• 丹下左膳余話 百萬両の壺  (Sanze Tangen and the Million-Ryo Pot)

11/1/20 (Sun), Tokyo

The Tokyo International Film Festival is featuring a special section on director Yamanaka Sadao, a prolific film director from the 1930s who tragically died at age 28. He made over two dozen films in a brief period at a pace of 4-5 per year, but only three survive, all of which are highly regarded. That makes it easy to do a retrospective of his career, and all three have been digitally cleaned up for the occasion. That includes one of my all-time favorite Japanese films, Humanity and Paper Balloons. Today was the oldest of the surviving films, dating from 1935, when sound was just taking hold in Japan. The theater is not practicing social distancing, so we’re back to crowded seats (the theater was around 60% full even for an old flick readily available on YouTube). I guess I should be careful what I wish for, especially since everyone was concentrated in the center. Still, it was good to be in a packed house again.

Tange Sazen, a one-armed, one-eyed samurai, is a popular character that had been created just a few years earlier in a newspaper serial but was already the subject of numerous films. This was the first talkie version and is a distinctly comic take on the material. This can’t really be called a Sazen film as he is in fact just one of several key characters in a screwball plot.

A brother who lost out on his family’s inheritance has received only a large worthless-looking pot from the stingy elder brother. The latter discovers, however, that this pot hides a secret making it worth a fortune. He immediately sends a servant to retrieve it. The younger brother, insulted by his elder sibling’s dismissive treatment, refuses the request and sends the servant away. He then tells his wife to sell it to a junkman and squeeze whatever money out of it that she can.

The junkman buys the pot and resells it to a random boy, who uses it to raise goldfish. When the boy’s father is killed, Sazen and his wife end up caring for the kid, a total stranger. They don’t realize the value of the pot that the child brings with him. When the younger brother learns the pot’s secret, his wife urges him to get it back, but the child has moved out with no forwarding information. The younger brother, already well off, agrees to search for the pot as an excuse to leave the house and visit his mistress. The film revolves around the hunt for the million-ryo pot and Sazen’s attempt to raise the kid under the watch of his strong-willed wife.

The farce is meticulously crafted, every action fully justified by the plot and characters. There’s a bit too much reliance on surprise reversals, where Sazen, say, insists in one scene that he absolutely will not go out while shown him in the next cut doing just that. These were edited adeptly, and the director was probably among the first in film to use the technique. I just wish he hadn’t used it so much. Still, everything worked in context.

The characters were also sharply drawn, especially the lovably gruff Sazen (the inimitable Denjiro Okochi, who had already played the role several times in silent films, albeit more seriously) and his no-nonsense wife (a pitch-perfect Kiyozo, a former geisha who gets a chance to sing and play shamisen here as well), who is every bit her husband’s match. For instance, when Sazen makes his decidedly un-heroic entrance waking up midday from a drunken nap with a nasty hangover, the irritated wife not only refuses his commands to stop singing but sings even louder in order to give him an even bigger headache. That interplay is a source of never-ending enjoyment. Their tug-of-war over the kid (each trying to push him onto the other) and gradual acceptance of him is consistently in character without ever veering into sentimentality. American television directors could take a lesson here.

Kunitaro Sawamura is also memorable as the younger brother. The cast has great fun with the material with surprisingly good acting all around, adopting an entirely natural style without overplaying the comedy. Even the orphaned child gave a restrained and realistic performance. It was a hugely impressive showing just a few years out of the silent era.

The director wields some innovative tricks. What seems to be expository narration at the opening is shown gradually to be actual dialogue by one of the characters, a ploy that is repeated three times in a row, throwing us off balance from the start. He also maintains a tight flow of events that keeps the drama flowing smoothly among the various plot strands, such as showing the pot right under the noses of the various parties looking for it, without straining for credibility. The humor stemmed properly from the story and characters with no extraneous dialogue. The restorers of the film threw in a short bit of recently discovered silent content featuring Sazen fighting, which made me want to see more (we also get a good taste of his prowess in the long single cut in the dojo). Yamanaka’s amusing take on Sazen, undermining the samurai’s status in a way, is undoubtedly a reflection of his leftist views, but it works in context and never challenges the samurai’s dignity as a human. Even without the swordsmanship, the movie was highly entertaining in every way.