Tag: Yuzo Harumi

Female Slave Ship (女奴隷船, Yoshiki Onoda, 1960)

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Playing out much more like a classic serial than war movie, Yoshiki Onoda’s Female Slave Ship (女奴隷船Onna dorei-sen) takes a curiously flippant approach to the conflict along with a moral perhaps a little at odds with similar films of the time. Adapted from a novel by Jun Funazaki, the film begins as spy thriller but ends up drifting into pirate territory as a Japanese solider with an incredibly important mission is shot down on his way to Tokyo, rescued by a freighter carrying women en route to being sex trafficked in Shanghai, and then captured by pirates who want to sell him to a Chinese spy working for the Americans. 

It’s right at the end of the war and Japan is losing quite badly they think because of advancements made in radar by the Allied forces. They’ve been passed blueprints for a better radar system by a German contact and so Lt. Sugawa (Bunta Sugawara), stationed in Malaya, has been charged with bringing them back to Tokyo disguised as a photo of a pretty young woman they’re going to say is his sister. Perhaps the most surprising thing about the film is that Sugawa abandons his mission quite quickly and instead devotes himself to rescuing the women, vowing not to return to Tokyo without them despite the fact that this vital information he’s carrying could supposedly turn the tide of the war.

Even so, this manly chivalry defines his code of heroism. He is constantly trying to escape and defiantly stands up both to the captain of the tugboat, who is not actually in charge, but also to the pirate captain (Tetsuro Tanba) who doesn’t really seem to be doing much of anything. Among the crew of pirates is a Japanese man who later confirms that he’s a deserter but alternately switches sides, first offering to team up with Sugawa because he’s fed up with the discrimination he faces from the other pirates, and then betraying him before doing the same thing again but claiming that he feels bad about deserting and wants to do something for Japan now that his Japaneseness has been truly awoken.

It was indeed other Japanese people who were operating the slave ship, chief of them being the Queen (Yoko Mihara) who rules the boat with an iron hand but then uses her sex appeal to curry favour with the pirate captain while simultaneously developing feelings for Sugawa who is equally drawn to a meek young woman, Rumi (Utako Mitsuya), who was tricked onto the boat on the promise of a nursing job in Manchuria. Most of the other women, few of whom are actually given any characterisation, are established sex workers and resolved to their fates but all feel bad for and protective of Rumi. Though she’s the one Sugawa is closest to, it’s quite refreshing that the women are otherwise treated as equals rather than looked down on because of their occupation with Sugawa insistent on rescuing them all before they can be sold in Shanghai. 

As is usual for these kinds of films, the chief villain is Chin (Shuji Kawabe), a Chinese man apparently with ties to the Americans who has somehow found out about the radar plans, even knowing that they’re presented on a photo of a woman, and wants to capture Sugawa to get his hands on them. The bounty causes a rift between the pirate captain and Chin with the pirate captain wanting in on the deal and Chin not really willing to share, though there is a clear implication that these mercenary pirates are on the wrong the side in working with the Chinese and Americans while the slave ship was more on the level of not being okay but definitely not as bad. 

In any case, it comes down to a battle of masculinity between the monkey-loving pirate captain and his trusty whip, and Sugawa’s good old-fashioned chivalry. Surprisingly chaste given its racy title, even the pirates are more of the drunken and lascivious type than violent and rapacious, the film has a rather odd sensibility landing somewhere between jungle adventure and wartime escapade in which an earnest young man bravely carries the weight of the nation on his shoulders while doing his best to address a more immediate threat and rescue 12 captive women from the evils of Japan’s imperialist expansion. 

Original trailer (no subtitiles)

The Sands of Kurobe (黒部の太陽, Kei Kumai, 1968)

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Kei Kumai’s three-hour epic of human engineering The Sands of Kurobe (黒部の太陽, Kurobe no Taiyo) opens with a titlecard to the effect that the film testifies to the courage of the Japanese people who brought the nation back to life after the war. Partly produced by Kansai Electric Power along with the production agencies of stars Toshiro Mifune and Yujiro Ishihara, the film is therefore somewhat conflicted, part bombastic celebration of Japanese engineering skill and ambivalent critique of the wilful decision to place success above all else including the welfare and safety of ordinary workers.

