• 果てしなき欲望 (Endless Desire)

9/5/26 (Sat)

Imamura Shohei’s 1958 heist comedy was his third that year, the first (his debut feature) being the similarly titled Stolen Desire. These seem to have been studio assignments, so the fully formed Imamura style isn’t quite there. But the seeds are in place. This is supposedly based on an obscure Edward G Robinson film, though that’s not officially credited.

Several war veterans, none familiar with the others, gather ten years after the war’s end to retrieve a hugely valuable supply of morphine that was buried below a former hospital. They’ve had various lives, from teacher to pharmacist to unrepentant ruffian, but all have an eye on the untold gains. Their commander has told them that only three men other than him know of the secret stash – but four show up, any of whom could be the extra. On top of that, they discover that the commander has died, with a woman claiming to be his sister coming in his place. She is not reluctant to use her sexual allure to get her way.

They discover that the area is now a shopping street and that the burial spot lies beneath a butcher’s shop. They rent a room nearby, pretending to be a real estate agency, with plans to dig a tunnel to the loot. Unfortunately they are forced to hire the landlord’s hapless son as part of the deal. The unemployed son has accepted the job mainly to impress his girl, none other than the butcher’s daughter, who is also being courted by another man. He is thus enthusiastic to help out in the shop to prove his worth, but succeeds only in getting in the group’s way. To complicate matters, the greedy landlord announces after renting out the room that the entire shopping district will be demolished in a few days for a redevelopment project, making the digging schedule even tighter. As the men race to get the goods, jealousy, greed and mutual suspicion lead to unfortunate consequences for all.

The comedy veers into slapstick at times as the group tries desperately to disguise its activities from the neighbors, such as when a man emerging from the floor gets his head stuck in the trap door as someone sits unawares on top of him. We also see arms and legs jutting out of the ground where people have been disposed of. Most of the comedy involves the group trying to fend off the eager son. The woman tries to seduce him to divert him from the proceedings, which unnerves him. There’s a nice visual joke when the son is out courting his girl, and three of the men simultaneously peek up to watch as he gives her a nervous kiss. The film does offer a suspenseful ending when the woman, pursued by the police, is running away with the morphine on a stormy night over a dangerous bridge. Only toward the conclusion do we learn who the fourth man was. After all this, the film actually has a happy ending as the son and girl, apparently unbothered by the murders and crime that came so close to them, ride off on their bicycles into a positive future.

The characters are finely delineated in this group drama, helped by superb character actors, especially Taiji Tonoyama as a gruff older veteran, the ever-reliable Nishimura Ko as an intense pharmacist, a great Watanabe Misako as the femme fatale, and Sugai Ichiro as the dismissive landlord. Nagato Hiroyuki and Nakahara Sanae do their best as the clueless son and butcher’s daughter.

Imamura offers particularly atmospheric work in the low-lit tunnel and the climactic rainy bridge scene, and does well as always with the hustle and bustle of the shopping district. The picture is uncomfortably balanced at times between the farcical elements and suspense and features little of the pointed social critique that Imamura would become known for. But he does show the endless avarice of all involved, from the four men to the femme fatale to the landlord to the old man who gets a reward from the woman for helping her escape and then another for turning her in anyway. The back-stabbing (sometimes literal) of the various characters is right up his alley. While not as wild as the director’s later works, the film is enjoyable for what it is.