Tag: 1970s

The Pollen of Flowers (화분, Ha Gil-jong, 1972)

Posted on by

Park Chung-hee kept a tight rein on cinema which he saw as an important political tool and means of communication. That’s not to say, however, that criticising his authoritarian regime was impossible, but that criticism was often expressed in unexpected or abstract ways. The debut film of Hollywood-trained director Ha Gil-jong, The Pollen of Flowers (화분, Hwabun), was adapted from a novel by Yi Hyoseok that was published in 1939 when Korea was under Japanese rule but now speaks directly to the contemporary era as a young man and woman long for escape from the oppressive atmosphere of the “Blue House”.

The Blue House is the name for the residence of Korea’s president and where Park Chung-hee lived at the time, but within the context of the film, it’s inhabited by the mistress of a wealthy businessman, Se-ran (Choi Ji-hee), and her younger sister, Mi-ran (Yoon So-ra). The relationship between the sisters is, however, much more like mother and daughter with Se-ran repeatedly stating that Mi-ran is “everything” to her and that she must grow up to become a “great woman”. The slightly uncomfortable implication is that she is encouraging a possible relationship between Mi-ran and her patron Hyeon-ma (Namkoong Won) or at least that by “great woman” she means Mi-ran should be the partner of a great man who moves within their social circles. Ominously, however, the film opens with Mi-ran discovering that all the fish in their pond have died making it clear that the water here is poisoned and the atmosphere rancid. 

It’s not exactly clear how old Mi-ran is intended to be, only that Se-ran had been worried that hadn’t yet started menstruating. She’s spent her entire life in the cosseted environment of the Blue House and knows nothing of the world outside. That she gets her period for the first time when her father brings his secretary/secret lover Dan-ju (Hah Myung-joong) to the house suggests that she has, in a sense, been liberated by his arrival. For whatever reason, Se-ran had tried to warn her off him. She appears jealous while implying that Dan-ju is a dangerous social climber who threatens the integrity of her household. Mi-ran replies that you shouldn’t judge someone because of their background, but in a fit of pique also refers to Dan-ju as a “servant” which hurts both his feelings and his male pride.

But Dan-ju himself is something of a cypher whose motivations are often unclear. Having grown up working class, he’s risen in the world through complicity with Hyeon-ma’s authoritarian rule. As Se-ran says, Hyeon-ma is infatuated with him but perhaps more as a symbol of his overall control. He reminds Dan-ju that he controls his future and repeatedly asks him if he wants to go back to his old life of being a “scumbag” not quite realising that Dan-ju may have become fed up with his degradation and no longer thinks this kind of success is worth it. Hyeon-ma refers to Dan-ju as his “dream and ambition,” even going so far as to say he’d like to start a new life with him, though this is obviously not something that would be considered publicly acceptable in the Korea of the early 1970s. The film is often referred to as the first to depict a same-sex relationship, but it’s one motivated more by power than by love. It’s not clear if Hyeon-ma is so convinced that Mi-ran is completely safe with Dan-ju because he believes him to be interested only in men, or if he is certain that his control over him is absolute, while Dan-ju may not actually be interested in men at all and is only submitting himself to Hyeon-ma’s attentions in return for social advancement.

What he comes to represent for each is freedom. After running away, Mi-ran explains that she was happy with her life within the Blue House, in other words under authoritarianism, because it treated her well and so she could think of no other happiness. But meeting Dan-ju has shown her that happiness is possible outside of it. Love is a force that threatens the social order, and now Mi-ran resents her tightly controlled life and longs for the freedom Dan-ju represents over the patriarchal oppression represented by Hyeon-ma to which Se-ran has wholly submitted herself. Now that she’s committed to the regime, she cannot permit Mi-ran to leave it and tries to convince her to study music abroad and date an international pianist who could help career. Hyeon-ma, meanwhile, reacts in jealousy and frustration. He beats Dan-ju and throws him in his shed echoing the torture and imprisonment of dissidents that took place under Park’s regime. 

As time passes, however, something evidently goes wrong with Hyeon-ma’s business causing him to flee in a hurry abandoning Se-ran and Mi-ran to their fates. The ominous maid who has been dropping rats through their windows, eventually tries to release Dan-ju with whom she has some kind of intimate connection, with the consequence that he haunts the mansion like a ghost. Mi-ran appears to have reassimilated, dancing with another man while wearing what looks very like wedding a dress, but her desire for freedom is reawakened by Dan-ju’s return. The house itself is then stormed by the revolutionary force of Hyeon-ma’s creditors who are not exactly noble avengers. They raid the place looting his possessions to get back what they’re owned, even going so far as to cut off Se-ran’s finger to take her ring and pulling out her gold teeth. The message seems to be that the dictator will probably get away (Park didn’t, he was assassinated by the head of his own security forces), but a heavy price will be paid for complicity when the regime falls, as all regimes eventually do. 