This critique is most evident to the flashbacks to the construction of Kuro 3 in 1938 which as many point out was conducted by the military under brutal and primitive conditions. The construction of the new Kurobe hydroelectric dam, by contrast, is a much more modern, enlightened affair in which workers have proper equipment and are not simply hacking at rocks with pickaxes wearing only a vest. But then as the conflicted Takeshi (Yujiro Ishihara) points out, it’s all effectively the same. Just because no one is pointing a gun at their heads, it doesn’t mean the men actually building the dam aren’t being exploited rather simply pressured by a vague notion of national good that they should be ready to lay down their lives. Could it be that “prosperity” is worse thing to die for than “patriotism”, especially when it appears as if your employer cares little for your physical wealth and economic wellbeing simply pledging that they will support the families of men killed during the dam’s construction. 

That there will be deaths seems inevitable. The man placed in charge of building a tunnel through the mountain, Kitagawa (Toshiro Mifune), is haunted by the vision of a man falling from a cliff that he witnessed when they first hiked to the dam site. He originally described the project as “crazy” and wanted to resign but was convinced to stay on. Kitagawa is himself fond of insisting on safety first where others are minded to cut corners, but also troubled by domestic issues in the film’s sometimes insensitive use of his daughter’s terminal leukaemia as a mirror for the dam project in considering what is and isn’t possible through human endeavour. The suggestion is that Kitagawa wants to believe the miracle of the dam is possible because needs to keep believing in a scientific miracle that can save his daughter, though obviously even if it is ultimately possible to build this dam that’s designed to fuel the post-war rocket to economic prosperity there are limits and unfortunately decades later we have still not found a cure for cancer though treatment may be more effective. 

Takeshi meanwhile has a similar battle with his hard-nosed father whose devotion to the dam project he describes almost like an addiction, suggesting that he values nothing outside of tunnelling and is willing to sacrifice everything in its name including the lives of himself and others. A flashback to to 1938 reveals that he asked his own teenage son to place dynamite and inadvertently caused his death though lax safety procedures which is the understandable reason why his wife eventually left him taking Takeshi with her. But the strange thing is for all his original opposition, Takeshi too is later captivated by the immensity of the challenge if also wary that the workers are falling victim to the same sickness as his father and are still being exploited by those like him who expect them to offer up their lives while paying them a pittance and complaining when the project does not proceed along their schedule. 

The almost nationalistic, bombastic quality of the film seems at odds with some of Kumai’s previous work save the discussion of the building of the 1938 tunnel though this largely serves as a contrast to imply that this time is different because they’re doing it for love of country rather the forced patriotism of the militarist past. Kitagawa justifies himself that if they don’t build the dam, economic prosperity will stall, companies will go bust, and people will lose their jobs but it seems somewhat hollow in the knowledge many men are certain to die while building this dam. Kumai undercuts the bombast with a series of scenes shot like a disaster movie in which supports collapse and the tunnel floods, or men are hit by falling rocks, eventually closing on an ironic Soviet-style statue dedicated to the labour of the workers that seems to question the immense loss of life along with the destruction of the natural beauty of Mount Kurobe but cannot in the end fully reconcile himself, torn between a celebration of human endeavour and its equally human costs. 

Original trailer (no subtitles)

The Lady Vampire (女吸血鬼, Nobuo Nakagawa, 1959)

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Three years after the Vampire Moth, Nobuo Nakagawa returns to the realms of bloodsucking adventure with the misleadingly titled The Lady Vampire (女吸血鬼, Onna Kyuketsuki). The only “vampire” on offer here is male, though his victim is indeed a “lady” in being the descendent of a noble family apparently the subject of a mysterious curse which, along with her resemblance to a beautiful ancestor, makes her so attractive to the sensitive, artistic bloodsucker at the tale’s centre. Heavily influenced both by Hammer Horror and Universal’s monster films from the ‘30s, Nakagawa plays fast and loose with his mythology while indulging in a common though problematic association between vampirism and Christianity.

