Five Marines (五人의 海兵 / 5인의 해병, Kim Ki-duk, 1961)

December 19, 2017by Hayley ScanlonLeave a comment

Korean War films have a very particular tone and flavour often absent from those from elsewhere. As sad and despairing as they can be across the world, war films are generally the realm of macho heroism, men bravely holding back tears and charging forth with unrestrained rage in a quest to avenge their fallen comrades. Korean War films, however, like the majority of the nation’s cinematic output, are tinged with melodrama. These men wail, talk about their mothers, and worry for the future while forging intense bonds of homosocial brotherhood and becoming a battlefield family. The debut feature from Kim Ki-duk, Five Marines (五人의 海兵 / 5인의 해병, O in-ui haebyeong) is a prime example of this approach, eschewing combat scenes for behind the lines ensemble drama as ordinary men attempt to come to terms with the extraordinary situation of war.

Stock footage of the battlefield eventually gives way to a small squadron of marines digging trenches and at constant risk of ambush by Chinese forces. The main drama revolves around lieutenant Deok-su (Shin Young-kyun) who is the son of the company commander but there has long been bad feeling between the two men as Deok-su has always felt that his father favoured his brother, Deok-han (Choe Bong), and never really loved him. Meanwhile we’re introduced to another four marines – intellectual Jeong-guk (Choi Moo-ryong), Ju-han (Flyboy / Gwak Gyu-seok) – a father of five from Seoul, farm boy Yeong-seon (Park Nou-sik), and mother’s boy with anger issues Hun-gu (Hwang Hae). Following the death of two comrades, the squad of five is sent on a daring missing into enemy territory to blow up an arms depot through which they aim to make the sacrifice their friends have made in some way meaningful.

Made just eight years after the end of the Korean War and apparently commissioned by the Marine Corps in the wake of the May 16 military coup which initiated the dictatorship of Park Chung-hee, Five Marines takes a very different approach to that seen in other contemporary war films such as Lee Man-hee’s The Marines Who Never Returned. Though in no way particularly jingoistic or warmongering, it would be difficult to describe Five Marines as an “anti-war” movie, not least because it avoids depicting scenes of combat until the final mission in which, as expected, some or all of the heroes will fall valiantly defending their fellow Koreans as well as their friends.

Jeong-guk, the college educated enlisted man, originally considers himself to be taking part in the pantomime of war, going along with the ridiculous sham of soldiering, but when a fellow soldier – a young boy who spends his time rewriting a poetic confession of love he doesn’t quite have the nerve to send to the girl he left behind, falls in front of him, Jeong-guk suddenly wants to join the fight for real. The idea of militaristic patriotism is then subtly reinforced if not quite sold with patriotic fervour. The necessity of the sacrifice is never questioned and the idea of doing one’s duty remains paramount even if it is also clear that the war has taken these men out of their familial environments leaving their women at home alone and, perhaps, defenceless.

Kim explores the peacetime lives of each of the men through flashback with the consequence that we get to know and care for them as people rather than as combatants. We rejoice with Jeong-guk when he hears he’s going to be a father, share Ju-han’s amused frustration when his wife includes all their bills in his mail, and worry with Hun-gu when his usual letters have not arrived. During their down time, the men discuss women but with more tenderness than expected – save for Yeong-seon’s rather lewd (and apparently fabricated) story of his wedding night for which he is rightly taken to task by his stern company Sergeant. Rather than focussing on the negatives of military service, Kim emphases the warmth and friendship among the men who forge deeper and stronger connections precisely because of the ever present threat of death.

When the final mission rolls around, Kim allows the action to take centre stage as the five man squad plots and executes a daring raid which does not quite go to plan and eventually erupts into a more conventional fire fight. Marrying the demands for macho battle scenes with the emotional quality of melodrama, Kim allows the men to sort out their emotional difficulties, shedding both blood and tears in equal measure. More emotional drama than action packed celebration of the glory of war, Five Marines may not quite be what the Marine Corps had in mind but perhaps serves their purpose anyway in reinforcing the positive ideas of camaraderie and patriotism whilst telling the stories of ordinary men and extraordinary heroism.

Available on DVD as part of the Korean Film Archive’s Kim Ki-duk box set. Also available to stream online for free via the Korean Film Archive’s YouTube Channel.