The Fixer (日本の黒幕, Yasuo Furuhata, 1979)

Posted on by

Japan was rocked by scandal in 1976 when it came to light that American aviation firm Lockheed had paid the office of then Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka three million dollars funnelled through right-wing fixer Yoshio Kodama to ensure that Japanese airlines such as ANA purchased Lockheed Lockheed L-1011 TriStar passenger jets rather than the McDonnell Douglas DC-10. The disturbing revelations deepened a sense of mistrust in the government which was shown to be inherently corrupt and in constant collusion with nationalist activists and yakuza.

This might be why the figure of the political mastermind hangs heavy over the Japanese paranoia cinema of the 1970s. The Fixer (日本の黒幕 Nihon no Fixer), however, rather ironically began as a vehicle for director Nagisa Oshima. At that time, Toei was struggling as its run of jitsuroku movies began to run out of steam. Producer Goro Kusakabe wanted to make a film about Kodama, who’d been alluded to in the Japanese Godfather series, and thought that getting Oshima to do it would take Toei in a new artistic direction, moving them away from the studio model by bringing in outside auteurist talent. But the problem with that was that an artist like Oshima did not want to work with a typical studio production model and, at the end of the day, what Toei wanted was a commercial film. It also has to be said that as a studio Toei tended to lean towards the right, and the film that was finally produced, directed by action drama specialist Yasuo Furuhata using a script by Koji Takada which Oshima had described as “boring”, was much more sympathetic towards its subject than Oshima would likely have been.

Like the Japanese Godfather, series it’s essentially a Greek tragedy retold as yakuza movie in which Kodama is brought low by a series of betrayals that prevent him realising his dream of an ideal Japan, which in effect means undoing democracy to restore the pre-war militarist regime. The true source of the corruption is then shifted to the prime minister, Hirayama (Ryunosuke Kaneda), a stand-in for Tanaka, who is brought to power by Yamaoka (Shin Saburi), a thinly veiled Kodama, but later betrays him for a shot at a political comeback following a bribery scandal during which Yamaoka is left out to dry. Yamaoka casts himself as the true patriot, and Hirayama as the greedy opportunist who only cares about his own wealth and status. 

Yamaoka’s vision of himself is eventually undercut by a former ally who accuses him of being deluded by his own lust for power, placing a pistol on the table in front of him and suggesting he do the honourable thing. Yamaoka, however, does not want to do that and gives a last speech to his young men explaining that silence is his way of fighting back and that he’ll be vindicated in the end, which he eventually is when Hirayama is arrested. The drama is played out in part by the internal conflict within a young man with a bad leg who first tries to assassinate Yamaoka but is taken in by him and trained up as a potential successor only to be manipulated by his daughter who hands him the dagger Hirayama had returned to Yamaoka when he betrayed him and asks whether he wants to kill a woman or the “real villain”, by which she means Yamaoka but the boy has a different target in mind.

On the other hand, Yamaoka is exposed as having some very weird and cult-like ideas such as breeding a child that has his completely purified blood in his veins by encouraging a relationship between his legitimate daughter and a young man he brought back from China she has no idea is her half-brother born to a Chinese woman Yamaoka murdered to escape Manchuria. Brief mentions are made of Yamaoka’s Manchurian exploits though painted in a more heroic fashion that Kodama’s reality, as in a late speech about how “terrorism” has lost its meaning as some of the young men joining Yamaoka’s militia meditate on his pre-war activities in which he belonged to an organisation that assassinated politicians who advocated for peaceful coexistence with Korea and China. 

That the young assassin, Ikko (Tsutomu Kariba), eventually decides to knife Hirayama as the “real” villain, suggests that the youth of Japan has chosen Yamaoka rather than simply being sick of the political corruption he in effect represents even as others quickly, and perhaps uncritically, leap to his defence buying his claims of having been targeted due to “internal infighting”. While those around him are driven towards their deaths, Yamaoka survives muttering that it’s all for Japan even while finding himself cut loose as rival yakuza factions vie over territory and political influence. Lighting candles at his altar, it’s almost as if these men are human sacrifices designed to bring about his vision of a “better” Japan and chillingly it seems he has no shortage of willing victims.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Angel Guts: Nami (天使のはらわた　名美, Noboru Tanaka, 1979)

Posted on by

Aspiring journalist Nami Tsuchiya (Eri Kanuma) works for a magazine called “The Woman,” but it soon becomes clear she’s their only female reporter and one of a handful of women in an office otherwise staffed by men. Her editor has her writing a series titled “Rape and its Consequences” in which she attempts to interview women who’ve experienced sexual assault in an attempt to root out the effect it’s had on their lives. At times Nami seems a little conflicted, puffing away on a cigarette with a pensive look on her face, but there’s no denying that she’s sold out other women for a chance to make it in a man’s world by exploiting a suffering she does not herself share.

