent for him a better future in the new Japan in which he would own a photo studio and live a law-abiding life. Saeko (Reiko Dan), Itami’s secretary with whom he was also having an extra-marital affair, is in other ways his opposite number and the representative of the dark side to which Tobe is drawn. Like him, she tries to play the situation to her advantage by playing the innocent before finally throwing her lot in with Tobe and suggesting he help her double-cross Itami so they can run off with the money he embezzled from his company before faking his own death in a convenient train crash. That Tobe extracts sexual favours from Saeko in return for giving her the photos and negatives interferes with the supposed nobility of his quest and apparently pure-hearted love for Kazuko and her little boy, while Saeko gradually shifts from exploited victim to calculating conspirator manipulating Tobe just as he believes himself to be manipulating her.

In any case, it remains true that he could have just settled for the money he needed for the cafe and walked away from this overly complicated situation involving Itami’s legal wife and associates who have actually embezzled the money and want the pictures back because they need Itami to be dead for their plan to work, but he doesn’t. He becomes fixated on getting his fair share of the ill-gotten gains much more than helping Kazuko or getting his revenge against Itami, which wasn’t really much of a revenge anyway considering what Itami had actually done during the war. But on the other hand, Itami seems to have become a rather powerless figure having married into his wife’s family to work in their business while she plots to have him confined to a psychiatric hospital to keep him out of her way. Saeko too is manipulating him. She has no real feelings for Itami and only wants the money, masterminding this whole scheme to get her hands on it with no intention of fleeing abroad with him. Similarly, she plays the victim with Tobe, telling him that Itami paid for her brother’s school fees and that she wants the photos back to avoid her brother or Mrs Itami finding out it about it and feeling hurt.

But while they’re fixating on the 150 million yen embezzled from the business, there are crowds of angry people turning up at the building society Itami runs complaining that their savings have disappeared and wanting to know if they’re going to get the houses they’ve been promised. Tobe walks through the May Day protests calling for better working conditions and higher wages, pointing to the ways this society is still veering off course in deliberately leaving some-people behind by rooting the new economic prosperity in exploitation. Tobe’s assistant wants to join the protest, but Tobe tells him they don’t really belong with the workers because of their nature of their business. The blackmail scam is his revenge not only on Itami but on everything that’s happened to him since the war and this ridiculous post-war society that he nevertheless hopes to join through these immoral means. The song of the canary he buys for Saburo begins to haunt him as a symbol of the wholesome life he might lead, but that life cannot really be won that way. He and Saeko are really two of a kind, she apparently brought low by her unexpectedly genuine feelings for him as even the police, picking him up for something else, leave them bleeding in the street surrounded only by emptiness and futility mere feet from the hospital in their own relentless pursuit of the “real” criminals.

That Guy and I (あいつと私, Ko Nakahira, 1961)

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Likely intended as a slightly silly student rom-com, Ko Nakahira’s That Guy and I (あいつと私, Aitsu to Watashi) captures a sense of the changing gender roles and sexual mores of the early 1960s, if through a very male and at times even middle-aged lens. Adapted from a serialised novel by Yojiro Ishizaka and set amid the ANPO protests of 1960, the film is narrated by its heroine, a very ordinary young woman from a typical, moderately wealthy middle-class family, as she struggles with her attraction to a fabulously wealthy young man who pretends to be a boor but is actually a nice guy and unexpected feminist.

One of a new generation of women attending university with a prospect of independence, Keiko’s (Izumi Ashikawa) horizons seem to be broadening. She’s not exactly conservative and openly jokes about sex and dating with her friends, but is quite settled with her life, not particularly wanting anything more than she already has. Her psychology tutor highlights the problem of social inequality in their school that she had already raised in her opening voiceover in remarking that the rich kids all have cars and can drive themselves to school, while others are having to work to support themselves while they study. When he asks how much pocket money they all get, some are outraged and keen to stress they don’t get any help at all, but Keiko reveals that her parents actually give her a healthy allowance. It’s just that she has no real urge to spend it, so it’s been mounting up quietly in a desk drawer in her childhood bedroom while she still lives at home close to the university.

Saburo (Yujiro Ishihara), by contrast, boasts that he gets more than some people’s monthly wage as an allowance from his mother and blows it on drink, gambling, strip clubs and sex workers. It’s this last point that scandalises the female students who are all shocked and disapproving, even going so far as to ask the teacher to throw Saburo out because they don’t feel comfortable sharing a space with a man like that. The teacher also says he’s disappointed and wishes Saburo hadn’t added the last bit, only for Saburo to call him a hypocrite because sex work was legal in his day and he simply doesn’t believe that he’s never paid for sex. Most of the other boys join in on Saburo’s side, insisting that no man sees any problem with visiting sex workers which they regard as a natural right because the male sex drive is driven by “uncontrollable forces”.

But then there’s something unexpected that occurs among the female students in that some of them are obviously attracted by this very rough form of masculinity. “I’d rather have a wild beast than a meek sheep,” one intones, but nevertheless goes to join the group of girls confronting Saburo at the pool in the hope of gaining an apology for the offence he caused them. They’ve since found out that he probably made it up anyway, which is ironic because he claimed he’d only spoken the truth when they asked him to leave, but that’s somehow even worse because it means he said it deliberately to upset them. The upshot of it all is that Saburo ends up in the pool and is then forced to borrow some of the girls’ clothes while his dry off, signalling his awkward positioning between traditional masculinity and femininity in that he’s otherwise surprisingly sympathetic of women and makes sure to look out for them but in a way that encourages their independence and is never patronising. 

