As its opening text explains, Mikio Naruse’s The Angry Street (怒りの街, Ikari no Machi) takes place in a world in which a love of justice and faith in others has been crushed under foot. That might equally apply to any other of Naruse’s films and well enough reflects his generalised philosophy that the world in which we live betrays us, but in this case it’s more than usually true as he adopts the trappings of film noir to consider the series of reversals that have taken place amid post-war chaos chief among them class and gender.
Sociopathic student Shigetaka’s (Yasumi Hara) primary motivation is to earn money for his family, once upper middle-class but now fallen on hard times, but he’s also engaged in an act of class warfare taking revenge on the “nouveau riche” who he feels have usurped his class privilege. His chief weapon is his good looks along with his seductive charm which he puts to full use on the dance floor flirting with naive young women to whom he sells sob stories of his poverty to extort money out of them. He and his friend Mori (Jukichi Uno) have an “agreement” that what they’re doing’s alright as long as they only take advantage of the women financially rather than sexually though at this point Shigetaka seems to have little interest in that anyway insisting that women are just business to him so he little cares for their feelings.
Their sense of class resentment is rammed home by their mocking of their classmates who have to do “humiliating” jobs to support themselves such as selling lottery tickets in the streets. Trying to get them to attend a meeting about student employment, their classmates describe them as “privileged” suggesting they may feel it’s not their problem because they don’t need to work little knowing that each of them is impoverished and dependent on exploiting women for their income.
There is however also a gender reversal in play as Shigetaka misogynistically takes on a feminised role, playing the gold digger in attempting to manipulate women, who are now in a position of power, into supporting him financially. He even tells some of them that he’s being forced into a financial marriage by his “old-fashioned” family, playing the damsel in distress and hoping that his target will swoop in to rescue him. When one of the women writes to his home after he abandons her, his grandmother is scandalised by the idea that he might have formed an attachment to a woman to whom he had not been formally introduced but equally that he might have been frequenting “effeminate” places such as dance halls. Unmanliness is something he’s accused of several times but also the tool which he uses to seduce women who are taken in by his feminine features and graceful dancing. Closely echoing Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope, it’s near impossible not to read both Shigetaka and Mori as queer coded and the relationship between them filled with homoerotic tension as Mori looks on in jealously while Shigetaka goes about his business seducing naive young women they’ll swindle together.
A point of crisis arrives when the pair bite off more than they can chew in getting involved with a woman who is slightly older and sophisticated in her dealings with men. An independent woman, Tagami (Yuriko Hamada) claims to be a dentist but actually makes her money through smuggling and the black market if drawing her line at drugs. Shigetaka thinks he’s using her, but Mori warns him she’s really the one in charge and playing him at his own game planning to drop him once she’s got what she wanted which in this case is his youthful flesh (realistically the only thing he could possibly offer her). Tagami draws him into a wider and more dangerous world of crime than he’s equipped to deal with just as Mori receives twin blows that break the spell and encourage him to want out of Shigetaka’s schemes firstly in discovering that one of their targets, Kimiko (Mayuri Mokusho), is the sweetheart of an old war buddy, and then into running into Shigetaka’s earnest sister Masako (Setsuko Wakayama) who is the film’s de facto moral authority pulling him away from Shigetaka’s dark machinations back towards a more conventional morality.
In a series of flashbacks, he remembers more innocent times before the war when he too sold tickets on the street and worked in a shop washing windows while going on innocent dates with Masako. The implication is that it’s his wartime service along with the world he came back to that have filled him with nihilistic cynicism while he later says that he indulges in Shigetaka’s schemes as a means of staying close to him and earning his favour. But Shigetaka is already far too corrupt, filled with class resentment over his lost privilege along with a deep-seated misogyny as a reflection of his sense of emasculation in this new world in which young women wield significant economic power. Kimiko in particular is brash and insensitive even aside from her naivety remarking on the piles of money that turn up at her home every day before virtually throwing cash at Shigetaka with seemingly no thought as to how that might make him feel even if he weren’t conning her in offending his pride and masculinity.
Mori wonders how he can save himself if Shigetaka remains so irredeemable and is instructed by Masako that they must work together and live honestly though even she hangs on to her ideas of social class scandalised by the revelation that her mother too has begun selling things in the street, in her case knitted socks which is a fairly labour intensive activity for an incredibly small profit margin. Echoing film noir, Naruse opens and closes with scenes of the present day city teeming with life yet in a way that seems more ominous than exuberant even in the myriad dance halls where youngsters come to look for love but soon find themselves lost amid the contradictions and confusions of a rapidly changing city.
Kinuyo Tanaka was one of the most successful actresses of the pre-war years well known for her work with celebrated director Kenji Mizoguchi including several of his most critically acclaimed works such as Sansho the Bailiff, Ugetsu, and The Life of Oharu. However, post-war Japan was a very different place and Tanaka had a different kind of ambition. With 1953’s Love Letter (恋文, Koibumi) she became Japan’s second ever female feature film director, though her working and personal relationship with Mizoguchi ended when he attempted to block her access to the Director’s Guild of Japan. No one quite knows why he did this and he tried to go back on it later but the damage was done, Tanaka never forgave him for this very public betrayal. Whatever Mizoguchi may have been thinking, he was very wrong indeed – Tanaka’s first venture behind the camera is an extraordinarily interesting one which is not only a technically solid production but actively seeks a new kind of Japanese cinema.
Windows on Worlds 