Muraki (Takeo Chii), formerly a top magazine editor, reminds her that not everyone who reads her magazine is a woman, but there is something perverse about the idea of her article which is otherwise conceived from a perspective that seems very male. The female readership of this magazine would not need to be educated about the prevalence of rape nor its consequences. Nami’s article doesn’t seem to want to find success stories, but to revel in misery. She accosts one of the women she’s hoping to interview and tries to badger her into talking on the record. Yoshiko appears fed up and tells her that recounting what happened would be like being raped all over again, but still Nami doesn’t relent. She tries to guilt her into speaking by suggesting that her testimony would stop other women being assaulted, which is backwards logic seeing as it isn’t the women who are responsible and even if she were advancing a victim blaming narrative that it’s on women to protect themselves, Yoshiko had not done anything that could be seen to be “wrong” nor is there any way she could have prevented what happened to her.

Through her articles, Nami has become complicit in this culture and is effectively an agent of rape herself in her desire to tear into the lives these women have tried to build for themselves and extract even more salacious detail. She describes Yoshiko as “happily married,” but she’s living in a rundown house on the margins of the city. It seems her husband maybe ill and therefore unable to work. Yoshiko may have married him out of a lack of other options and it’s not clear if her husband knows about her past or how he would react if he learned of it now. The fact that Nami’s attempt to interview others about Yoshiko fails bears out the social stigma that can surround those who’ve experienced sexual assault and suggests that Yoshiko has now become an outcast. The photos that they publish only black out Yoshiko’s eyes making it easy for those in her community to identify her which could certainly make her life much more difficult and lead to a loss of employment or social further exclusion.

It’s clear that Nami hasn’t really thought any of this through and is only focussed on impressing her male editors to be given better assignments. This may in part be what she means when she says that she’s been assaulted in her office by the people she works with on gaining more of an insight into the consequences of her writing. Though he threatens to rape her himself, Muraki seems to be a representative of a more compassionate masculinity but at the same time has been emasculated, rendered impotent after his own wife was raped by an intruder and then left him because he couldn’t satisfy her sexually. He connects Nami with a mentally disturbed nurse who was assaulted by a doctor with an autopsy fetish, though the incident was covered up by the hospital. None of these men, except Muraki, is held responsible for their actions. Nami, however, becomes all of these women, envisioning herself abandoned at the scene half-naked and clothes torn, discarded on the rubbish tip of the modern society. At the beginning of the film, a woman smashes the lens of the camera as a man moves towards her, as if she meant to rebuke us for watching, while even Nami finds herself becoming dangerously aroused by watching other women being assaulted or listening to their stories before she too cracks and begins to see herself as nothing more than an anonymous object at the mercy of male society.

Angel Guts: Nami is available as part of The Angel Guts Collection released on blu-ray 23rd February courtesy of Third Window Films.

Angel Guts: Red Classroom (天使のはらわた 赤い教室, Chusei Sone, 1979)

Posted on by

Chusei Sone’s Angel Guts: Red Classroom (天使のはらわた 赤い教室, Tenshi no Harawata: Akai Kyoshitsu) opens with grainy 8mm footage of a woman being gang raped, but this turns out to be a film being watched by the protagonist, Muraki (Keizo Kanie), rather than the one we’re actually watching. Nevertheless, in presenting the footage in this way, the film has made us somewhat complicit in witnessing this woman’s exploitation for the purposes of entertainment. A producer of pornographic magazines, Muraki is captivated by the woman’s ruined innocence and becomes obsessed with the idea of finding her.

Though he says he doesn’t think she belongs in this world, Muraki does not so much want to save Nami (Yuki Mizuhara) as get her to work for his magazine. He declares that years of this kind of work have left him numbed and desensitised. Watching her video was the first time he’s felt moved in years. However, it turns out that this may be because the video wasn’t a movie in which the actress had consented to appear, but raw footage of an actual gang rape committed against a trainee teacher. The implication is that this traumatic incident has numbed Nami in the same way Muraki has been numbed by his exposure to pornography, leaving her with a permanently vacant, inscrutable expression and reducing her to nothing but a sexual object. Though the 8mm “blue movie” is an illegal form of pornography that can be watched only in underground clubs, she claims to have run into several men like Muraki who recognise her and has concluded that the only way to get rid of them is to satisfy their desire by sleeping with them. She says she won’t feel anything anyway, but has scars on her wrist and seems to have turned to potentially dangerous sex with random men as a means of self-harm.

Muraki refuses to sleep with her, but in Nami he seems to be looking for his own buried innocence and masking the shame he feels towards his line of work. His parents think he publishes books for children, he tells Nami, but rants to another woman that his magazines are all the same and he doesn’t know how to make them better. He can’t take the kind of pictures he wants to, because he wouldn’t be able to publish them under the increasingly strict censorship laws. Repeated references are made to the need to avoid showing any pubic hair which is considered obscene under Japanese law, though they’re otherwise free to depict scenes of sexual violence and degradation. Ironically, Muraki is unable to meet Nami at their rendezvous because he’s been arrested for breaking the Protection of Minors Act after having photographed a 15-year-old girl, though Muraki claims he was just trying to help her. He says she told him she was 19, recently arrived from Aomori and had been reduced to shoplifting, so he gave her a job out of the kindness of his heart.