Love New and Old (三味線とオートバイ , AKA Shamisen and Motorcyle, Masahiro Shinoda, 1961)

April 15, 2017by Hayley ScanlonLeave a comment

Masahiro Shinoda’s first film for Shochiku, One-Way Ticket to Love, over which he’d been given a fairly free rein did not exactly set the box office alight. Accordingly, he then found himself relegated to studio mandated projects with set scripts designed with the studio’s house style in mind. Love New and Old (三味線とオートバイ, Shamisen to Otobai, also known as Shamisen and Motorcycle) is just one of these studio pictures, taking him away from the beginnings of a promising collaboration with avant-garde poet and playwright Shuji Terayama begun in Dry Lake (Youth in Fury) and Killers on Parade. Despite the banality of its melodramic tale of mother and daughter strife caused by changing times, secrets and social mores, Love New and Old plays into several of Shinoda’s recurrent themes and allows him to further indulge his tendency for visual flamboyance with a widescreen colour canvas.

Regular teenager Hatsuko (Miyuki Kuwano) hangs around with the “nice” kind of biker gang, clinging onto her upper class boyfriend Fusao (Yusuke Kawazu) as they ride around the city making use of all the new freedoms available to the young people of the day. Hatsuko lives alone with widowed mother Toyoeda (Yumeji Tsukioka), a minor celebrity known for giving lessons in traditional “kouta” singing on local television. Despite Hatsuko’s rather headstrong nature, she and her mother are very close and have a broadly happy life together in the small house they share which doubles as her mother’s studio.

Things change when Hatsuko and Fusao get into an accident on the bike which leaves them both in hospital. It just so happens that the doctor who ends up treating Hatsuko, Kuroyanagi (Masayuki Mori), is an old friend of her mother’s from before the war. During Hatsuko’s extended convalescence the pair rekindle their long abandoned romance but tension soon arises when the still youthful Hatsuko begins to resent this change in her familial relations. Having come to think of her mother as a kind of pure, saintly figure the idea of her as woman with a woman’s needs and desires profoundly disturbs her.

Shinoda frames this twin tale of women in love as series of embedded conflicts – between generations, between eras, and between a mother and a daughter whose relationship must necessarily change as one comes of age. There is also an additional burden placed on the relationship by means of a long buried secret regarding Hatusko’s birth, the man she had regarded as her father, and the newly resurfaced figure of the doctor who, it seems, has always been in Toyoeda’s heart. Despite the fact that one might assume all of the resentment towards a new relationship would come from the maternal side, Toyoeda is generally supportive of her daughter’s right to choose a boyfriend only warning her that the boy’s parents had acted with hostility following the accident and there may be class based trouble ahead given the fact that her mother is “only a kouta teacher”.

The doctor, a melancholy and perceptive figure, is the first to notice the effect his unexpected return is having on the previously happy mother daughter relationship. Correctly remarking that young people of Hatsuko’s age have much more clearly defined ideas about “morality”, especially as it relates to the older generation, Kuroyanagi can see why Hatsuko may have reservations about her mother remarrying. In this he is very much correct. Even setting aside the slight cultural squeamishness concerning second marriages, Hatsuko’s reaction to her mother’s new romance is one of deep disgust and confusion. Though she recognises that her feelings are unfair and will only cause her mother additional suffering, she cannot bring herself to accept the idea of her mother taking a lover and eventually bringing this new element into their extremely close relationship.

Eventually Hatsuko moves out to live with a friend while Fusao, who had been absent from the picture thanks to his parental machinations, finally reappears and seems to want to resume their relationship whatever the final cost to his own familial relations. Ending on a bittersweet note after which secrets are revealed, confessions are made, and hearts are bared, the film seems to want to remind us that life is short and unpredictable – there is no time for the kind of petty discomforts which lead Hatsuko to force her mother to choose between the man she loved and her daughter. After beginning with an innovative title sequence, Shinoda’s approach is more straightforward than in some of his more visually adventurous work of the period but makes good use of dissolves and interesting compositions to bring a little more substance to this otherwise generic Shochiku programme picture.

