Tag: Keizo Kawasaki

Undercurrent (夜の河, Kozaburo Yoshimura, 1956)

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Is it possible to be both married and personally and artistically fulfilled? Marriage hangs over Kiwa (Fujiko Yamamoto) like a looming cage in Kozaburo Yoshimura’s sensuous melodrama Undercurrent (夜の河, Yoru no Kawa, AKA Night River). Scripted not by his regular writer Kaneto Shindo but frequent Mikio Naruse collaborator Sumie Tanaka adapting a novel by Hisao Sawano, the film finds its heroine caught between tradition and modernity while struggling to maintain her position as an independent woman and rightful heir to her father’s kimono dyeing business.

Everyone also keeps telling her that kimono itself is dying out, a relic of a bygone past now that everyone wears Western dress. Even Kiwa’s younger sister Miyoko (Michiko Ono) dresses exclusively in Western fashions and moves to Tokyo on her marriage. An ancient capital, Kyoto is the centre of historical elegance and the last bastion of these “outdated ideals”, yet several shops in their area have closed recently and people do things differently now. A wealthy woman comes to the shop with some fabric directly, cutting out the middlemen and haggling for a discount while cheerfully asking for her cab fare to be covered when Kiwa refuses the job. The young man they’ve taken in as an apprentice, Toshio, leaves to work in an electric factory complaining that “master” and “apprentice” are outdated concepts and that it’s against the Labour Law to force him to work overtime. Kiwa’s father Yujiro (Eijiro Tono), meanwhile, thinks this is just an expression of Toshio’s lack of commitment and that it’s only right that an apprentice should be applying himself to learning his craft every waking moment of the day. 

He was after all once an apprentice himself, but is both proud that his daughter has surpassed him in skill and guilty, fearful that Kiwa has sacrificed her own life and happiness to devote herself to kimono dyeing which is why she has never married. On one level, he’s happy if she’s happy and willing to leave marriage up to her, but also wary of the social censure of the neighbours including his kimono dyeing mentor who gives him a telling-off for his failure as a father to find a match for his daughter. When rumours arise that Kiwa has entered an affair with a married professor, the lady who helped Yujiro get started in business more or less tells him he should get her married to keep her in line. If hadn’t been for the war, she says, Kiwa would have been safely married off long ago and would probably have a gaggle of children to look after which would obviously prevent her from pursuing her art as a kimono dyer though the lady herself has obviously gone on working. 

Kiwa is drawn Takemura (Ken Uehara ) firstly because he’s wearing a tie that features one of her signature dyes which implies some kind of affinity between them. That the fact that he was touring a Nara temple alone with his daughter may have suggested he was a widower, though in truth Kiwa always knew he was married and that may have been a key part of what attracted her to him. She is after all, as Yujiro’s mentor said, a woman and experiences romantic desire even if the mentor is wrong to say that Kiwa sublimates her loneliness through art when in reality the reverse is true. After meeting Takemura even Yujiro remarks that she seems more like a woman, implying that her industry and forthrightness lend her a masculine quality as does her determination to get on in business. She first strikes up a business relationship with the sleazy Omiya (Eitaro Ozawa) whose wife is always watching him like a hawk though she manages to rebuff his attentions while establishing herself as business woman and in demand kimono designer. In pursuit of Takemura she is the one bringing him gifts and inviting him out for walks while Takemura remains somewhat conflicted and pulled along her wake.

Yet for all that, none of her family members really question the fact that she’s been carrying on with a married man and rather seem slightly relieved that she’s discovered an interest in romance or perhaps just anything outside of kimono dyeing. Even Takemura’s daughter suspects they’re romantically involved and doesn’t seem to mind. Yujiro remarks on Kiwa suddenly using the colour red which she never previously liked and it does seem to echo her reawakening passion. Takemura is also researching red fruit flies, which is less romantic, but also hints his barely suppressed longing. The film seems to align him with yellow flowers and Kiwa with pink. When they’re caught in a rainstorm and refuge in an inn owned by Kiwa’s childhood friend, the entire room in bathed in the glow of the Daimonji fire festival as their passions finally, and perhaps unwisely, overtake them as Takemura announces he’s thinking of moving far away perhaps to avoid this forbidden romance or otherwise for the health of his ailing wife who has been a Kyoto hospital for the last two years.