It’s things like this that might have Muraki desperate to prove he’s not “scum” but a good man and an artist rather than a purveyor of pornography and exploiter of women. The film has its cake and eats it too, critiquing female exploitation but simultaneously trading on it, if doing its best to make the viewer feel at least conflicted. Three years later, Muraki is in a relationship with a woman he once exploited who couldn’t let him go and has fathered a child, but the papers are full of news about suicides and domesticity does not seem to him provide much of a refuge. He continues to search for Nami in order to reclaim his innocence, but discovers that she has become a vacant sex worker, ironically working at a bar called “blue” and the plaything of a man in a James Dean-style red jacked who has broken dreams of his own. Unlike Muraki, she has only fallen further, and he is ultimately forced to watch what his business has reduced her to as a group of men set on a captive high school girl like a pack of wolves, ironically echoing the opening sequence. Yet in the end, it’s Nami who frees him by literally showing Muraki the way out of this place as he urges her to leave though she seems to say it’s already too late. Looking at her own distorted image in a puddle, she no longer knows who she is and has no identity that is not forced upon her by a violent male gaze.

Angel Guts: Red Classroom is available as part of The Angel Guts Collection released on blu-ray 23rd February courtesy of Third Window Films.

Silk Hat Boss (シルクハットの大親分, Norifumi Suzuki, 1970)

Posted on by

A true patriot squares off against a series of duplicitous nationalists in Norifumi Suzuki’s Red Peony Gambler spin-off, Silk Hat Boss (シルクハットの大親分, Silk Hat no Oooyabun) starring Tomisaburo Wakayama as top hat-wearing yakuza Komatora. Set in the world of 1905 in which Japan had just emerged victorious from the Russo-Japanese war, the film on one level attacks the rising militarism of late Meiji in which corrupt and arrogant military officers collude with venal yakuza to further the course of empire while lining their own pockets, but stops short of rejecting it outright.

Kumatora is about to return home in glory after taking his guys to the front to defeat the Russians and is expecting to receive a hero’s welcome when the boat docks in Kobe. Unfortunately, he is met only by his sister and an underling, Hansuke, who he immediately berates for the affront of having grown a magnificent moustache in his absence which is even bigger than his own. It turns out that evil yakuza rival Chindai has stolen all the credit for the work done by those like Kumatora and the ordinary foot soldiers who lost their lives defending Japan’s interests. 

Chindai has teamed up with corrupt military officer Kito who wastes no time throwing his weight around. Having fallen her during a brawl but been rebuffed, Kumatora searches for Osakan geisha Choko only to find her running away after Kito tried to assault her. Running around in his underwear, Kito rudely demands that Kumatora “return” Choko to him, but true to form Kumatora only tells him that he’s being unreasonable and the choice of whether to return or not belongs to Choko herself. Something similar occurs when Kumatora visits the family of a fallen comrade and discovers that his wife has been forced into sex work while the daughter, Satsuki, is seriously ill. Noticing the pock marks on her face which remind him of his own, Kumatora immediately decides to take the girl to a hospital at his own expense and, in fact, throws Kita out of a rickshaw in which he was riding because the girl’s need is greater. 

Kumatora is, perhaps unexpectedly, a great defender of the rights of women. After taking his guys to a brothel, he finds out that the girl assigned to him is only 14 and ends up cleaning her ears and singing a lullaby. Eventually he discovers that Chindai and Kita have been rounding up sex workers and tricking other women into sexual slavery with the intention of trafficking them and resolves to free all of them while looking for Satsuki’s mother to let her know she no longer needs to work in the red light district. Of course, Kumatora is very much in the throes of his unrequited love for Red Peony Gambler Oryu (Junko Fuji), running back to his lodgings mistakenly thinking she’s in town, but partially rejects Choko’s affections after she becomes besotted with him because he thinks it’s unfair to ask a woman to become the wife of a yakuza who might after all die any day.

Kumatora is also a fierce defender of his men, ceremoniously handing each of them a condom at the brothel and reminding them to stay safe before they head off with the women whom he has already rather comically inspected. He is very clear that the victory over the Russians was bought with the lives of ordinary workers who should be fairly rewarded with their share of the glory rather than allowing men like Chindai to exploit their heroism for their own gain. Kumatora finds an ally in good general Matsumoto who hands him a letter he can’t read from a general he admired who calls him the ideal Japanese man for his bravery and fighting spirit, but is as expected targeted by Kito and Chindai who are only interested in lining their own pockets. What it boils down to is that Kumatora is good because his patriotism is genuine while Kito and Chinda are bad because their nationalism is self-serving which does quite uncomfortably suggest that imperialism itself is not an issue only how it’s progressed. 

In any case, the corrupt officers are finally dealt a crushing blow by a resurgent Kumatora along with a little help from Oryu herself who eventually turns up to save the day in the bloody showdown which ends the film. Slightly absurdist in tone, the Silk Hat Boss has its fair share of offbeat humour beginning with Kumatora wearing his top hat in the bath and jokingly comparing various generals’ penis sizes to that of a loofah but is undeniably endearing in its hero’s guileless goodness. 