Mothra (モスラ, Ishiro Honda, 1961)

April 12, 2017July 6, 2022by Hayley Scanlon3 Comments

Japan’s kaiju movies have an interesting relationship with their monstrous protagonists. Godzilla, while causing mass devastation and terror, can hardly be blamed for its actions. Humans polluted its world with all powerful nuclear weapons, woke it up, and then responded harshly to its attempts to complain. Godzilla is only ever Godzilla, acting naturally without malevolence, merely trying to live alongside destructive forces. No creature in the Toho canon embodies this theme better than Godzilla’s sometime foe, Mothra. Released in 1961, Mothra does not abandon the genre’s anti-nuclear stance, but steps away from it slightly to examine another great 20th century taboo – colonialism and the exploitation both of nature and of native peoples. Weighty themes aside, Mothra is also among the most family friendly of the Toho tokusatsu movies in its broadly comic approach starring well known comedian Frankie Sakai.

When a naval vessel is caught up in a typhoon and wrecked, the crew is thought lost but against the odds a small number of survivors is discovered in a radiation heavy area previously thought to be uninhabited. The rescued men claim they owe their existence to a strange new species of mini-humans living deep in the forest. This is an awkward discovery because the islands had recently been used for testing nuclear weapons and have been ruled permanently uninhabitable. The government of the country which conducted the tests, Rolisica, orders an investigation and teams up with a group of Japanese scientists to verify the claims.

Of course, the original story of the survivors was already a media sensation and so intrepid “snapping turtle” reporter Zen (Frankie Sakai) and his photographer Michi (Kyoko Kagawa) are hot on the trail. Zen is something of an embarrassment to his bosses but manages to bamboozle his way into the scientific expedition by stowing away on their boat and then putting on one of their hazmat suits to blend in before anyone notices him. Linguist Chujo (Hiroshi Koizumi) gets himself into trouble but is saved by two little people of the island who communicate in an oddly choral language. Unfortunately, the Rolisicans, led by Captain Nelson (Jerry Ito), decide the helpful little creatures are useful “samples” and intend to kidnap them to experiment on. Refusing to give up despite the protestations of the Japanese contingent, Nelson only agrees to release the pair when the male islanders surround them and start banging drums in an intimidating manner.

The colonial narrative is clear as the Rolisicans never stop to consider the islanders as living creatures but only as an exploitable resource. Nelson heads back later and scoops up the two little ladies (committing colonial genocide in the process) but on his return to Japan his intentions are less scientific than financial as he immediately begins putting his new conquests on show. The island ladies (played by the twins from the popular group The Peanuts, Yumi and Emi Ito) are installed in a floating mini carriage and dropped on stage where they are forced to sing and dance for an appreciative audience in attendance to gorp.

Zen and Michi may be members of the problematic press who’ve dubbed the kidnapped islanders the “Tiny Beauties” and helped Nelson achieve his goals but they stand squarely behind the pair and, along with linguist Chujo and his little brother Shinji (Masamitsu Tayama), continue to work on a way to rescue the Tiny Beauties and send them home. The Tiny Beauties, however, aren’t particularly worried because they know “Mothra” is coming to save them, though they feel a bit sad for Japan and especially for the nice people like Zen, Michi, Chujo, and Shinji because Mothra doesn’t know right from wrong or have much thought process at all. 100% goal orientated, Mothra’s only concern is that two of its charges are in trouble and need rescuing. It will stop at nothing to retrieve them and bring them home no matter what obstacles may be standing in the way.

The island people worship Mothra like a god though with oddly Christian imagery of crosses and bells. Like many of Toho’s other “monsters” it is neither good or bad, in a sense, but simply exists as it is. Its purpose is to defend its people, which it does to the best of its ability. It has no desire to attack or destroy, but simply to protect and defend. The villain is humanity, or more precisely Rolisica whose colonial exploits have a dark and tyrannical quality as they try to insist the islands are uninhabited despite the evidence and then set about exploiting the resources with no thought to the islanders’ wellbeing. The Japanese are broadly the good guys who very much do not approve of the Rolisicans’ actions but they are also the people buying the tickets to see the Tiny Beauties and putting them on the front pages of the newspapers. Nevertheless, things can only conclude happily when people start respecting other nations on an equal footing and accepting the validity of their rights and beliefs even if they include giant marauding moth gods.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Ten Dark Women (黒い十人の女, Kon Ichikawa, 1961)

August 6, 2016December 16, 2019by Hayley ScanlonLeave a comment

Ten Women in Black Kon Ichikawa, wry commenter of his times, turns his ironic eyes to the inherent sexism of the 1960s with a farcical tale of a philandering husband suddenly confronted with the betrayed disappointment of his many mistresses who’ve come together with one aim in mind – his death! Scripted by Natto Wada (Ichikawa’s wife and frequent screenwriter until her retirement in 1965), Ten Dark Women (黒い十人の女, Kuroi Junin no Onna) is an absurd noir-tinged comedy about 10 women who love one man so much that they all want him dead, or at any rate just not alive with one of the others.