It’s finding out about Mrs Takemura’s likely terminal illness that seems to implode Kiwa’s romantic fantasy. After they’d made love for the first time, she had told Takemura that if she became pregnant she’d raise the child alone without intruding on his family life, which is to say she wasn’t really envisaging one with him. Her horror is on one level framed as guilt, that she now sees she’s committed an act of betrayal and resents Takemura when he tells her “it won’t be much longer” as if he were counting down the days until his wife passed away. Or worse, that he or others suspected that Kiwa willed her dead. But in reality the reverse is true. Mrs Takemura’s death is an existential threat to Kiwa’s independence. She doesn’t want to get married, even if loves Takemura, because if she did she wouldn’t be able to maintain her independence or career as a kimono dyer. She really does mean it when she says that likes it best when it’s just she and her father in their “cramped” old-fashioned dyeing shop without even an apprentice. 

A tortured art student who seems to pine for her tells her as much, disappointed in her for her relationship with Takemura not out of moral censure but because he fears she’s betraying her art. Okamoto is much younger than her and she’s not interested in him romantically even if he’s painting slightly lewd interpretations of his mental image of her. At one point he appears with a bandage around his neck that implies he may have tried to take his own life and eventually announces he’s leaving Kyoto because he can’t secure his identity there. Ironically he’s happy that Kiwa and Takemura are now free to love each other when the opposite is now true. Now that he’s no longer a married man, Kiwa can no longer love him and is denied the possibility of having both romantic and artistic fulfilment. She is perhaps free in another way, backed by a deep red cloth hanging up to dry as she watches the May Day parade pass by with all of its waving red flags having embarked on a life that is defiantly of her choosing and fulfilled by the passion of art.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Sound in the Mist (霧の音, Hiroshi Shimizu, 1956)

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In the opening scenes of Hiroshi Shimizu’s Sound in the Mist (霧の音, Kiri no Oto), a young woman tells another that “as women, we need to create our own happiness,” though as it turns out it’s something that neither of them are really able to do. A classic melodrama, the film once again hints at Shimizu’s mistrust of romance and the frustrating inability of men and women to communicate or embrace their love for one another even when the seeming barriers preventing it have been removed.

To that extent, it’s interesting that the chief disagreement between unhappily married botanist Kazuhiko (Ken Uehara) and his wife Katsuyo is over her feminist politics and desire to devote herself to women’s emancipation under the new post-war constitution. The main bone of contention is that she wants to sell a mountain owned by Kazuhiko’s family to fund her political career though as he later says this mountain is his life. In any case he lets her sell it, believing there’s no point putting up a fight. He puts up even less of one in his relationship with Tsuruko (Michiyo Kogure), his assistant who is hopelessly in love with him yet after his wife’s angry visit decides to absent herself feeling as if she’s in the way.

It was her friend Ayako, a Tokyo dancer, who told her that women need to make their own happiness but in the end she couldn’t do it either. She was similarly involved with a weak-willed married man who continued to vacillate over leaving his wife offering the justification that he didn’t want to mess things up for his children. Eventually the pair find escape through double suicide which only emphasises the futility of their romantic connection. Tsuruko similarly makes several comments about the idea of death and dying, stating that if she were to die she’d want to go to a particular spot in the mountain which seems like heaven to her.

Though Katsuyo describes it as a “filthy” place the cabin does indeed become a kind of haven, a bubble of apparently chaste love and longing inhabited only by Kazuhiko and Tsuruko as the voiceover says hiding out from post-war chaos. Tsuruko seems to be the kind of woman Kazuhiko regards as the ideal wife in that she cares for him and supports his work even if he tells Katsuyo he just needed someone to run errands and do the grocery shopping so Tsuruko is there as his maid. Both are at pains to emphasise that no physical relationship exists between them but are otherwise prevented from acting on the their love because of Kazuhiko’s marriage along the existence of his daughter, Yuko (Keiko Fujita), who may be adversely affected by her parents’ decision to divorce in an age when such things were less common.