Beginning in high style, the film opens with a driver escorting ace reporter Tamio (Takashi Wada) to the birthday party of his fiancée Itsuko (Junko Ikeuchi) for which he is already very late. The driver stops the car believing he has hit a woman pedestrian, but she seems to have vanished. Later, Tamio spots her wandering around near Itsuko’s home, while Itsuko brings darkness into her party by accidentally cutting her finger and getting a suspiciously large amount of blood on her cake. This alarms Itsuko’s father Shigekatsu (Akira Nakamura) because it reminds him of something that happened right before his wife, Miwako (Yoko Mihara), mysteriously disappeared 20 years previously. 

Of course, the mystery woman turns out to be none other than Itsuko’s long lost mother who is discovered in a long disused room by her extremely confused husband. To everyone’s consternation, Miwako looks exactly the same as she did 20 years ago and for the moment is more or less catatonic. The doctors can’t explain it, and no one is quite sure what to do about this miraculous development. Itsuko stops to make sure Tamio isn’t going to put any of this in his paper, fearful that people will think of her mother’s condition shamefully as a disease or a deformity. Paying a visit to a local art gallery, the pair are shocked to discover that the prizewinning work by a previously unknown artist seems to be a nude painting of Miwako and begin investigating to find out if it has some connection to her disappearance and present vacant state.

Meanwhile, a “fiend” is making trouble in the modern city. The artist behind the painting, using the name Shiro Sofue (Shigeru Amachi), is a brooding, dapper young man in a dark fedora and sunshades with a white scarf fashionably tied around his neck. We learn that he has an extreme aversion to moonlight because it makes him go crazy, feasting on the poor hotel maid who was only trying to make his stay as comfortable as possible. Aided by his dwarf minion Tiny (Tsutomu Wakui), Shiro (not his real name), puts the body neatly outside like a room service tray and pleads ignorance when the police, and crime reporter Tamio, arrive to investigate the heinous murder. The same thing happens again in a Ginza bar where, for reasons not quite obvious, Tiny starts making trouble and smashes a window letting the moonlight in sending Shiro into a murderous rage where he slashes six women with Tamio watching from the sidelines. 

Shiro steals the painting back and delivers it to Shigekatsu where Miwako eventually sees it and regains her memories. At this point, Shigekatsu enlightens us about the “Matsumura curse” which dates back to the 17th century and the rebellion of Shiro Amakusa who led Japan’s secret Christians in revolution against the Shogunate but was defeated. His troops were massacred and he himself was beheaded as a traitor. The Matsumuras are apparently direct descendents of the Amakusa clan and so have “cursed” blood. “Shiro Sofue” is not Amakusa Shiro but a lovelorn retainer, Takenaka, who coveted the princess Katsu but was unable to have her. When she asked him to take her life to save her from the Shogunate forces he complied, but then drank her blood out of love for her and apparently became an immortal being with the occasional urge to sustain himself with the blood of other young women. 

How this became a “Matsumura” curse or really what the curse supposedly refers to is unclear, especially as Takenaka isn’t even part of the family but a lesser retainer damned by love for an unattainable princess. Like subsequent Japanese vampires, the “curse” is directly linked to Christianity. Takenaka’s sales patter uses heavily ritualised language he likens to a “baptism” . “Accept my love, and you will live forever in eternal, unfailing youth” he tells his victims after drugging them with sweet smelling flowers and dragging them back to his underground castle which is built in the Western gothic style and, ironically, filled with crosses. This vampire makes good use of mirrors and has co-opted religious imagery for his own ends. Later we see that he has attempted to find an eternal mate several times before, turning his victims into fleshy statues by placing a gold cross on their heads in the same way a Taoist priest might stop a hopping vampire with a Buddhist sutra. The final of these is a direct echo of the archetypal Virgin Mary statue found at Christian churches all over the world. 