That might, in one way, be because of his unusual upbringing which is far more modern and bohemian than Keiko’s and in the beginning, at least, quite confusing for her. Saburo’s mother Motoko (Yukiko Todoroki) is a famous entrepreneur with a beauty shop empire. She writes her name in Western order and uses katakana for her first name which makes look foreign and therefore exciting and sophisticated even though it obviously isn’t. It was Saburo’s mild-mannered father who gave up his career in insurance to raise him, while his mother apparently blows off steam through numerous affairs. His father occasionally gets upset about this and the pair go through a charade of him leaving her while she professes her love for him, which seems to have a sexual dimension in itself. Perhaps this has given Saburo an alternative view of romantic relationships, though we also later discover that he was subject to what we’d now see as a form of sexual abuse as a teenager when his mother got a young but still adult woman, Michiko (Misako Watanabe), to essentially give him practical lessons in sex and satisfy his teenage urges, only he thought it was an organic romantic relationship and feels more than anything else emotionally betrayed. 

But then again, the film has a very of its time and defiantly male view of rape which is dealt with in a fairly flippant manner. Keiko rings her mother to tell her she’s realised that the reason she didn’t like the idea of her being at the ANPO protests was because she feared she’d be raped, which is at any rate an odd conversation to be having. Her mother asks her what her virginity has to do with ANPO, which is a fair question, but also implies that it’s not so much the physical and psychological harm of sexual assault that bothers her mother but the shame of premarital sex. One of the girls who goes to the protest, Ayako (Shigako Shimegi), is actually raped by the two boys she went with who deliberately plied her with alcohol and took her to a hotel knowing that she trusted them, but her roommate, who had a crush on one of the boys, immediately turns against her. Sadako (Kazuko Yoshiyuki), the most political of the students, calls her a slut who parades herself in front of men and says Ayako must have led them on. Only Keiko takes her side, walking her to the bath and waiting outside for her while admitting that she has conflicted thoughts about Saburo. She throws things at him to shoo him away, feeling that his presence as a man is inappropriate and not wanting him to see Ayako in this moment of vulnerability, but also she admits to herself because she’d be jealous and doesn’t want him to see a naked woman that isn’t her.

Something similar happens when she finds out about Saburo’s past and is jealous and resentful of Michiko, irrationally angry with Saburo, and on another level protective of him knowing that happened when he was a teenager was wrong. After she runs out into the rain and the pair argue about it, Saburo forces a kiss on her which, again, Keiko seems like in a show of robust manliness. Saburo is though also protective and sympathetic towards Ayako, insisting that that the way for her to move past her rape is to ensure she becomes financially independent and successful so that she can see it as just something unpleasant that happened to her rather than something that ruined her life or makes her unworthy of another man’s love. He even helps her to do that by getting her a job at his mother’s company. 

Saburo’s mother Motoko, meanwhile, gives Keiko some frank advice in disclosing the secrets of her life and Saburo’s birth. Even when Saburo suddenly announces their engagement without actually asking her, Keiko does not merely swoon but reflects that she’s got to have a proper think before actually agreeing which she is still free to do or not. Nevertheless, the film seems to have hit on a contradiction in redefining masculinity as both tough and soft. Keiko is despite herself attracted to Saburo’s forcefulness, but also his chivalrous nature and awkward kindness, his fair-mindedness and care, and recognition of women as actual human beings with interior lives and a right to independence. Nakahira may be a little less surreal than usual, but leans heavily into absurdity, on the one hand acknowledging the somewhat superficial quality of these privileged students’ lives in having them confront a band of angry rural workers and half-heartedly take part in the ANPO demonstrations without much thought to what they’re for or what they mean, but, in the end, characterises them as merely ordinary, slightly lost amid the rapid changes of the post-war society but otherwise cheerful and looking ahead to a bright future stretching out in front of them.

Trailer (no subtitles)

A Good Man, A Good Day (好人好日, Minoru Shibuya, 1961)

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It’s funny, in a way, that life can hold so much goodness in it even with an underlying, barely visible melancholy. Goodness does indeed breed goodness for the sometimes misunderstood heroes of A Good Man, a Good Day (好人好日, Kojin Kojitsu) who struggle to adjust themselves to changing times but at the end of the day just want each other to be happy and for life to be blissfully dull and free of complication.

The obvious point of friction is that 20-something daughter Tokiko (Shima Iwashita) has had a proposal. She behaves as if it’s an arranged marriage, but in reality Ryuji (Yusuke Kawazu) is actually her boyfriend and the two of them have mutually decided to formalise their union but are doing things the “proper” way perhaps in part because Ryuji’s family run a 200-year-old ink shop and are intensely conservative. Though it’s Tokiko’s fuddy-duddy professor father Hitoshi (Chishu Ryu) who is often regarded as the sticking point, it’s equally Ryuji’s family and particularly his traditionalist grandmother (Tanie Kitabayashi) who isn’t sure that Tokiko is really good enough. She is however the only member of the family who thinks it’s not a big deal after discovering that Tokiko is adopted while others regard her with an increased suspicion and the prejudice often held towards orphans that they don’t want to let someone into their family whose familial lineage they don’t know.

It’s most likely for their benefit that Tokiko and Ryuji are intent on compromising by doing everything the “proper” way rather than as her mother Setsuko (Chikage Awashima) tells her just get married on their own without worrying about what anyone thinks. But in this awkward mix of tradition and modernity we can see that times have changed and Ryuji and Tokiko have decided their future for themselves. They firmly believe it will work out so they’re remaining patient, but should that patience run out they will decide to prioritise their own happiness. 

For his part, Hitoshi later says that he never actually objected to the marriage but just hates the idea of big weddings which he regards, not without reason, as stupid and pointless. In any case he warms to Ryuji when he loses his temper and calls him an “old fart,” realising that he’s a young man with a backbone and possibly worthy of Tokiko. A professor of mathematics, Hitoshi is an awkward man who doesn’t quite fit into polite society but has a good heart even if he has a funny way of showing it. When he wins an important medal from the government for his contribution to scholarship and it gets stolen, he won’t let the hotel owner report it because of his embarrassment but when the chastened thief brings it back he sends Tokiko after him with money for his train fare and a little more as a thank you. 