Kazuhiko continues to return to the mountain cabin which has since become an inn at regular intervals to see the Harvest Moon, as does Tsuruko though she also carries a degree of shame that makes her fear re-encountering Kazuhiko having become a geisha apparently solely to ensure her proximity to the mountain. Once again filming with the gentle lateral motion familiar from his later films, Shimizu focuses on the landscape and suggests that these lovers are only free to love in the natural world unconstrained by the petty concerns of civilisation which prevent them from embracing their desires. The sound in the mist is perhaps that of Kazuhiko’s latent romanticism and the implication that to him it may be better to suffer for love than to accept it. The same may be true for Tsuruko who is equally powerless if filled with regret that in the end she gave up so easily rather than fight for the love of her life.

On the other hand, the cabin seems to have given rise to a love match between Kazuhiko’s daughter Yuko and her husband who vow to continue the tradition of coming to the inn on the occasion of the Harvest Moon which marks both their wedding anniversary and the time they met. Yuko’s melancholy expression on coming to an understanding of her father’s “special memories” suggests a gentle sympathy but also that this younger generation is freer to love though no less romantic.The poignant closing scenes in which Kazuhiko wanders into the mist are nevertheless filled with irresolution, regret, and a longing that express only a deep sadness for the misconnections and misunderstandings of a less open past.

Sound in the Mist screens at Japan Society New York on May 23/30 as part of Hiroshi Shimizu Part 2: The Postwar and Independent Years.

Punishment Room (処刑の部屋, Kon Ichikawa, 1956)

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In the mid-1950s, Nikkatsu released a series of incendiary youth films which gave rise to a small moral panic in the older generation. The “Sun Tribe” movies proved so controversial that Nikkatsu could only release three of them before bowing to public pressure while Toho and Daiei both managed to release one each, bringing the total up to five. Produced by Daiei, Kon Ichikawa’s contribution to the Sun Tribe phenomenon, Punishment Room (処刑の部屋, Shokei no Heya), adapted another novel by Crazed Fruit’s Shintaro Ishihara who had, it seems, managed to capture something of the nihilistic spirit of the age.

Among the darkest of the Sun Tribe tales, Punishment Room follows near sociopathic university student Katsumi (Hiroshi Kawaguchi) as he works out his frustration with his hangdog father Hanya (Seiji Miyaguchi) by kicking back against societal rigidity. Hanya is a bank clerk with some kind of stress-related stomach complaint for which he is forever taking medicine. One particular day, Katsumi and his friend Hideo (Shoji Umewaka) turn up to run some kind of scam on him, insisting that Hideo’s family are in dire straits because his dad’s working abroad and they don’t have money to make a payment on a loan. The boys want Hanya to buy the note of debt as security and lend them 30,000 yen, something which isn’t really allowed but he ends up taking out half of his own life savings to avoid embarrassing or being embarrassed by his own son in the workplace. The boys, however, were just trying to extort him and planning to use the money to host a college dance while making a little extra on the side. 

At this point, most still seem to feel that Katsumi is a “nice kid”, while Hideo is a bad influence. His middle school best friend Ryoji more or less says as much, but no one really knows the extent to which Katsumi is already becoming a black hole of nihilistic fury. His ire is provoked during a college debate session at which he’s outtalked by smart female student Akiko (Ayako Wakao) and abruptly cut off by the bored professor (Nobuo Nakamura). Despite knowing that one of his buddies has a crush on her, Katsumi makes a point of picking Akiko up during the chaos of celebration after a sports game. Along with Hideo and another, more innocent student they nickname “Sonny”, Katsumi takes Akiko and her friend to a nearby drinking house, popping out to buy sleeping pills and eventually spiking their drinks while they use the bathroom, knocking Sonny out for good measure to stop him getting in the way. After dragging the barely conscious girls back to Hideo’s family home, they take one each and rape them. On waking Akiko is defiant, threatening to call the police but an unrepentant Katsumi insists that she won’t be believed. Not content with their humiliations, the guys even insist on taking the girls home by cab only to run out and leave them with the bill. 