Kaze (Eiji Funakoshi) is a TV producer by profession, though it might be better to think of him as a professional ladies’ man. He’s married to a woman who owns a bar, but is also carrying on affairs with nine (!) other women plus occasional one night stands with 30-50 others he meets through his work. His wife knows about his affairs and, while not happy about it, is putting up with things like decent wives are supposed to do. However, many of Kaze’s “mistresses” have inconveniently discovered each other’s existences and bonded in their mutual frustration with him. Strangely they all think he’s a great guy and remain very much in love with him but the situation being what it is the entirety of the betrayed wife and mistress support club eventually comes to the same conclusion – Kaze must die!

However, the women are all so devoted to Kaze, they don’t quite want him to disappear so much as for him to pick them and only them to live with happily ever after. One of the women foolishly warns Kaze about their plot as leverage for her marriage proposal but unfortunately for her he still turns her down and returns home to ask his wife what’s going on. She doesn’t deny her murderous intentions and in fact tells him in great detail how they intend to do him in. Kaze, to his credit, says he doesn’t mind very much and only worries about his wife’s future life as a murderess. Together they hatch a plan to fool the other women involving a pistol loaded with blanks and a tomato but nothing quite goes to plan.

An absurdist satire about the intense vanity of the womanising male, Ten Dark Women looks forward to Fellini’s similarly themed 8 1/2 or City of Women though here the idiotic husband at the centre becomes both prey and foil for the group of plotting women seeking revenge against his disloyal ways. Kaze, as he himself admits, is not particularly appealing to women though his position at the TV studio undoubtedly proves useful to some of them. He’s a curiously passive presence, not so much seeking out female company as acquiescing to it. It’s not quite clear if his concern for his wife should she decide to kill him is genuine or a means of manipulative self preservation but at any rate he takes the threat to his life extremely calmly.

Each of the women has their own claims on Kaze but the other thing they all have in common is being the prisoner of an extremely sexist society. Some of the women are with Kaze for careerist reasons, but it’s clear that there is a definite limit placed on a woman’s potential both inside and out of the creative industries. The commercial model makes a play for a more official relationship by bringing up the fact that Kaze’s wife has a job and therefore cannot devote herself entirely to Kaze’s wellbeing as proper wife should (as by implication would she after marrying and retiring from the modelling world). Kaze helped his wife set up her bar which she runs herself though constantly plays hostess to her husband’s industry friends. It appears what Kaze wants is less a devoted wife than an indifferent one who will permit his frequent “indiscretions” whilst also providing him with a conventional “home”.

Another of the women tries to get herself a promotion but her boss, though broadly sympathetic and dangling the idea of a raise, brings up the oft repeated notion that there’s no sense in giving her the job because a woman should leave at some point to marry and have children. When the woman criticises the behaviour of her male colleagues, her boss simply shrugs and admits men in TV aren’t “serious”, yet when she points out that she is serious and works hard she is told that women are better off at home. Women, he says, express themselves through their children whereas men make their mark through a career. The woman says that she believes everyone should try to reach their own potential in whatever way they can but her pleas fall on deaf ears. This notion is repeated later on when the women try to take revenge on Kaze by tricking him into resigning from his job – a man is his work, he claims. A man without a job is nothing at all and a man who is kept by a woman is less than nothing – Kaze is suddenly panicked, losing his occupation and social position is much more frightening to him than losing his life.

The women couldn’t kill the system or the TV, but they could kill Kaze so who can blame them for trying. Another of the women states that the imposed isolation of a man’s working life has cost him the ability to connect with other people on a human level and so his erasure is simply the end of a long process of social death. If some of the women triumph, others retreat as one does in suicide only to return as a ghost longing for the murder plot to succeed so that she and Kaze can be alone together at last. Kaze thinks he’s using each of them, but they have all been using him in one way or another and his only way out lies either in death or becoming a trophy for the most needy of his paramours.