Still, he was probably not an easy man to live with and Setsuko’s not so secret sake habit is likely a result of the strain of dealing with him and his constant faux pas in the boredom of a rural life in which she says all she does is make pickles. But despite that, she still tells Tokiko that marriage is essential to a woman’s happiness if also encouraging her to fight for what she really wants. Tokiko is already doing just that, but has lingering doubts over her parentage and wants to know who her birth parents may have been partly out of curiosity but also a mild fear of the implications it may have. But what Hitoshi eventually tells her is that she is a war orphan which makes her a kind of everywoman and a symbol of the young, post-war generation which is making a break with the past. 

The film in fact includes a small satirical, anti-war sequence in which Hitoshi is accosted by a snooty nationalist who shouts out that he lacks “patriotism” for allowing the medal the emperor so generously gave him to be stolen. The man tells him he should face the direction of the Imperial Palace and apologise all which makes him look quite mad and paints Hitoshi as the figure of exasperated sanity. He also rejects contemporary consumerist culture in continuing to live like a student counting every last yen and rejecting the TV set Ryuji buys him because it would deprive him of going to the coffee shop to watch baseball games instead (though he does regret it later). In any case, Hitoshi’s guileless goodness does seem to ameliorate the world around him in making others, like the thief, want to live up to it as he, like Tokiko, defiantly does what he wants and though at times perhaps insensitive generally has his heart in the right place.

Invasion of the Neptune Men (宇宙快速船, Koji Ota, 1961)

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Japan was well on the way to economic recovery by 1961, but the newly prosperous society also gave rise to other anxieties and most particularly in the light of the Cold War and space race with the nation fearful of falling behind in scientific development. Or at least, that’s something that particularly bothers the young heroes of Koji Ota’s kids tokusatsu, Invasion of the Neptune Men (宇宙快速船, Uchu Kaisokusen), in which the nation’s failure to build a space rocket is conflated with its traditional visions of masculinity. 

At least, the boys all agree that Tachibana (Shinichi Chiba), a young scientist who runs a kind of club with them at the research facility where he works, is pretty great but also a bit of a wimp who failed to stand up to some bullies who were hassling him at a local cinema. They think it would be better if he were cool, re-imagining him as a kind of tokusatsu hero named “Iron Sharp” for whom they even come up with a theme song. As part of their club activities watching satellites, the kids accidentally stumble across a spaceship belonging to Neptune men who are planning to invade though obviously as they are children no one really believes them until the Neptune men start causing other forms of destruction. 

Attacked, the kids are saved by the hero they themselves made up flying in on a car/plane/spaceship though he too doesn’t really have a lot time for them and the kids don’t even really notice he looks a lot like Tachibana who is noticeably absent from the lab whenever he’s around. Even so, this being a kids film the major the problem is that no one else takes the boys very seriously, save Tachibana himself, leaving them to save the day on their own while the grown-ups argue amongst themselves. 

Getting people to argue amongst themselves turns out to be part of the aliens’ mission in exploiting Cold War paranoia to start world war three. The first attack results in a mushroom cloud which must have been fairly painful symbolism though the Americans immediately blame Russia who blame the US in return asking if they’re really intent on starting a nuclear war. The kids wonder why grownups are always so suspicious of other countries, hinting at a desire for a less xenophobic society eventually echoed in the calls for worldwide unity to defeat the Neptune men while otherwise repeatedly emphasising that Japan can’t be left behind by the US and Russia in the space race. 

Then again, there is something quite troubling in the fact that the invading Neptune men who’ve taken on human form appear as soldiers but wearing prominent feminine makeup, re-echoing the boys’ concerns regarding science and masculinity while introducing a seemingly unintentional dose of homophobia into the threat posed by the aliens who otherwise wield destructive nuclear powers echoing the atomic bomb in using their ray guns to vaporise their targets who then leave shadow imprints of themselves where they disappeared. The main weapon used to combat them is science, Tachibana and his boss, the father of one of the boys, coming up with an ingenious electric shield and then a series of magnetic rockets which allow them to shoot down the Neptunian’s ship. 

In this case, science is the “good” force that combats the “bad” use of nuclear weapons this time rendered alien rather than manmade therefore neutering the debate surrounding their use and the responsibilities involved with their discovery. Tachibana, the thinly disguised Iron Sharp, then becomes a hero of science racing round in his custom car and largely defeating the Neptunians through a more primal kind of hand to hand violence while embodying the kind of cool masculinity the boys the otherwise feared he lacked which is to say that unlike his real life guise, Iron Sharp is perfectly capable of standing up to “bullies” like extraterrestrial invaders. Reusing some of the effects footage from The Last War, the film emphasises the need for world unity and the end of the Cold War, but also sells a slightly contradictory, mildly nationalist message insisting that Japan can’t fall far behind technologically or will essentially be at the mercy of Russia and America, Tachibana having travelled to Moscow to assist with the creation of a new spaceship. Spurred on by their adventures, the kids all vow to become great inventors protecting Japan through their innovations, going on to explore Mars and Venus hinting at a new sense of possibility in the post-war society but also mindful of its geopolitical realities.

Yojimbo (用心棒, Akira Kurosawa, 1961)

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“You’re not a bad guy after all” a previously hostile inn owner later concedes, finally seeing the method in the madness of a cynical wanderer who appears to take no side but his own but may in his own way be quietly fighting for justice in a lawless place. A samurai western set in an eerie ghost town beset by feuding gangsters whose presence has destroyed the local economy and lives of the frightened townspeople, Yojimbo (用心棒) subversively suggests that the world’s absurdity is best met with nihilistic amusement and healthy dose of irony. 