Katsumi is is equally unrepentant when someone sends his family a letter informing them of his conduct, admitting that the allegations are true but insisting that the women are complicit because they did not report him to the police. He even refers to Akiko, who has after a fashion fallen in love with him, as “sort of my girlfriend”. Hanya ironically blames his wife whom he has treated with nothing but contempt, giving his son a crash course in a inherited misogyny, but she turns the same logic of toxic masculinity back on him in pointing out that his own passivity is the major cause of his son’s resentful rebelliousness. If Katsumi is rebelling against something rather than just a sociopathic little punk, it is indeed the spinelessness he sees in his father, obliged to scrape and bow for a mere pittance as a “wage slave” of a cruelly conformist society. 

An angry young man, Katsumi preemptively rejects the salaryman straightjacket by rebelling against conventional morality. “I do what I want” he insists, as if proving that he’s a free agent acting under force of will alone and beholden to no one. His efforts are however, futile. His amoral violence buys him nothing but the same in return. Denied a mechanism for dealing with emotion, contemptuous of hollow authority figures, and infinitely bored by a society they believe has nothing to offer them bar empty consumerism, post-war youth seeks escape but finds only nihilistic self-destruction, trapped in a perpetual Punishment Room with no exit in sight. 

Opening Scene (no subtitles)

https://youtu.be/rv-5K5usjkE

The Blue Sky Maiden (青空娘, Yasuzo Masumura, 1957)

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blue sky maiden dvd coverYasuzo Masumura is generally remembered for dark, erotic and disturbing explorations of human behaviour but the early part of his career was marked by a more hopeful innocence and a less cynical yet still cutting humour. His debut, Kisses, was very much in the mould of the youth movie of the day but its themes were both more innocent and more controversial as a boy and girl bond after running into each other at the prison where both of their parents are serving time. Marked by darkness as it is, the worldview of Kisses is much kinder than Masumura would later allow as the pair of lovers seem to shake off their respective concerns to embrace the youthful joy and boundless freedom young love can offer.

The Blue Sky Maiden (青空娘, Aozora Musume), Masumura’s second film, does something similar but with added bite. Working for the first time with actress Ayako Wakao who would later become something of a muse, Masumura takes a typical melodrama storyline – the returned illegitimate child treated as a poor relation by her own “family”, and turns it into a genial comedy in which Wakao’s charming heroine shines brightly despite the often cruel and heartless treatment she receives. As far as the family drama goes, the genre was still in its heyday and the family unit itself fairly unquestioned yet as Masumura shows times were changing and perhaps the family is not the bedrock it initially seems to be.

18 year old Yuko (Ayako Wakao) stands at the gates of adulthood. Taking a last photo in school uniform with her high school friends as they prepare for graduation, Yuko expresses her nervousness about being sent to Tokyo to live with the family of a father she barely knows while her friends worry about getting married or getting stuck in their tiny village all alone respectively. Tragedy strikes when the girls’ teacher arrives on a bicycle and informs them that Yuko’s grandmother has been taken ill. On her death bed, the grandmother reveals the reason Yuko is the only one of her father’s four children to be raised in the country is not a concern for her health, but that she is illegitimate. Yuko’s father, unhappy in his marriage, fell in love with his secretary (Kuniko Miyake) who later gave birth to Yuko, but he was already married with two children and so Yuko’s mother went to Manchuria leaving her to be raised in secret in the country.

Having nowhere else to go, Yuko arrives at her father’s large Western style house to be greeted coldly by her half-siblings, and treated as a maid by her still angry step-mother while her father (Kinzo Shin) is away on business. It has to be said that this model middle class family are an extremely unpleasant bunch. Step-mother Tatsuko (Sadako Sawamura) is shrewish and embittered while oldest daughter Teruko (Noriko Hodaka) spends all her time chasing wealthy boyfriends (but failing to win them because she’s just as mean as her mother). The oldest brother (Yuji Shinagawa) idles away in a hipster jazz band while the youngest boy, Hiroshi (Yukihiko Iwatare), is rude and boisterous but later bonds with his new big sister when she is the only one to really bother interacting with him.