Wandering Ginza Butterfly (銀蝶渡り鳥, Kazuhiko Yamaguchi, 1972)

Posted on by

Having made a name for herself at Nikkatsu, Meiko Kaji was one of many who declined to continue working with the studio after it shifted production entirely to its Roman Porno line of softcore erotic cinema. Her exit, however, proved fortuitous for rival studio Toei who were urgently looking for a new female star following the sudden retirement of Junko Fuji who gave up acting after marrying a kabuki actor (she’d return a few years later working in television and subsequently films under the name Sumiko Fuji). With her feisty intensity and zeitgeisty energy Kaji would seem to be exactly what Toei were looking for. Her first vehicle for the studio, Wandering Ginza Butterfly (銀蝶渡り鳥, Gincho Wataridori) finds her attempting to forge a new star identity stepping into the space vacated by Fuji and making it her own in the midst of Toei’s ninkyo eiga decline. 

Set in the contemporary era, the film opens with a brief prologue at a woman’s prison in which new girl Tome (Kayako Sono) attempts to claim a space for herself by immediately challenging the boss of her new cell only for Nami (Meiko Kaji) to calmly defuse the situation with a traditional gambler’s introduction very much in keeping with Toei’s gambling films many of which had starred Fuji such as the Red Peony Gambler series which is perhaps referenced in Nami’s nickname of the Red Cherry Blossom. The action then shifts to a year later with Nami returning to Ginza in the hope of locating a woman, Saeko (Mieko Aoyagi), to thank her for writing a petition to get her prison sentence for killing a yakuza boss who had killed two members of her all-female biker gang reduced. On the train, however, she’s accosted by a mysterious man who rudely kisses her in order to hide from gangsters chasing him and is thereafter dragged into local intrigue after realising that a shady new yakuza group, Owada Enterprises, is at the centre of the injustice affecting all her friends new and old. 

As one of her new friends puts it, every girl in Ginza has a wound from the past she’d rather not talk about yet Nami’s particular sense of shame regarding her misspent biker girl youth and desire to atone are singular markers of her ninkyo inspired path to heroism. She’s just come out of prison, and now she’s going to clean up Ginza getting rid of rubbish, post-war yakuza who ignore the code and exploit “honest” people through underhanded methods such as buying up their debts to force them out of business. Discovering that Saeko has lost her business to Owada and thereafter became a regular bar girl but is now suffering with a serious illness and unable to work, Nami takes her spot at Bar Broncho while funnelling money to her through a mutual friend worried she wouldn’t take it if she knew where it came from. As a bar hostess, she is smart and coquettish, playing cute in a side not often seen from Kaji later in her career in order to get the punters to pay up, but unafraid to go all in that doesn’t work even pinching a construction worker’s truck as collateral when he refuses to pay his tab.

Nevertheless, the film subverts expectation by shifting away from the gambling movie model including only one round of cards which Nami easily wins and then immediately leaves explaining that you have to know when to quit in a fight or in gambling. The central conflict is, in fact, played out through an intense game of pool, a few brief moments of onscreen text explaining the rules before Nami squares off against a drug-addled Owada henchman whose face begins to glow in an ominous yellow as the stuff wears off. Nevertheless, when Owada reneges on his promises violence is all that remains. Nami and new friend Ryuji (Tsunehiko Watase) team up to take revenge on the sleazy gangsters in order to set Ginza to rights. 

Nevertheless, there’s a kind of poignancy in the fact the central trio are all war orphans, “wandering birds” trying to find a foothold in the complicated post-war landscape while attempting to hold on to their sense of integrity. When Nami’s past as an ex-con is exposed to the other ladies at the bar they roundly reject her, though one assumes they’ve sad stories of their own, leaving her consumed by shame. Reformed by Saeko’s unexpected generosity of spirit and compassionate forgiveness, she bitterly regrets the moral compromises of her biker girl life and commits herself to fighting injustice, unwavering in her refusal to be complicit in the increasingly amoral venality of the post-war society. Sadly, Wandering Ginza Butterfly did not entirely succeed in stealing Fuji’s crown, the contemporary setting unable to overcome audience fatigue with the ninkyo genre which was shortly to implode in the wake of the jitsuroku revolution. It spawned only one sequel, but did perhaps pave the way for Kaji’s path to Toei stardom as the face of pinky violence. 

Terrifying Girls’ High School: Women’s Violent Classroom (恐怖女子高校　女暴力教室, Norifumi Suzuki, 1972)

Posted on by

“Society fucking sucks” according to the delinquent teens at the centre of Terrifying Girls’ High School: Women’s Violent Classroom (恐怖女子高校　女暴力教室, Kyofu joshikoko: Onna boryoku kyoshitsu). The first of four in a Toei pinky violence series, the film presents a feminine rebellion against the societal tenets of womanhood, if doing so largely within the realms of male fantasy, but nevertheless kicks back against the corruption and hypocrisy of the older generation otherwise hellbent on controlling them.