Through this, the “curse” is rendered a foreign import existing outside of and presenting a direct threat to traditional Japanese culture, again aligned somewhat problematically with Christianity by way of an overly literal interpretation of ritual. The  settings too are predominantly Western – the European-style mansion, hotels, bars, and galleries, while Takenaka dresses in a billowing white shirt and cape, living in a stone “castle” built in a cave, and eventually fighting with a fencer’s rapier rather than a katana. His minions, however, have a slightly more diverse flavour in addition to Tiny with a giant mute bald man providing security and a witchy old woman looking like she’s just walked out of Throne of Blood dispensing advice with a seemingly more “Japanese” context. As usual, Itsuko becomes mere bait hysterically running around the castle chased by Tiny while intrepid reporter Tamio heroically battles both the bald man and Takenaka himself until the police finally arrive and bring “order” to this orderless place. The young free themselves from an ancestral curse and prepare to move on, no longer burdened by “bad blood” as they watch the past dissolve while preparing to move into a freer future. 

Black Sun (黒い太陽, Koreyoshi Kurahara, 1964)

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black sun still 2The Warped Ones showed us a nihilistic world of aimless youth living not so much on their wits as by their pleasures, indulging their every animalistic whim while respectable society looked on in horror. By 1964 things have only got worse. Tokyo might have got the Olympics, Japan might be back on the international map, and economic prosperity might be on the rise but all around the city there’s an arid wasteland – a literal dumping ground in which the unburied past has been left to fester as a grim reminder of historical follies and the present’s reluctance to deal with them.

Akira (Tamio Kawaji), now calling himself “Mei” (perhaps a play on the reading of the character for his name 明), seems to have mellowed since the heady days of his youth. Living alone save for a dog named Thelonious Monk, Mei has co-opted a disused church and turned it into a shrine for jazz. The walls and ceilings are covered in photographs of famous jazz musicians and posters for club nights and solo shows. He has his own turntable and a well stocked selection of LPs, though he still seems to frequent the same kind of jazz clubs that so defined his earlier life.

Change arrives when Mei boosts a fancy car and is almost caught in a police net caused by the body of an American serviceman found floating in the harbour. Apparently the crime is the product of an internal GI squabble, but the offending soldier is on the run with a machine gun. As coincidence would have it, the wounded killer, Gil (Chico Lourant), fetches up at Mei’s church and, as Gil is a black man, Mei assumes that they will definitely be friends. It is, however, not quite that simple.

As in the earlier film, jazz is the force which keeps Mei’s mind from fracturing. His life still moves to improvisational rhythms even if apparently not quite so frenetically as it once did. Rather than the rampant animal of The Warped Ones, this Mei has embraced his outsider status through literally removing himself from the city in favour of self-exile and isolation as a squatter in the house of God – a place about to be torn down.

While Mei has been literally pushed out with only his beloved dog as evidence of his latent human feelings, his formerly delinquent friend, Yuki (Yuko Chishiro), has gone on to bigger and better things. No longer (it seems) a casual prostitute catering to foreigners, Yuki has repurposed the skills her former life gave her to shift into an aspirational middle-class world as a translator for those same American troops she once performed another service for. The American occupation is long over, but the US Army is everywhere.

Mei thinks of himself as one of Japan’s oppressed outsiders – an outcast in a land subjugated by a foreign power. He squats in a ruined church while the Americans “squat” in his ruined country. He likes jazz because it fits the rhythms of his mind but also because he believes it to be the music of the oppressed. In Gil he thinks he sees another like him, a man oppressed in his own homeland and ironically enough by the same forces that are (in part) oppressing him. Mei has a lot of strange, stereotypical ideas about black men – he’s excited to meet Gil because he thinks all black men must love jazz and that Gil must be some kind of jazz god, but Gil is a frightened rabbit on the run, terrified and bleeding. Thinking he’s in the middle of a visitation, Mei tries to make plain his enthusiasm despite the obvious language barrier, pointing wildly at his shrine to jazz, but all Gil wants is quiet and help with the bullet wound currently suppurating on his thigh.