The Ono household has always been an unhappy one. Yuko’s father married his wife after being bamboozled into it by an overbearing boss trying to offload his difficult daughter. Feeling trapped and avoiding going home he fell in love with a kind woman at work, had an affair, and wanted to marry her but wasn’t strong enough to break off not only from his unwanted family but also from his career in pursuing personal happiness. By Masumura’s logic, it’s this failure to follow one’s heart which has poisoned the Ono family ruining not only the lives of Tatsuko and the children who have no respect for their father or capacity for real human feeling (as Yuko later tells them), but also that of Yuko’s poor mother  whose life has been one of constant suffering after being unfairly jettisoned by a man who was bold enough to have an affair, but not to defy social conventions and leave an unhappy home.

Yuko herself, however, refuses to allow her life to be ruined by the failings of others. Looking up at the bright blue sky with her teacher (Kenji Sugawara), she learns to create her own stretch of heaven if only in her own mind. Though others might have fought and complained at being forced into the role of maid in what is her own family home, Yuko bears her new circumstances with stoicism and good humour. Thanks to her kindness and enthusiasm, the family maid, Yae (Chocho Miyako), is quickly on her side and if Teruko’s latest target, Hirooka (Keizo Kawasaki) starts to prefer the “new servant girl” his defection is completely understandable. Unlike later Masumura heroines, Yuko’s “revenge” is total yet constructive. She refuses to be cowed by unkindness, remains pure hearted in the face of cruelty, and resolves to find her own happiness and encourage others to do the same. With a few cutting words offered kindly, Yuko gets to the heart of the Onos, essentially reminding her father that all of this unhappiness is his own fault – he made his bed 20 years ago, now he needs to lie it and be a full-time husband and father to the family of lonely misfits he created in the absence of love.

Light and bright and colourful, The Blue Sky Maiden is among Masumura’s more cheerful films, not least because it does seem to believe that true happiness is possible. Yuko does not so much defy social convention as ignore it. She lives openly and without rancour or regret. She takes things as she finds them and people (aside from the Onos) are good to her because she is good to them. Though Masumura’s later work would become increasingly dark and melancholy, Yuko bears out many of his most central themes in her steadfast claim to her own individuality and equally steadfast commitment to enabling the happiness of others in defiance of prevailing social codes.

Diary of a Mad Old Man (瘋癲老人日記, Keigo Kimura, 1962)

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e0022344_20155095Junichiro Tanizaki is giant of Japanese literature whose work has often been adapted for the screen with Manji alone receiving four different filmic treatments between 1964 and 2006. His often erotic themes tallied nicely with those of the director of the 1964 version, Yasuzo Masumura who also adapted Tanizaki’s The Tattooist under the title of Irezumi, both of which starred Masumura’s muse Ayako Wakao. Preceding both of these, Keigo Kimura’s Diary of a Mad Old Man (瘋癲老人日記, Futen Rojin Nikki) adapts a late, and at that time extremely recent, work by Tanizaki which again drew some inspiration from his own life as it explores the frustrated sexuality of an older man facing partial paralysis following a stroke. Once again employing Wakao as a genial femme fatale, Kimura’s film is a broadly comic tale of an old man’s folly, neatly undercutting its darker themes with naturalistic humour and late life melancholy.

Tanazaki’s stand in is a wealthy old man, Utsugi (So Yamamura), who has recently suffered a stroke which has paralysed his right hand and significantly reduced his quality of life. He currently operates a large household with a number of live-in staff, including a round the clock nurse, his wife, son, daughter-in-law, and grandson. The son, Joukichi (Keizo Kawasaki), is a successful executive currently having an affair with a cabaret dancer, leaving his extremely beautiful wife, Sachiko (Ayako Wakao), herself also formerly a dancer, at a loose end. Though approaching the end of his life and possibly physically incapable of acting on his desire, Utsugi is consumed with lust for Sachiko and thinks of little else but how to convince her to allow him even the smallest of intimacies. Sachiko, for her part, is not particularly interested in pursuing a romantic entanglement with her aged father-in-law but is perfectly aware of her power over him which she uses to fulfil her material desires. Meanwhile, Utsugi’s rather pathetic behaviour has not gone unnoticed by the rest of the household who view his desperation with a mix of pity, exasperation, and outrage.