Cynical in tone, Ten Dark Women is an amusingly absurd look at gender roles in early 1960s Japan as each of our women attempts to usurp male power for their own ends, some with more success than others. Ichikawa employs beautiful noir lighting in his elegantly composed black and white photography which, along with its jazzy score, gives the film a familiar feeling of crime laced modernity. An early instance of the feminist revenge film, Ten Dark Women is very much a comedy which avoids making its group of frustrated, resentful women mistreated by a buffoon of a TV exec the butt of its own joke, neatly highlighting the precarious nature of their existence which obliges them to rely on so hollow a support.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Pigs and Battleships / Stolen Desire – Eureka MOC Blu Ray Review

July 5, 2011December 1, 2016by Hayley ScanlonLeave a comment

contains mild spoilers

Pigs and Battleships, Shohei Imamura’s 1961 absurd portrait of the transformation of a small fishing port during the American occupation is a biting indictment of postwar society. Kinta (Hiroyuki Nagato), the young would be Yakuza, is excited when he is given responsibility over the gang’s latest asset – a herd of pigs, which they plan to fatten up and sell back to the Americans at an inflated price. His girlfriend, Haruko (Jitsuko Yoshimura), is unhappy about his connection to gang and constantly urges him to get a proper job. Kinta, however is unwilling to do this because he doesn’t want to end up like his father, sacked from his long time factory job after becoming ill, or be just another ordinary low age worker living hand to mouth. He seems to want to be something, someone more than that but also seems unable to do anything about it other than follow the gang. He likes the respect and the feeling of being the big man that the gang affords him but is unable to see that it’s illusionary, his status is only that of expendable fall guy in a petty gang of punks. Haruko’s family on the other hand are unhappy with her relationship with Kinta and constantly urge her to become the kept mistress of a wealthy American who’s shown an interest in her. For obvious reasons this isn’t something Haruko is very interested in doing but her mother’s quite violent instructions are becoming harder and harder to defy. Eventually Kinta agrees to go with Haruko to an uncle in another town who might be able to find them work, after he’s completed one final gang related task which he hopes will provide them with money to take with them. However, predictably things do not go to plan and the young couple’s hopes are frustrated.

There are only really two things going on in this town, the pigs and the battleships. Everyone is completely (and quite desperately) dependent on the Americans, they drive the entire town’s economy. The red light district in which the film is set is dedicated to catering for the foreigners on shore leave, and most of the women in the picture are engaging in either casual or outright prostitution, encouraged by their petty yakuza boyfriends or families. Even our heroine Haruko at one point, angry with Kinta but also with her family, decides to give this a go with disastrous results which leads to one of the most masterful shots of the film – the much praised spinning top shot which perfectly articulates the chaos and horror of that terrible situation. The entire town has become like pigs running toward a feeding trough, the final scene of the town’s women running to greet the newly arrived ship, desperate for attention and the material benefits that attention might bring. The only hope in this final scene is with Haruko finally leaving her overbearing mother, defiantly marching straight ahead through this crowd of baying women to start again in a new town, with a proper honest job away from all these corrupting influences.

Pigs and Battleships is a masterful film and in fact quite darkly humourous, highly recommended for anyone interested in the history of Japan or Japanese Cinema. The Blu Ray release from Eureka’s Masters of Cinema series is top notch, the picture quality is mostly excellent as is the soundtrack (the disc comes with optional English subtitles which are also very good).

Also provided is Imamura’s debut feature for Nikkatsu, Stolen Desire, the story of a middle class young man (also played by Hiroyuki Nagato) who ends up joining a traveling Kabuki (though leaning more and more towards burlesque elements) group, not so far away from the directors own youthful experiences. This is a more typical Nikkatsu B Movie, a ribald comedy with jokes about randy peasants, vain/difficult actors, misplaced love and the sort of tensions present within a traveling group of artists who’ve hit upon slightly low times. However there are the uniquely Immamura elements that lift this above the rest, the documentary like opening for example and the genuine warmth with with he paints the earthy peasants in all their unbridled vitality. This is the first time this film has been available commercially available with English subtitles in the West and is definitely well worth seeing, its transfer, whilst not quite as strong as that of Pigs and Battleships is certainly very good. There is the odd cut or damage in the frame and the image is certainly a bit softer but it’s still an excellent transfer given the nature of the material. Both releases are accompanied by a booklet containing essays by Tony Rayns about each film which are very useful and informative. This is another fantastic release from MOC, very much deserving of a place in every collection. Fantastic.