The “relationship” deteriorates, but a strange kind of camaraderie is eventually born between the two men. Things take a turn for the surreal when Mei dons black face and paints Gil’s white, only to get stopped by GIs who want to see an ID from a “foreigner” driving a fancy car, and for Mei to introduce Gil at his favourite jazz bar as his new “slave”. In hindsight it’s all a little awkward as Kurahara throws in stock footage of the civil rights movement and tries to equate it both to the recent protest movements in Japan and to Mei’s self-identified status as one of Japan’s oppressed masses. Still, you can’t argue with the fact that the two men have found a bond in their shared alienation and desire to escape from the impotence of their current situations.

Ironically enough Kurahara does seem to believe in an escape, though it’s perhaps not so positive as it sounds. The tragic friendship of the two men in which one must save the other by releasing him towards the sea and the sun pushes Mei out of his self-exile and back into the “real” world even if he still considers himself to be an outsider within it. The sun is bright but it’s also dull, shining not with hope but with consolation for a hopeless world in which the only victory lies in the final act of surrender.

Short scene from the beginning of the film (English subtitles)

A Colt is My Passport (拳銃は俺のパスポート, Takashi Nomura, 1967)

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colt is my passport posterJo Shishido played his fare share of icy hitmen, but they rarely made it through such seemingly inexorable events as the hero of Takashi Nomura’s A Colt is My Passport (拳銃は俺のパスポート, Colt wa Ore no Passport). The actor, known for his boyishly chubby face puffed up with the aid of cheek implants, floated around the lower end of Nikkatsu’s A-list but by 1967 his star was on the wane even if he still had his pick of cooler than cool tough guys in Nikkatsu’s trademark action B-movies. Mixing western and film noir, A Colt is My Passport makes a virtue of Japan’s fast moving development, heartily embracing the convenience of a society built around the idea of disposability whilst accepting the need to keep one step ahead of the rubbish truck else it swallow you whole.

Kamimura (Joe Shishido) and his buddy Shiozaki (Jerry Fujio) are on course to knock off a gang boss’ rival and then get the hell out of Japan. Kamimura, however, is a sarcastic wiseguy and so his strange sense of humour dictates that he off the guy while the mob boss he’s working for is sitting right next to him. This doesn’t go down well, and the guys’ planned airport escape is soon off the cards leaving them to take refuge in a yakuza safe house until the whole thing blows over. Blowing over, however, is something that seems unlikely and Kamimura is soon left with the responsibility of saving both his brother-in-arms Shiozaki, and the melancholy inn girl (Chitose Kobayashi) with a heart of gold who yearns for an escape from her dead end existence but finds only inertia and disappointment.

The young protege seems surprised when Kamimura tosses the expensive looking rifle he’s just used on a job into a suitcase which he then tosses into a car which is about to be tossed into a crusher, but Kamimura advises him that if you want to make it in this business, you’d best not become too fond of your tools. Kamimura is, however, a tool himself and only too aware how disposable he might be to the hands that have made use of him. He conducts his missions with the utmost efficiency, and when something goes wrong, he deals with that too.

Efficient as he is, there is one thing that is not disposable to Kamimura and that is Shiozaki. The younger man appears not to have much to do but Kamimura keeps him around anyway with Shiozaki trailing around after him respectfully. More liability than anything else, Kamimura frequently knocks Shiozaki out to keep him out of trouble – especially as he can see Shiozaki might be tempted to leap into the fray on his behalf. Kamimura has no time for feeling, no taste for factoring attachment into his carefully constructed plans, but where Shiozaki is concerned, sentimentality wins the day.

Mina, a melancholy maid at a dockside inn, marvels at the degree of Kamimura’s devotion, wishing that she too could have the kind of friendship these men have with each other. A runaway from the sea, Mina has been trapped on the docks all her adult life. Like many a Nikkatsu heroine, love was her path to escape but an encounter with a shady gangster who continues to haunt her life put paid to that. The boats come and go but Mina stays on shore. Kamimura might be her ticket out but he wastes no time disillusioning her about his lack of interest in becoming her saviour (even if he’s not ungrateful for her assistance and also realises she’s quite an asset in his quest to ensure the survival of his ally).