Kimura’s film takes more of an objective view than the subjective quality of the title would suggest but still treats its protagonist with a degree of well intentioned sympathy for a man realising he’s reached the final stages of his life. Utsugi’s sexual desire intensifies even as his body betrays him but this very life force becomes his rebellion against the encroaching onset of decay as he clings to his virility, trying to off-set the inevitable. As such, conquest of Sachiko becomes his last dying quest for which he is willing to sacrifice anything, undergo any kind of degradation, simply to climb one rung on the ladder towards an eventual consummation of his desires.

Sachiko, instinctively disliked by her mother-in-law, is more than a match for Utsugi’s finagling. A young, confident, and beautiful woman, Sachiko has learned how to do as she pleases without needing permission from anyone for anything. In this, the pair are alike – both completely self aware yet also in full knowledge of those around them. The strange arrangement they’ve developed is a game of reciprocal gift giving which is less a war than a playful exercise in which both are perfectly aware of the rules and outcomes. Sachiko allows Utsugi certain privileges beginning with slightly patronising flirtation leading to leaving the bathroom door unlocked when she showers (behind a curtain) and permitting Utsugi to kiss and fondle her leg (even if she hoses it down, complaining it feels like being licked by a slug).

Tanizaki’s strange fetish is again in evidence as Utsugi finally deifies Sachiko in creating a print of the sole of her foot which he intends to have carved into his grave so he can live protected beneath her forever, as insects are under the foot of Buddha. This final act which takes the place of a literal consummation goes some way towards easing his desire but may also be the one which pushes him towards the grave he was seeking to avoid. Notably, Sachiko is bored and eventually exhausted by the entire enterprise even whilst Utsugi is caught in the throws of his dangerous ecstasy.

Other members of the household view the continuing interaction of Sachiko and Utsugi with bemusement, pitying and resenting the old man for his foolishness whilst half-admiring, half disapproving of Sachiko’s manipulation of his desires. Utsugi had been a stingy man despite his wealth and even now risks discord within his own family by refusing to assist his grown-up daughter who finds herself in financial difficulty and in need of familial support, yet lavishing vast sums on Sachiko for expensive trinkets even as she continues an affair with a younger man right under his nose. Still, Sachiko uses what she has and gets what she wants and Utsugi attempts to do the same only less successfully, completely self aware of his foolishness and the low probability of success yet buoyed with each tiny concession Sachiko affords him. A wry and unforgiving exploration of the link between sex and death, Diary of a Mad Old Man undercuts the less savoury elements of its source material with a broadly humorous, mocking tone gradually giving way to melancholy as the old man begins to accept his own impotence, the light around him dwindling while Sachiko’s only brightens.

 

Warning from Space (宇宙人東京に現わる, Koji Shima, 1956)

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Warning_from_Space_1956
Taro Okamoto illustration from Japanese DVD liner notes

Apparently the citizens of Japan are a little more cautious than some of their contemporaries when it comes to extraterrestrial contact. After all, the kindly aliens who visit with helpful advice in The Day the Earth Stood Still end up leaving in a huff because humanity is just not ready to accept their offers of interplanetary research and is constantly trying eliminate the alien “threat”. Hence, though the people of Japan recoil in horror from the Pairans in their scary starman shape, they start paying attention when they come in the form of a pretty showgirl. Somethings never change, eh?

Mysterious flying objects have been spotted above the skies of Tokyo. Nobody knows what they are with some leaning towards aliens and others becoming paranoid that Japan is under attack from another nation who are positioning spy satellites above its capital city. There have also been sightings of mysterious creatures near sources of water, usually accompanied by blue flickering lights.