When the confused hero who later gives his name as Sanjuro (Toshiro Mifune) wanders into town, he is surprised to see a stray dog running past him with a human hand in its mouth. This is indeed a dog-eat-dog society in which a petty dispute between gang members has forced the townspeople to hide behind closed doors. The streets are empty and silent until the town’s only policeman darts out and requests a “commission” for recommending Sanjuro offer his services as a bodyguard to either of the two factions suggesting that brothel owner Seibei (Seizaburo Kawazu) is on the way out and upstart Ushitora (Kyu Sazanka) is the best bet. But Sanjuro does not particularly like the look of Ushitora’s gang which as is later revealed is largely staffed by desperate disreputables, convicts, and murderers. 

Sanjuro’s response is to laugh. He makes his money by killing and there are lots of people in this town the world would be better off without. He plays each side off against the other, knowing that they each need a man of his skill to break the stalemate but is rightfully mistrustful of both. First approaching Seibei, he overhears his cynical wife Orin (Isuzu Yamada) suggesting that they agree to his high fee but kill him afterwards so his services will effectively be free. Sanjuro’s plan is to antagonise both sides so they wipe each other out, freeing the town of their destructive influence. With violence so present on the streets, the townspeople are afraid to leave their homes and the only guy making any money is the undertaker. 

The trouble also means they can’t host the local silk fair which usually stimulates the town’s economy demonstrating the counter-productivity of the gangsters’ dispute in that no silk fair means no delegates and empty gambling rooms meaning the gangsters aren’t making any money either. Yet it’s also clear that it’s gambling that has corrupted the town and is disrupting the social order. A symptom of an economical shift, gambling offers a new path to social mobility amid the fiercely hierarchal feudal society in which the possibility of distinguishing oneself in warfare has also disappeared. Thus the young man Sanjuro encounters on the way into town argues with his father, rejecting the “long life of eating gruel” of a peasant farmer claiming he wants nice clothes and good food and has chosen to burn out brightly. Kohei (Yoshio Tsuchiya), a young father has also succumbed to the false hope offered by the gambling halls and lost everything, including his wife, to a greedy sake brewer turned silk merchant and local mayor thanks to his enthusiastic backing of Ushitora. 

“I hate guys like that” Sanjuro snarls, but it seems he also hates petty gangsters and everything they represent. “This town will be quiet now” he remarks before leaving, as if stating that his work here is done and the real purpose of it was clearing out the source of the corruption rather than taking advantage of the town’s plight for his own material gain. Yojimbo quite literally means bodyguard and is the service Sanjuro offers to each side interchangeably, but Sanjuro isn’t above betraying his clients or playing one off against the other. His final foe, Ushitora’s brooding brother Unosuke (Tatsuya Nakadai), wanders around with a pistol in his kimono as if to say the age of wandering swordsmen has come to an end but in the end is exposed as complacent in his superior technology, easily neutered by Sanjuro who even gives the gun back to him as if no longer caring whether he lives or dies merely amused to find out the answer much as he had been standing on a bell tower watching the factions pointlessly tussling below. Masaru Sato’s surprisingly cheerful score seems to echo his state of mind, seeing only humour in the absurdities of the feudal order and the futility of violence while Kurosawa’s camera roves around this windswept wasteland as Sajuro kicks the gates of hell shut and prepares to move on to the next crisis in a seemingly lawless society.

Yojimbo screens at the BFI Southbank, London on 18th & 23rd February 2023 as part of the Kurosawa season.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

The End of Summer (小早川家の秋, Yasujiro Ozu, 1961)

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Fathers in Ozu are usually sentimental and doting, sometimes insensitive or austere, but by and large responsible. The crises the family faces are generally emotional more than they are practical, few Ozu fathers fail in a duty of care towards their wives and children. And then, there’s Manbei (Ganjiro Nakamura). The hero of Ozu’s penultimate film, The End of Summer (小早川家の秋, Kohayagawa-ke no Aki), is quite the opposite. He does as he pleases and enjoys his life to the fullest without really noticing the effect his behaviour has those around him. But then, as his sister later puts it, he was a very happy man which is rare thing in this society so perhaps he had something right after all. 

Produced for Toho and set in Osaka rather than the usual Shochiku and Tokyo, the film opens not with Manbei but with his brother-in-law Kitagawa (Daisuke Kato) trying to set up Manbei’s widowed daughter-in-law Akiko (Setsuko Hara) with a widowed industrialist obsessed with cows. Meanwhile, the family is also trying to find a match for his youngest daughter, Noriko (Yoko Tsukasa), who is put off by the whole idea of an arranged marriage and worried that Manbei and her older sister Fumiko (Michiyo Aratama) may try to pressure her into accepting because their family sake brewery is trouble. Fumiko’s husband Hisao (Keiju Kobayashi) is technically running the brewery and favours a merger to save the business but Manbei is resistant. Manbei himself is largely absent and his increasing habit of skipping out during the day is beginning to worry the family, especially when they discover he’s been visiting an old mistress with a 21-year-old daughter he thinks is his. 

Followed to a cafe, Manbei exclaims that summer refuses to end in an accidental metaphor for his life. For him everything is sunshine and rainbows, scuttling away from the family home like a little boy sneaking out after dark while the now grownup kids are left behind to clean up his messes. Manbei is a widower, and aside from the financial dimension, perhaps it’s not a huge problem if he wants to go and hang out with an old flame, but Fumiko in particular is scandalised remembering the various humiliations he put her late mother through when she was just a child. Hisao advises her that perhaps it’s best not to bring it up. Manbei isn’t going to change his behaviour and it’s only going to create more drama whereas it might be more manageable if they all pretend not know. Fumiko, however, can’t stay silent even if she knows her father isn’t going to listen to her and in fact lies quite baldly about what he’s been doing in Kyoto. 

Fumiko is on the side of marrying Noriko off, but unlike her husband, father, and uncle, is keen to emphasise that they should move slowly and be sure to take her feelings into account. Rather than her sister, Noriko turns to Akiko for support. Originally in favour of meeting the prospective husband, after all you can always turn it down if you don’t like him, she cautions Noriko that the most important thing is character rather than behaviour and that it’s essential to marry without regret. Noriko feels as if she’s obliged to do as everyone says, but is secretly in love with a young man she met on a skiing holiday who has just been transferred to Sapporo. Akiko, meanwhile, was not altogether taken with the cow-loving widower, but in any case would prefer to maintain her present way of life as a single mother even while others pressure her to remarry. 

