• 無法松の一生 (Rickshaw Man, 1958 version)

11/17/20 (Tues)

Sentimental slop. The 1943 original was shown at the Tokyo International Film Festival a few weeks ago, piquing my interest. The one available online was a popular color remake by the same director, Hiroshi Inagaki, starring Mifune Toshiro and Takamine Hideko. A buoyant bull-in-a-China-shop rickshaw driver – think Tora-san – befriends a boy and his well-off family. He becomes effectively a surrogate father after the boy’s real father dies, and this poor uneducated driver naturally helps turn the boy into a man. We’d normally expect the driver and widow to fall in love, but neither seems to show much romantic interest, perhaps a reflection of the yawning social gap. Their relationship throughout is basically mistress and servant. The driver eventually comes to realize his feelings for the woman but, stigmatized by his low social status, is unable to confess. He turns to saké, breaking a life of sobriety, and ends up dying drunk and face down in the snow. Among his belongings, the widow chokes up to discover that he has saved money for her and the boy despite his own miserable circumstances.

The film doesn’t miss a cliché and does not seek to deepen the story or examine the characters in more detail. It seeks simply to be a crowd pleaser, though it didn’t work on me. The stars do well under the circumstances, but that’s not enough to rescue this dumb work. I’m glad I didn’t spend money to see the old version.