These strange creatures turn out to be a scientific delegation from the planet Paira (inconveniently located directly opposite Earth but behind the sun which is why it’s never been discovered). They are a race of star shaped bipedal creatures with a single eye in the middle of their chests. Actually, they are quite cute and completely non-threatening in appearance and seem quite hurt that the Earthlings think they are ugly and are too frightened to talk to them. Consequently, they send their best scientist through a special process to change his appearance to one humans find more appealing which just happens to involve copying that of a local superstar showgirl.

The Pairans have come in peace! With their advanced technology they can see a rogue planet is about to crash into Earth and destroy it forever. This is bad news for everyone so they’ve come to warn humanity and try to help, if only they could get someone to listen to them. They also know that Doctor Matsuda has been developing a nuclear weapon which is far more powerful than the atomic bomb. The Pairans think this is a very bad idea and he should stop, but only after they’ve used it to destroy the rogue planet before it’s too late.

Warning from Space (宇宙人東京に現わる, Uchujin Tokyo ni Arawaru) is Daiei’s first colour sci-fi film though it’s actually not all that colourful aside from that weird blue light. In contrast to many other films from the era and even those previously made by Daiei, Warning From Space seems to have an oddly ambivalent view on weapons of mass destruction. The Pairans have chosen Japan because they think the Japanese are the best placed to appreciate the destructive power of an atomic bomb and will therefore share their stance on the necessity of abandonment. Yet, they also know Dr. Matsuda has been working on an even more destructive weapon – the Pairans also discovered this power at some point in their history but abandoned it over fears of its power being misused. They supposedly developed a much safer way to harness nuclear energy but now need Matsuda’s research to destroy the rogue planet. Like much of the Pairan’s behaviour, this doesn’t make complete sense (at least, to those of us used to Earth logic).

The Pairans are very friendly, but a bit shy. Their idea of “making contact” seems to be running away when the humans spot them and start screaming. Seeing something so unusual is probably quite traumatising, but the Pairans are so cute with their starfish outfits and comical waddle that it’s strange to think anyone could find them threatening. The Pairans are even a little upset that Earthlings find them “ugly”. They think the best thing to do is appear in a more pleasing form so they freak everyone out by visiting a popular musical show and stealing a picture of the star to clone. Because every scientist on Earth is going to want to listen to the advice of a cabaret showgirl, right? That’s always how it happens. She doesn’t even care very much about maintaining her disguise and keeps doing alien stuff like jumping really high in the air or dematerialising in one place and rematerialising somewhere else, but then no one seems to find this that weird anyway.

Basically, the Pairans have come to tell the Earthlings not to go ahead with their weapons research because they don’t know what they’re getting into. However, they also need to use this research to destroy the rogue planet which is a bit contradictory. The Pairans are apparently too shy to actually talk to the UN and think the other nations are kind of mean anyway so Japan will have to sort this out on their own while the Pairans nod appreciatively in the background (other than when they randomly disappear for a whole month until coming back to sort everything out because humans are rubbish). Of course, evil corporations are also after Matsuda’s super weapon but he’s a proper scientist and doesn’t want to sell, so they kidnap him and tie him to a chair out of spite while the world simultaneously floods and burns thanks to the rogue planet’s effect on the atmosphere.

Finally, science saves the day in a quiet and methodical way! All the creatures of the Earth emerge from underground. The birds are singing, turtles are swimming, racoons are doing racoon stuff again all while the sun is shining brightly and children are singing, so it’s definitely all going to be OK and Earth has probably made a whole new set of star shaped friends! All in all it was probably worth near destruction. Warning from Space is the kind of science fiction film which is always 100% serious, with the consequence that it’s not serious at all. Not as much fun as some of other B-movies of the era it nevertheless adds its own charms particularly in the form of the completely batty Pairans and their cute star shaped suits but fails to offer anything memorable beyond them.

Original trailer (poor quality, no subtitles)

The adorable starfish-like Pairans were designed by iconic Japanese artist Taro Okamoto who is probably best known for the Tower of the Sun constructed for Expo ’70.