The conclusion Noriko comes to is, perhaps strangely, inspired by her carefree father in that she decides it’s best to do what will make her the most happy rather than simply going along with what everyone else wants her to do which may or may not be in her best interest. Fumiko grudgingly admits that though her father was often exasperating perhaps he was the only thing holding the family together. Ozu broadly lends the irresponsible but never malicious Manbei tacit approval in celebrating the fact that he lived the life he wanted to live and he was at least defiantly happy in his own eternal summer, but then ends on an uncharacteristically morbid note as two farmers wash vegetables in the river opposite a crematorium remarking on the increasing number of crows while resigning themselves to the cycle of life. Smoke and crows await us all, perhaps Manbei had it right and the thing is to be happy while you can without taking much notice of what others might have to say about it. 

The Fantasy of Deer Warrior (大俠梅花鹿, Chang Ying, 1961)

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A fearless warrior’s solipsistic priorities and obsession with male pride begin to endanger his community in Chang Ying’s incredibly bizarre Taiwanese-language forest fable, The Fantasy of Deer Warrior (大俠梅花鹿). Seemingly aimed at children with its series of moral messages and anthropomorphised animal characters, Chang’s drama is surprisingly violent not to mention a little on the raunchy side for a family film while ending on a note entirely at odds with the prevailing wisdom of children’s cinema as the righteous hero takes bloody revenge on his bound and defenceless enemies but is nevertheless embraced by his innocent love interest for having brought “justice” back to the forest. 

Opening with a surreal scene of children in animal outfits dancing to jingle bells in the middle of the forest, the cheerful atmosphere is soon disrupted by an incursion of “wolves” carrying nailed bats. An emissary is dispatched to fetch “Sika Deer” (Ling Yun), the forest’s most fearsome warrior, but he is busy having fight with love rival Elk (Li Min-Lang) over the beautiful “Miss Deer” (Pai Hung) who according to the mischievous Foxy (Lin Lin) has been kind of dating both of them. Foxy is incredibly jealous of Miss Deer and stirs the pot by suggesting that Elk and Sika Deer continue in a formal duel with the winner taking Miss Deer’s heart. Shockingly this is what they do and Sika Deer wins only to be immediately called away to the wolf attack, discover his father is already dead, and decide the best thing to do is not see Miss Deer again until he’s finished avenging his father’s death by killing Bloody Wolf. 

As you can see, Sika Deer has his priorities all wrong. First of all, he was off pointlessly fighting Elk while his family were eaten by wolves, then he decides to take the manly path by leaving Miss Deer alone and vulnerable not to mention his community largely defenceless. Later he does something similar when Miss Deer is kidnapped, stopping to lock horns with his love rival rather than devoting all their resources to tracking Bloody Wolf and saving Miss Deer. He does belatedly think to send her a letter explaining he’s busy with important revenge business and will call her later which foils Foxy’s plan to convince her he’s dead so she’ll date Elk instead (unclear why she wants this) but the fact remains that he basically just abandons everyone to selfishly pursue his own revenge ironically leaving the village vulnerable to attack.

Despite this and being absent for most of the picture, Sika Deer is still held up as the hero even when he marches Bloody Woolf and minion to his father’s grave and executes them with surprising violence while they are bound and gagged. Where most children’s films would end with some kind of forgiveness, a restoration of the forest’s harmony brokered by the hero’s magnanimity which in itself causes the villains to reform, Deer Warrior ends with quite the reverse which would seem to run contrary to most of the other moral messages presented throughout the film. 

Then again, “There is no justice in this world” Miss Deer is told on appealing first to a tree and then an elderly buffalo for a moral judgement on whether or not the wolf should be allowed to eat her even though she saved his life. As the tree points out, people took shelter under him but then they cut him down for firewood, while the buffalo complains that he’s been exploited all his life but as soon as he’s too old to work he’ll be killed and eaten. Miss Deer’s moral conundrum is as to whether a kindness ought to be repaid, convinced that Bloody Wolf is in the wrong for wanting to eat her and should let her go to repay the kindness of her saving his life. But Bloody Woolf is a wolf which is to say a creature without morals the only surprising thing being that he patiently waits while she makes all her petitions rather than just eating her as he pleases. Even so, the film seems to say not so much that Miss Deer is at fault for her innocent naivety in having trusted a wolf, but the world itself is wrong because one should never suffer for having been kind to another for kindness should always be repaid. 

Mildly critical as it is of an increasingly selfish society in which justice has become a casualty of increasing economic prosperity, Fantasy of Deer Warrior nevertheless ends on an uncomfortable note with the hero essentially delivering justice as vengeance. Meanwhile it’s also clear that prior to the arrival of the wolves which could perhaps be read either as a metaphor for Mainland China or indeed the KMT government threatening the natural harmony of the native Taiwanese society as represented by Sika Deer, the forest was not altogether harmonious before as evidenced by the rivalries between Miss Deer and Foxy and Elk and Sika Deer. These divides perhaps hint at a wounded unity, suggesting that the Taiwanese people are ill-equipped to defend themselves against external threat while preoccupied with petty disputes and personal concerns. 

Such messages are most likely above the heads of the target audience but then again, the film is curiously transgressive including several scenes of Foxy living up to her name, performing sexy dances and off “having fun” with Bloody Woolf in the forest while at one point talking Elk into attempting to rape Miss Deer to force her to marry him which whichever way you look at it is fantastically dark for a children’s film even if the metaphorical quality of the wolf as representing animalistic lust is still very much present in his determination to “eat” Miss Deer. To that extent it is also transgressive sexual energy which destabilises forest society in Foxy’s resentment of Miss Deer even if her implication that she’s been two-timing Elk and Sika Deer undercuts her otherwise innocent and pure nature which is in such contrast with Foxy’s chaotic and classically tricksy personality. 