Seiko Girls’ High School is, we’re told, both a private institution and a “trash bin” established to handle the “trash” transferred from “normal” schools. Nevertheless, the sign which hangs outside proclaims conservative values playing on the “good wife, wise mother” truism of traditional femininity in insisting the girls must become wise wives and kind mothers. Needless to say, most of the young women are quite uninterested in becoming any such thing. The unruliness of the school is signalled in the opening sequence as an older male teacher gives a boring lesson about curves while the girls all ignore him. Some are putting on makeup, others are eating or talking amongst themselves. After all, what’s the point of their education if the expectation is they’ll all become obedient housewives dependent on their husbands for support and allowed little in the way of free thought or interest?

A teacher later ironically suggests that the school’s reputation will later reflect badly on them when it comes to getting jobs or getting married only for one of the girls to snap back no one here is going to university and their reputations are all ruined anyway. It might be tempting to assume the problem is mostly generational, but the arrival of a young male teacher who has himself been transferred for violent conduct suggests a kind of backlash to the increasing freedoms of the contemporary society. He tells the girls that he won’t be soft on enforcing his three rules for education which are surprisingly gentle, being friendship, companionship, and harmony, but they simply laugh at him. Not only do they pelt the new teacher with pants and condoms but insist that it they who make the rules here and he will have to follow them. 

Then again there don’t seem to be any rules of any sort other than the absurdity of social hierarchy as they girls square off in various factions vying for dominance of the school, The implication is that gang leader Michiko (Miki Sugimoto) turned rebellious after being raped by strangers on her way home and witnessing her father, a politician, actively cover it up while she continues to feel shamed by her family. Another girl, Yoko (Natsuko Miura), otherwise not involved in the school violence, is working as a hostess to support herself as an orphan living with her grandmother but is lusted after by lecherous teacher who eventually forces her into a sexual relationship and then drops her when she becomes pregnant despite giving the implication he would marry her. Takeo tries to force her to have an abortion though she is determined to have the child despite the scandal causing him to hire another delinquent faction to beat her into a miscarriage. When she takes her own life, the school is most concerned about its reputation despite having done nothing when it was discovered the headmistress’ own daughter, the leader of the other gang, was also engaging in sex work. 

Takeo is also the target of a revenge plot at the hands of mysterious transfer student Yuki who avoids taking any categorical side until pulled into the conflict because of her friendship with Yoko and the growing sense of solidarity between the young women oppressed by a corrupt social system that uses shame to control them. “The rapists win in our society,” one sighs in an oddly contemporary moment. To celebrate their liberation, they burn their sailor suits having stripped and bound their teachers before posing before a sign announcing that they have enacted justice on the “three pigs” who financially exploited them through abusing the educational system. Full of ironic details such as the girls introducing themselves through the classic gambler’s pose, Suzuki films with a punkish irony quite clearly fetishising female violence yet also poking fun at lecherous middle-aged men, youthful hard cases, and matronly older women while in the end handing agency back to the girls even if society continues to suck. 

Delicate Skillful Fingers (白い指の戯れ, Toru Murakawa, 1972)

Posted on by

Toru Murakawa is most closely associated with his long and fruitful partnership with Yusaku Matsuda which came to define a certain kind of 1970s cinema, but he began his career at Nikkatsu in 1959 in the sales department before resigning and rejoining a year later as an aspiring director. At Nikkatsu he worked with established directors such as Toshio Masuda and Ko Nakahira, as well as with external directors such as Shiro Moritani before making his directorial debut in Nikkatsu Roman Porno, a line of soft core pornography the studio launched amid the collapse of the studio system, with Delicate Skillful Fingers (白い指の戯れ, Shiroi Yubi no Tawamure), in 1972.

Murakawa would actually leave the studio in the same year having completed two more Roman Porno films, returning to his hometown of Yamagata where he had married into the family of well-known metalwork artist Kenten Takahashi both training with him and helping his older brother Chiaki Murakawa set up the Yamagata Symphony Orchestra. In any case, his temporary withdrawal from the film industry had nothing to with a lack of success in his debut feature. Delicate Skillful Fingers was a critical hit and the first of Nikkatsu’s Roman Porno line to feature in Kinema Junpo’s prestigious Best Ten. It was also the debut film for lead actress Hiroko Isayama and, perhaps not entirely coincidentally, the first time the studio put the male star front and centre in their branding campaign. 

