• 張込み (Stakeout)

3/9/23 (Thurs)

Nomura Yoshitaro’s 1958 film opens with a long and sweaty train trip as two detectives travel from Tokyo to Saga to stake out a certain woman’s home in hopes that her lover, a murder suspect on the run, will visit her at some point. The trip, which takes around ten minutes of screen time, is peripheral to the story, but sets us up for the tedium of their work: they sit on the floor in the crowded train, buy bento and sake in brief station stops along the way, strip to their undershirts, and sweat profusely in the stifling heat. Precisely nothing happens, and that’s the way the director intended it.

That continues when they arrive in Saga, where they find the perfect spying point just across from her house. They diligently watch her every move Rear Window-style in a dreary daily routine – she makes breakfast, sees her children off to school and her husband off to work, cleans house, hangs the washing and so forth. They follow the woman to the market, only to see her buy groceries and return home, where they sit and watch again. They have told the ryokan staff that they are machinery salesmen, but the staff grow increasingly suspicious as the men rarely leave their room. The younger detective, Yuki, realizes from observation and gossip from the ryokan workers that the woman is basically trapped in a loveless marriage with a brutish husband and three stepchildren. This makes him reminisce about his own situation, torn between the woman he loves, who is reluctant to marry him because of her own poverty, and the daughter of a bathhouse operator who is more eager to have him.

Just when it seems that all this drudgery isn’t going to bear fruit, an umbrella salesman enters the woman’s home and quickly leaves, after which she ventures out without the usual shopping bag. Yuki realizes that this must be a signal from her lover, and immediately rushes to follow her. After twists and turns and an extended chase scene (the movie title is sometimes rendered as The Chase), the journey ends at a hot springs, where she indeed meets the alleged killer.

Yuki hides and eavesdrops on their conversation, which reveals that the woman, not as timid as she appeared from the window, wants to leave her unloved family and run away with the suspect; that the suspect is a confused and not-at-all evil young man driven by poverty into a bleak situation; and that their clear love for each other was nevertheless doomed as he had insisted on leaving for opportunity elsewhere while she insisted on staying. The detectives ultimately catch the man and take him back to the station for another long sweaty ride, while Yuki dispassionately tells the woman to forget about the guy and go back to her sad life. His observation of her life makes him realize that life is too short for hesitation, and he writes a cable to the girl he loves and asks her to marry him.

The film is marred by the overuse of expository dialogue to reveal Yuki’s thoughts, not all of them profound (“She’s in danger. I must arrest Ishii now… Hmm, they can’t be committing a lovers’ suicide”). The flashbacks, a favorite device of screenwriter Hashimoto Shinobu (Rashomon, Ikiru, Harakiri), can be confusing, especially the stories of Yuki’s two women. The dialogue has its moments, especially the scenes with the ryokan workers, but is generally not very compelling. The source novel by famed detective fiction writer Matsumoto Seicho could presumably provide this information in the narrative, but Hashimoto and Nomura put too much weight on the dialogue to do their work for them. The eavesdropping scene is clumsily presented as well. It becomes tiring. (It should be said that the screenplay won multiple awards in its day, so maybe I’m a minority view.)

The tedium of the job is well presented, but that shouldn’t translate to tedium for the audience. Kurosawa did a much better job with the details and sweat of police work in Stray Dog. Comparisons to Rear Window are apt in that we come to know the woman in question from a distance, though this is not mere voyeurism in this case but a disinterested investigation. As Yuki gains more understanding of the woman and begins to reflect on his own life, the movie becomes more interesting, and the sympathetic portrayal of the killer, which flips our expectations, is especially affecting. But it’s a drag getting there.

The best parts of the film were the street scenes of contemporary Saga – markets, festivals, shops, the evocative canal. I have to assume that the multitudes of people were the real thing; it was certainly a much more bustling and lively place than the quaint town it is today. I love when the housewife is walking with her parasol and gets lost in the town among a sea of parasols. The ryokan, the bathhouse (where the female proprietor chats casually with a boy on the men’s side as male customers blithely undress and roam around freely), the train station and other locations are really another world. Those wonderfully capture the era.

I’m not sure how they convinced Takamine Hideko, a huge star at this point, to accept a lesser role of this type, but she is utterly natural both as the weary housewife and the desperate lover. She is the film’s biggest asset. Tamura Takahiro as the suspect doesn’t appear until late in the film but is highly moving as the lost youth. These two are irreplaceable, unlike Oki Minoru as Yuki and Miyaguchi Seiji as the other detective, who are competent at best. Urabe Kumeko was excellent as the landlady, and the female ryokan staff were fun.

Nomura’s best scenes are those of crowds, rice fields (great overhead shot), streets and such. He’s less proficient with people. He made several films of Matsumoto’s works, but judging from this and his pedestrian Zero Focus, I’d have to say that detective stories are really not his thing.