Perhaps more of an ironic take on a kids film aimed at jaded adults, Fantasy of Deer Warrior is undeniably bizarre starring actors dressed in onesies mimicking their animal characters, deer with antlers on their heads fighting with antler staffs, and bird messengers hanging from obvious wires flapping their arms to mimic flight. Adopting the style of a classic fairytale, Chang incorporates several of Aesop’s fables such as a musical number themed around a strangely militarised tortoise and a cocky rabbit, or a literal instance of a boy crying wolf and never having the opportunity to learn his lesson. Yet the kind of justice with which the film concludes is disquieting suggesting perhaps that all is not so well in the forest after all. 

Remaster trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

A Wife Confesses (妻は告白する, Yasuzo Masumura, 1961)

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Mountains are dangerous places in Japanese cinema. Yasuzo Masumura’s tense, claustrophobic courtroom noir A Wife Confesses (妻は告白する, Tsuma wa Kokuhaku Suru) was released in the same year as Toshio Sugie’s Death on the Mountain, adapted from a popular story by legendary mystery writer Seicho Matsumoto in which a veteran climber is ushered towards his death through a series of machinations by his friend which might or might not be regarded as “murderous” depending on your point of view. Masumura wants to ask us a similar question but from another angle as he puts a woman on trial not quite for the “murder” of her husband but the fact of her survival.

Opening outside the courthouse with a gum-chewing paparazzo, Masumura unwittingly makes us part of the baying mob watching intently as a young woman hides her face with her handbag while the press more than live up to their name, pinning her with questions about the salacious case at hand. Inside, however, he shifts the focus. We are now in the dock with Ayako (Ayako Wakao), looking up at the three men who will judge her for her “crime” from a literal moral high ground. A youngish widow, Ayako is charged with the murder of her husband who died during a freak mountain climbing accident. Caught between a handsome young man, Koda (Hiroshi Kawaguchi), and her abusive husband, Takigawa (Eitaro Ozawa), with no way up or down Ayako chose to cut the rope and let her husband fall. If she had not done so, both she and Koda would also be dead. Ayako is on trial because she refused to sacrifice herself for a wifely ideal. The question is, in many ways, if a woman’s or more to the point a wife’s life has worth, not just worth equal to that of her husband’s but any kind of worth at all. 

The first charge against Ayako is a lack of womanliness. A man at the scene testifies that they don’t usually allow wives or mothers to view bodies and Takigawa’s was in a particularly bad way but Ayako insisted on seeing it only to react with a calm he found suspicious. A policeman then echoes his sentiment, admitting that he arrested Ayako for her unwifeliness. “A wife should stick with her husband ’til the end no matter how tough it is” he says, adding that his own wife agrees with him. As her lawyer points out, had Ayako been a man, or the person below her on the rope a stranger, the policeman would not have arrested her but her refusal to die with her husband, which would have resulted in the “murder” of another man, is an arrestable offence. You can argue about the moralities of choosing to end someone else’s life to save your own, a kind of self defence permitted under Japanese law through the “necessity” legislation, but Ayako’s transgression is in believing that her life and her husband’s weigh the same and that she had a right to save herself. Many feel she should perhaps have cut the rope above her own head, saving Koda only in a lovers’ suicide with Takigawa. 

The policeman offers more grounds for suspicion having discovered that Ayako had taken out an insurance policy on her husband and hoped to profit from his “accidental” death, though as an act of premeditated murder this would certainly be quite an elaborate plot. Furthermore, the prosecution posit that she and Koda were having an affair but, for reasons which are not clear, Koda is not under suspicion or cited as a co-conspirator and is in fact testifying in her defence. He is also engaged to someone else, Rie (Haruko Mabuchi), though the marriage was arranged by his boss for strategic reasons because she is the daughter of a major client at their insurance firm and yes Koda drafted the policy which is currently being used as evidence against Ayako. All very Double Indemnity, but Ayako is certainly no cold and scheming Phyllis whether or not she made a conscious decision to free herself from a man who made her life a misery by literally cutting him loose. 

Yet Ayako’s victimisation is also used against her as further evidence of her unwomanly coldness. She testifies that she married Takigawa after he attempted to rape her and then proposed, confessing that she did so in order to escape a life of poverty that had already driven her into suicidal despair (she still has a vial of potassium cyanide she had taken from his office with just this in mind). She did not love him, but did her best to become a “good wife”, even beginning to wear kimono because he preferred it. Her predicament is no different than that of many other women who agreed to an arranged marriage and found themselves shackled to an unpleasant man with whom they could not get along but the marriage’s failure is laid squarely at Ayako’s feet for not trying hard enough and having insufficient love for the husband who treats her like a glorified maid, is cruel and emotionally abusive, and finally forces her to have an abortion against her will because he doesn’t want to spend money on a child. She asks for a divorce but he points out that as things stand a woman cannot escape a bad marriage without a husband’s consent and he has done nothing to break their marital contract and so to that extent he owns her. 

But for all she’s a cold woman who resented her husband and longed to be free of him, Ayako is also condemned for illicit passion in her secret love for Koda. Indeed we can see she is clearly fond of him, and in flashback we realise much of this is simply because he was kind to her though the extent of his kindness was only to the level of general civility. At heart, they are both “decent” people and so there is nothing more between them than unexpressed longing but still the kernel of their attraction remains and the prosecution has indeed found a grain of truth on which to found a motive for murder.