Pure hardboiled, A Colt is My Passport is a crime story which rejects the femme fatal in favour of the intense relationship between its two protagonists whose friendship transcends brotherhood but never disrupts the methodical poise of the always prepared Kamimura. The minor distraction of a fly in the mud perhaps reminds him of his mortality, his smallness, the fact that he is essentially “disposable” and will one day become a mere vessel for this tiny, quite irritating creature but if he has a moment of introspection it is short lived. The world may be crunching at his heels, but Kamimura keeps moving. He has his plan, audacious as it is. He will save his buddy, and perhaps he doesn’t care too much if he survives or not, but he will not go down easy and if the world wants a bite out of him, it will have to be fast or lucky.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Danger Pays (危いことなら銭になる, Ko Nakahira, 1962)

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Danger PaysWhere there’s danger, there’s money! Or, maybe just danger, who knows but whatever it is, it certainly doesn’t lack for excitement. Ko Nakahira is best known for his first feature, Crazed Fruit, the youthful romantic drama ending in speed boat murder which ushered in the Sun Tribe era. Though he later tried to make a return to more artistic efforts, it’s Nakahira’s freewheeling Nikkatsu crime movies that have continued to capture the hearts of audience members. Danger Pays (AKA Danger Paws, 危いことなら銭になる, Yabai Koto Nara Zeni ni Naru) is among the best of them with its cartoon-like, absurd crime caper world filled with bumbling crooks and ridiculous setups.

The central plot gets going when a truck carrying watermarked paper destined for the mint is hijacked with force by armed thugs. They need a master forger though so they set out to recruit one of the best counterfeiters currently working on his way back from a business trip to Hong Kong. However, three petty crooks have also gotten wind of the scam and are trying to head off their rivals by kidnapping the old grandpa first.

The three guys are “Glass Hearted Joe” – a purple suited dandy with an aversion to the sound of scraping glass, Slide Rule Tetsu who walks with a cane and is a whizz with the abacus, and Dump-Truck Ken who’s a geeky sort of guy who also owns a dumper truck. Sakamoto, the forger, eludes their grasp when the better equipped professionals turn up, but none of them is willing to give up on the prize. A little later, Joe teams up with a female ally – Tomoko, who is keen martial artist and smarter than the other three put together. Eventually the four end up becoming an accidental team though it remains to be seen if they can really turn this increasingly desperate situation to their advantage.

Danger Pays is in no way “serious” though this is far from a criticism. Armed with a killer script filled with amazing one liners which are performed with excellent comic timing by the A-list cast, Danger Pays is the kind of effortlessly cool, often hilarious crime caper which is near impossible to pull-off but absolutely sublime when it works – which Danger Pays most definitely does. Though there is a large amount of death and bloodiness in the final third, the atmosphere remains cartoonish as our intrepid team of four simply step over the bodies to go claim their prize with only one of them left feeling a little queasy.

Nakahira maintains the high octane, almost breathless pace right through to the end. The finale kicks in with our heroes trying to escape from a locked room which is about to be filled with gas only to be trapped like rats in an elevator shaft where they engage in an improbable shootout whilst bodies rain down on them from above bathed in the red emergency light of the escape vaults. This is a hardboiled world but one cycled through cigar munching wise guys and tommy guns, it’s all fun and games until you’re trapped in a lift knee deep in corpses while blood drips from a couple more dead guys on the ceiling.

Ridiculous slapstick humour and broad comedy are the cornerstones of Danger Pays though it also makes its central crime conceit work on its own only to overturn it with a final revelation even as the credits roll. Excellently played by its four leads, this comic tale of “victimless crime” in the improbably colourful underworld of ‘60s Tokyo is one which is filled with absurd humour, cartoon stunts, and ridiculous characters but proves absolutely irresistible! If only modern day crime capers were this much fun.

Danger Pays is the second of three films included in the second volume of Arrow’s Nikkatsu Diamond Guys box set.