Co-scripted by another top Roman Porno name Tatsumi Kumashiro, the film follows the innocent and naive Yuki (Hiroko Isayama), who is so sensitive that the sight of a wrecked car makes her cry in sympathy, as she falls deeper into the world of petty street crime after being chatted up in a cafe by a goofy guy who just happens to have a problem with kleptomania. At least according to his sometime girlfriend Shoko, Jiro (Hajime Tanimoto) came from a wealthy family and attended a fee-paying school, seemingly stealing for the thrill of it rather than financial need. It has to be said that Yuki is rather ditsy, bamboozled into buying food to cook Jiro dinner while entering into a strange dialogue with a robot offering greetings in Chinese as to whether she should give him her virginity which she eventually does, perhaps recklessly, though it ends up not going particularly well, with Jiro having to explain that “the ceremony is now ended” without it seems much fanfare. In any case when he’s picked up by the police and put away for three years because he already had a record, Yuki has to quite her factory job because of persistent police harassment and bizarrely ends up living with Shoko who has predatory lesbian designs on her Yuki responds to but with a degree of internalised shame. 

Shoko’s desire for other women is in someways depicted as an expression of corruption caused by her pickpocket lifestyle as she implies sometime later in suggesting that Yuki will “come to like it” linking the idea of lesbian sex and the act of pickpocketing as implied by “delicate skilful fingers” of the film’s title. Yuki’s bodily submission but mental resistance is intended to suggest her lingering innocence, yet to submit herself to the hedonistic amorality of the pickpocket lifestyle. Rejecting Shoko, she later becomes sexually involved with Jiro’s former cellmate Taku (Ichiro Araki) who is responsible for teaching her how to pickpocket. Taku is otherwise seemingly less interested in sex, but allows Yuki to take the lead while he remains somewhat passive, lying still and still and chewing gum, always with his sunshades remaining firmly on. He even at one point passes her off to an associate in the middle of making love to her, Yuki first resisting on realising what’s going on but eventually giving in to it though clearly not willingly. 

The contrast between the two men, Jiro and Taku, is stark with Jiro clearly asking for consent at each step and waiting for Yuki to confirm it even if in the end he fails to perform whereas Taku seems to be merely using sex which doesn’t interest him to earn her trust and convince her to help him out in his various criminal operations. Yuki is seduced into a world of crime, but remains romantically naive, foolishly sacrificing herself for Taku and insisting she alone was responsible when cornered by the police while he simply walks away and then jokes with a policeman that he’ll look after her when she’s out. Even so, her loyalty to Taku, in contrast with Shoko’s continuing cynicism, proves that she is not fully corrupted by the pickpocket life, even if she foolishly damns herself by needlessly protecting him at the cost of her own future and wellbeing. On the other hand, to so is entirely her own choice just as it was her own choice to sleep with Jiro in the full embrace of her agency. Murakawa’s Nikkatsu debut is a gritty, grimy urban tale of amoral post-war youth but, even in its tragic conclusion, signals the hero’s spineless indifference and hands victory to the heroine who remains uncorrupted but only to her eternal cost. 

Woods Are Wet (女地獄　森は濡れた, Tatsumi Kumashiro, 1973)

Posted on by

As long as people live honest lives, eventually good things will happen to them, according to the sinister mistress at the centre of Takumi Kumashiro’s Roman Porno Woods Are Wet (女地獄　森は濡れた, Onna Jigoku: Mori wa Nureta). Perversely, she may actually believe this to be true but only in the most ironic of senses as she and her “cruel” husband enjoy incredibly happy lives together having decided to “honestly” embrace their true desires, which include things like rape, murder, and eating grapes off the corpses of their victims.

Inspired by the Marquis de Sade’s Justine and set in the Taisho era, the film begins in true gothic style as Sachiko (Hiroko Isayama), a runaway maid in flight from an accusation of having murdered her mistress, encounters Yoko (Rie Nakagawa), an upper-class lady who unexpectedly comes to her rescue in a small town. Yoko takes her back to the Western-style mansion she shares with her husband Ryunosuke (Hatsuo Yamaya) whom she describes as being incredibly cruel. Explaining that she’s been desperately lonely since her marriage at 19, Yoko begs Sachiko to stay but as her companion rather than a servant, which is another act of class transgression for which there will presumably be a price. 

In any case, the atmosphere changes when Ryunosuke arrives and reveals he knows all about Sachiko’s predicament and blackmails her into helping with his schemes to rape and murder guests at the hotel he runs. He explains that he’s very wealthy and does this for kicks not out of financial necessity but nevertheless uses her to spice up his game by directly telling her to warn the guests that their lives are in danger. If she manages to get them to escape, he’ll let her go too, but of course it’s not as easy as she’d assumed it would be, especially as the first two guests she’s sent to brutally rape her. Even so, she vows to escape with them, only they are not quite clever enough to beat Ryunosuke’s game.

Out in the middle of nowhere, the mansion is a true gothic fantasy lit by candle light due to an absence of electricity because of the Depression. Ryunosuke has adapted it so that it contains a series of prison-like doors with iron bars and locks that allow him to trap Sachiko and others exactly where he wants them. He is vile and depraved, as is Yoko, though they later brand themselves as simply liberated and living “honestly” having embraced their true desires. Ryunosuke paints himself as a quiet revolutionary, asking why he should conform with rules and laws dictated by a distant authority to which he himself does not subscribe. He describes commonly held visions of morality as nothing more than a tool of social coercion designed to control the common man (which he is not), in which he may have a valid point despite the depravity of his apparently honest nature. 