For his part, in another kind of film Koda would be the hero but here his “goodness” is intensely problematic in that he falls for Ayako precisely because of her suffering. His problem is that he later doubts her, swayed by arguments that paint her as a plotting femme fatale. Though amused by the whole affair, Koda’s boss warns him that women like Ayako are “trouble” and that he’s only been taken in because he is young and naive. Rie, meanwhile, is resentful and wounded, contemplating her own revenge but ultimately testifying in Ayako’s favour, she claims more for herself than for Koda or “justice” too embarrassed to take the stand and offer her own feminine “inferiority” as evidence against her romantic rival. Yet she later comes to admire her, seeing her as one who was bold enough to chase love at the expense of all else no longer caring what anyone might say or think. Ayako is the most liberated woman alive, and she would die for love but did not love her husband and so would not die for him. 

Koda is punished because he fell in love with an image of suffering womanhood but is afraid of Ayako’s transgressive femininity. He is conflicted in the knowledge that if she killed her husband her love for him may have been the reason, and is disturbed by her venality in that she would have taken the insurance money and lived well without finding it distasteful while he would have preferred to reject the settlement entirely lest it besmirch the innocence of their love. In real terms it doesn’t really matter why she did it, Ayako cut the rope and whether she did so out of an instinct for self preservation, in hate, or in love, the result is all the same. What she’s on trial for is defiance, that she acted, seized her own agency and made a choice to value her life over her husband’s which is still, as it turns out, a moral crime in the supposedly modern and democratic society of 1961. Masumura’s accusatory camera finds her pinned, confined, trapped at the edges of frames hiding her face with her single permitted feminine accessory while the subject of our judgemental gaze until the curtain finally closes leaving her in shadow but perhaps finally free of her cruel and oppressive society. 

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Big Shots Die at Dawn (顔役暁に死す, Kihachi Okamoto, 1961)

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“Assassins make the world an unfit place to live in” according to a random gas station attendant clueing our errant hero in to the fact his small-town home is now a “den of yakuza” and unlikely tourist hotspot. An early, delightfully absurdist yakuza romp from Kichachi Okamoto, Big Shots Die at Dawn (顔役暁に死す, Kaoyaku Akatsukini Shisu) is part Nikkatsu parody, part ironic western, and all cartoonish fun as a prodigal son returns to find his father murdered and his uncle on the throne. Sound familiar? 

Jiro (Yuzo Kayama) has been working for the forestry commission in Alaska and has not returned to his small-town home of Kuraoka in some time which is why he didn’t even know his father, the mayor, was dead let alone that he was apparently assassinated in a manner which strongly anticipates the Kennedy assassination though the film was released in 1961. He also had no idea his father, a widower, had remarried and his family home is now occupied by his stepmother Hisako (Yukiko Shimazaki), a former secretary who scandalously lounges around in her underwear all day. His uncle Imamura (Eijiro Yanagi) is now the mayor, and as he explains to him, the town is a hotbed of gangster activity apparently a consequence of his attempt to turn it into a tourist hotspot. In trying to find out who killed his father, Jiro finds himself quite literally in the middle of a petty yakuza gang war aided and abetted by corrupt police. 

Quite clearly influenced by American cinema, Big Shots Die at Dawn situates itself in the new frontier of small-town Japan in which a war is being fought over the spoils of the post-war era. Uncle Imamura’s legacy is apparently a children’s theme park with the distinctly pregnant name Dreamland. Apparently a man who just loves the children but was unable to have any of his own, he’s also opened a pre-school for the local kids. Meanwhile, in the yakuza-backed casino, obsessive gamblers brush their teeth at the tables while local kingpin Goto (Akihiko Hirata) attempts to fend off the incursion of the rival Handa gang. Jiro’s return puts the cat among the pigeons as both sides attempt to use him as a way to take out the other.

The dark heart of small-town Japan is however present in the greed and double dealing which extends even to the police, a corrupt officer offering to sell Jiro a key piece of evidence he had concealed in the hope of profit. Just about everyone tries to sell the evidence to someone else at one time or another, leveraging an idea of justice alongside greed and self-interest. Meanwhile, Yoshiko (Kumi Mizuno), a quasi-love interest and former girlfriend of a fallen foot soldier, reports that she gave the police valuable evidence that her fiancé’s death wasn’t a suicide but they ignored her.

Jiro’s come to clean up the town, but the showdown takes place incongruously in the children’s theme park complete with its cutesy mascot characters and adverts for chocolate in the background making plain that these venal gangsters are really just boys playing war, taking pot shots at each other from tiny trains. What could be a dark comment on a loss of innocence is more cartoonish irony from Okamoto who shoots in extreme closeup with intentionally humorous composition and slapstick choreography. Nevertheless the message is unmistakable as we piece together the connections between small-town government and organised crime underpinned with a rather creepy all for the kids justification. 

Then again, the world has its share of misogyny, everything coming down to the incursion of transgressive femininity as one duplicitous woman manipulating her feminine wiles becomes the common link between each of the warring factions, as if this is all her fault and Jiro’s return is a way of clearing up the pollution her arrival provoked. Nevertheless as even he says, his father, and implicitly his father’s generation, must share some of the blame. Filled with stylish action sequences, car chases, self-consciously cool dialogue, and scored with a mix of moody jazz and dreamy childlike melodies, Okamoto’s cartoonish takedown of the zeitgeisty youth movie is very much in keeping with Toho’s spoofier side but chock full of charm even if its hero’s particular brand of smugness occasionally borders on the insufferable. 

The Tale of Oiwa’s Ghost (怪談　お岩の亡霊, Tai Kato, 1961)

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Yotsuya Kaidan is among the most well-known and enduringly popular of Japanese ghost stories. Originating as a kabuki play first staged in 1825, it has inspired countless film adaptations though Tai Kato’s The Tale of Oiwa’s Ghost (怪談　お岩の亡霊, Kaidan Oiwa no Borei) from 1961 is accounted among the most faithful despite the variation in its title. Usually regarded as a cautionary tale about a man whose ruthless ambition destroys his humanity earning him supernatural retribution, Yotsuya Kaidan is also a tale of female vengeance as Kato’s slight refocussing makes plain. In this version of the tale, all of Tamiya Iemon’s problems are, aside from the offscreen murder for which he has already been exiled from his family before the film begins, caused by female subjugation.

Having married into Oiwa’s (Yoshiko Fujishiro) family, Tamiya (Tomisaburo Wakayama) is in a rueful mood even as the film begins. After randomly killing a man in a fight some time previously, Oiwa has left him because, quite reasonably, she does not want to be in a relationship with a murderer nor do her family wish to be associated with someone stained with such a serious crime. Noticeably ragged, Tamiya swears he’s going to get Oiwa back because he’ll “never find another woman with such a beautiful body”. He wants her firstly because she has rejected him and his pride is wounded, secondly to regain his status, and thirdly because for the moment she is a glittering prize though he’ll later come to tire of her. 

Tamiya is hanging around because he wants to talk to his father-in-law about reinstatement but he is currently meeting with a “masseuse”, unbeknownst to Tamiya planning to sell his second daughter Osode (Hiroko Sakuramachi) to a brothel in order to pay a debt. He has been assured that his daughter will not be expected to participate in sex work but will be running a toothpick stall near the temple. Needless to say, both he and Osode are very much mistaken and once the money has changed hands Takuetsu (Atsushi Watanabe), doctor and owner of the brothel, can do whatever he likes. Tamiya doesn’t much care about Osode, encouraging his lusty friend elixir pedlar Naosuke (Jushiro Konoe) who declared her the more beautiful of the sisters to buy her body that very night. You wouldn’t think Naosuke could afford it but he decides to do just that, only to be gazumped by Osode’s conflicted fiancé Yomoshichi (Sawamura Sojuro) who is about to depart for Edo with the lord for a year the very next day. Rather than save her, Yomoshichi merely takes her virginity and asks her to wait for his return in a year’s time, leaving her in the brothel. 

Both Oiwa and Osode are essentially made to pay for their attempt to refuse male subjugation. Naosuke has “bought” Osode’s body and feels entitled to have it, attempting to rape her while she violently refuses him. His resentment leads him to plot Yomoshichi’s murder, but he mistakenly ends up killing his friend instead while Tamiya takes the opportunity to kill his father-in-law and reunite with his wife under the pretext of revenge for a crime he himself committed, essentially gifting Osode to Naosuke as a kind of reward. But Tamiya isn’t satisfied because he remains poor and lowly. His wife may be from a previously well respected samurai family, but he’s having to resort to making umbrellas to get by and now that Oiwa has given birth to their child he no longer finds her so “beautiful”. Bearing out the misogyny in their society, the men joke that Tamiya had been hoping his wife would die in childbirth so he’d be free of her at last. 

It’s at this point that he is offered an opportunity. Oume (Yumiko Mihara), the daughter of the wealthy Ito family of merchants fell in love with Tamiya when he returned her comb to her after a tussle in the square. Moving in nearby, the Itos are keen to persuade Tamiya to marry Oume but he has a wife and child already. The source of Tamiya’s heartlessness is it seems a kind of toxic masculinity, his intense sense of insecurity and a need to prove himself through promotion that fuels his obsession with advancing up the ranks to serve the shogun. As much as this is about inhumanity, it’s also about a society in flux. Unlike Naosuke, Tamiya is a samurai. The Itos are members of a new middle class whose increasing wealth is beginning to threaten the social order of the tightly regimented feudal society. Mr. Ito wants to make his daughter happy, or so he says, but marrying her to a samurai and therefore into the ruling class even if that ruling class is impoverished and possessed of only illusionary power is certainly advantageous. It is however somewhat irrational to encourage a man to murder his first wife so he can marry your lovestruck daughter, it does not bode well for her future safety. In any case, Tamiya is aware that “one’s reputation affects one’s promotion prospects” and so is unwilling to simply kill Oiwa without “a good reason”, later deciding to try and frame her for adultery which would make her death not only permissible but in fact socially mandated.  

In this age a woman’s life has no value, as Oiwa eventually sees. Tamiya gets the adultery idea after catching sight of the bodies of a samurai woman murdered for having an affair with a servant, marking her double transgression against the social order in both advancing her own agency over her body and her love for a man who was not of her own social class (assuming of course that there was any kind of relationship at all and they haven’t simply been killed on pretext by a man like Tamiya). Oiwa’s ruined face, caused by poison disguised as medicine, is symbolic of her social disfigurement, turning her into a “monstrous” woman who vows revenge on the man who has so maliciously wounded her. She asserts her own agency only in her death, choosing to pursue her vengeance from beyond the grave.

Yet it’s not only Tamiya who must pay, but the Itos too for their attempt to cheat the class system. Unlike other retellings, there is little suggestion that Tamiya’s torment is psychological, he is quite literally haunted, taunted into ruining his bright future by exorcising the demon of crime. Unusual for a Toei programmer of the time, Kato’s camera has New Wave verve, replete with handheld photography and swooping zooms while making use of his characteristic low angle composition but the final confrontation precipitated by a literal storm and earthquake which implodes the transgressive world Tamiya and the Itos are forging, is realised with expressionist ferocity. Tamiya tries to atone by taking refuge in a temple, but is undone not perhaps by guilt but by regret in realising he has destroyed his much hoped for chance of advancement and thereby rendered his existence meaningless. 

Returning the play to its roots, he dreams his relationship with Oiwa as kabuki dance until woken by the sight of her ruined face, demanding to be freed from his torment. Yet vengeance comes in realer terms and it is Osode who strikes the blow, striking back on behalf of her sister and herself as a representative of all wronged women, while Naosuke can only lament that “this life had nothing good in it” as he too pays for his transgressions. Osode reclaims her mother’s comb and with it restores the social order while simultaneously rejecting her subjugation at the hands of duplicitous men, laying Oiwa’s unquiet ghost to rest as she leaves the venal past behind for a (presumably) less inhuman world. 

Original trailer (no subtitles)