This aspect of Ryunosuke as an anti-social force was apparently something very much intended by Kumashiro, who was himself rebelling against a moral panic which had seen Nikkatsu’s Roman Porno line condemned under public obscenity laws. To make a point, he inserts large black blocks and lines throughout the film to mimic those sometimes demanded by the censors, though enlarged to an absurd degree and often not actually covering what they would presumably be intended to or actually drawing attention to it. In any case, what the censors objected to in this case was not apparently the sex itself but the violence which accompanies it, notably in the scenes in which blood-soaked sex continues after Yoko has shot one of the male victims she effectively raped at gunpoint. 

The central part of the film is a lengthy orgy scene in which Ryunosuke has his maids whip the victims while he anally rapes them while they are forced to have sex with Yoko and Sachiko on the pretext of saving their lives. It only gets grimmer from there, though there’s a censoriousness about Sachiko’s insistence that happiness should come from correctness to counter the “happiness” that Yoko and Ryunosuke exude in their embrace of their baser desires that undercuts her role as the innocent heroine standing up to their depraved inhumanity amid the absurd interruption of a radio taiso broadcast signalling the arrival of the next unhappy guests to rock up for a less than pleasant stay at this decidedly unluxurious hotel.

The 7 Grandmasters (虎豹龍蛇鷹, Joseph Kuo, 1977)

Posted on by

“The way of kung fu, no one is invincible. A fighter shouldn’t be arrogant and bully others,” according to one of the mini lessons given by the ageing champion at the centre of Joseph Kuo’s 7 Grandmasters (虎豹龍蛇鷹), though it has to be said there is a fair amount of cockiness in play while bullying does seem to be a part of his training programme. Arrogance is in fact what he has himself been accused of at the ceremony at which he has been honoured by the emperor and after which he planned to retire if he had not received a rude note telling him he is not a real champion and shouldn’t lay claim to the title until he’s defeated all of the other regional champions in each of their signature fighting styles. 

A 30-year veteran of the local martial arts scene, Zhang Shenguang (Jack Long) is tired and ready to pass his school on to the next generation but feels he cannot retire until he’s proved once and for all that he is the greatest kung fu master. Setting out with his daughter and three pupils, he roams around the land easily defeating his rivals and teaching them a lesson to boot. Unfortunately, however, his first target, Sha (Wong Fei-lung), ends up dying while he’s also being followed around by an over-earnest boy, Shao Ying (Li Yi Min), who insists on becoming his pupil, though Zhang is unwilling to take him on because his own master was betrayed by a bad faith student who stole the final three pages of the book he’d been given to safeguard outlining the 12 Bai Mei strikes.

Zhang is definitely all about righteousness, constantly reminding everyone about the responsibilities that come with kung fu but his own students are fairly merciless to Shao Ying firstly mocking him as he trails along behind them like a stray puppy and then continuing to bully him until he finally surpasses their own abilities. They are all also supremely confident and often resort to cocky banter during fights which it has to be admitted they usually win. The film is structured around Zhang’s quest abruptly shifting from one expertly choreographed fight sequence to another, each showing off a different style and the ways in which Zhang can overcome it while some of his opponents accept defeat gracefully and others not. In one town they are ambushed by goons working for the local master who wanted to avoid potentially losing his title by underhandedly taking Zhang out first but as Zhang puts it losing his good name instead. The final challenger meanwhile refuses to Zhang directly because he can see Zhang is already ill and it wouldn’t be fair so has their students square off instead. 

Nevertheless, Zhang is not permitted to exit the world of kung fu until dealing with the left over baggage of the three missing strikes of Bai Mei, Shao Ying eventually becoming its inheritor after a twist of fate connects him with Zhang’s past while causing him a paradoxical dilemma in temporarily becoming Zhang’s enemy in order to avenge the death of his father as his code dictates. Like Zhang however he is perhaps only trying to make a point, never intending to harm his former mentor, at least physically, but only to close the cycle through symbolic revenge, later returning to Zhang’s side on realising he’s been used and deceived. 

Featuring top choreography from Hong Kong’s Yuen Kwai and Yuen Cheung Yan, Kuo’s low budget indie kung fu drama is pure fight fest less interested in the emotional conflicts between the men than the physical which might explain its incredibly abrupt conclusion which largely implodes the moment of catharsis achieved in the villain’s defeat. Even so, it succeeds in showcasing a series of fighting styles as Zhang continues with his quest to prove himself the ultimate grandmaster so he can finally retire while throwing in some comic relief thanks to Shao Ying’s dogged determination to become one of the gang before finally proving himself the most talented of all the students, not least because of his perseverance and willingness to learn. Shooting mainly in the open air to avoid the expense of sets, Kuo’s approach is unfussy but to the point of removing all distractions in order to showcase the immense abilities of his performers in an otherwise generic tale of rivalry and revenge.