Category Archives: Film

Goyokin (御用金)

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  • 御用金 (Goyokin)

5/26/23 (Thurs)

Gosha Hideo’s 1959 film finds the young Oriha returning to her seaside village after five years of indentured service to discover a town devoid of all life other than Hitchcockian groups of greedy crows. Everyone has vanished without a trace. We learn that Rokugo (Tamba Tetsuro), the chief samurai of the fictional Sabai clan (presumably modeled on the real-life Sabae clan in present-day Fukui Prefecture), had waylaid a ship carrying the shogun’s gold from nearby Sado Island, recruited the villagers to steal the treasure, and allowed the ship to sink, thus making it appear an accident. He then had his men slaughter the villagers to prevent word getting back to the shogunate, and spread the word that their disappearance was the work of magical forces known by the superstitious as kami-kakushi, literally “hidden by the gods”. (The phrase is interestingly left untranslated in the subtitles. It was deftly rendered in the title of a later animated film as “Spirited Away”.)

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Merrily We Go to Hell

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  • Merrily We Go to Hell

5/22/23 (Mon)

A pre-code 1932 film that deals with daring themes for its time like adultery and alcoholism, but not very well. As in many of these films, it features upper-crust society with impossibly glamorous mansions, gorgeous clothing and an endless supply of alcohol in defiance of Prohibition. Dorothy Arzner, the only significant female director in those days and an open lesbian (as if being female in itself wasn’t hard enough), clearly wanted to be scandalous, as the controversial title itself suggests. But she should have found a better script to hang it on.

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A Last Note (午後の遺言状)

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  • 午後の遺言状 (A Last Note)

5/20/23 (Sat)

Shindo Kaneto’s 1995 work proved the final film for two of Japan’s greatest actresses, his wife Otowa Nobuko (who died of liver cancer before the film was even released) and Sugimoto Haruko, who passed away two years later. He was already 82 – he would live to over 100 – so it’s no surprise that he took on the subject of old age and dying. I just wish it had lived up to its co-stars.

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Buster Keaton: The General, Sherlock Jr., Steamboat Bill, Jr.

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  • The General, 3/17/23 (Fri)
  • Sherlock Jr., 3/18/23 (Sat)
  • Steamboat Bill, Jr., 3/20/23 (Mon)

Criterion was offering a Keaton collection for the month, so I decided it was a good chance finally to see what I’d been missing. I chose three representative films as a starter. Continue reading →

There Was a Father (父ありき)

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  • 父ありき (There Was a Father)

3/7/23 (Tues)

I had déjà vu watching Ozu’s 1942 film, one of only two that he directed during the war, and learned that it was initially planned as a companion piece to his similarly themed The Only Son a few years earlier. He had apparently abandoned the follow-up due to unreasonable demands from censors but must have later overcome his qualms; ironically the film was reportedly censored again by US Occupation authorities after the war, so the version today may lack more militaristic parts from the original (which was probably fine with Ozu). It is not a propaganda piece in its current form, with no talk of war other than a brief mention of a physical for the draft, and the “Japanese” values that it promotes are not unique to the war. Like its earlier companion piece, There Was a Father centers on a single parent who makes significant sacrifices for his only son’s sake that result in a painful separation for both when the son is sent away for education and a better life. It is also similar in boasting a strong central performance, here by Ozu stalwart Ryu Chishu.

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Woman of Tokyo (東京の女)

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  • 東京の女 (Woman of Tokyo)

3/6/23 (Mon)

Ozu’s superior 1933 mini-silent movie was supposedly filmed in just over a week when the director suddenly had time in his schedule; he was apparently filming while the script was still being completed. It sure doesn’t feel like it: though the sets are limited and confined, the characters are fully rounded, and the story says all it needs to say in 45 minutes – padded out, actually, by the odd inclusion of two minutes of an entirely different film by Ernst Lubitsch. (Even weirder, Ozu’s film was initially said to be based on a European novel, which Ozu revealed later to be a total invention. This is an original work written partly by him.)

The film is driven by a tremendous performance by Okada Yoshiko as Chikako, who works as a typist to support her younger brother Ryoichi (Egawa Ureo) in his studies. Continue reading →

Lady Snowblood (修羅雪姫)

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  • 修羅雪姫 (Lady Snowblood)

3/5/23 (Sun)

Fujita Toshiya’s 1973 manga-based exploitation flick is translated as Lady Snowblood, an interesting translation of the original Shura Yukihime or Demigod Lady Snow. (The Japanese title is a takeoff on the fairy tale Shira Yukihime or Snow White. Snow Blood is a pretty lame attempt at preserving the pun.)

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Stakeout (張込み)

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  • 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. Continue reading →

Egoist (エゴイスト)

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  • エゴイスト (Egoist)

5/4/23 (Thurs)

The handsome, buff and gay Kosuke has left a poor and closeted life in the countryside and become a successful fashion consultant in Tokyo, complete with fabulous wardrobe, a gorgeous condo and a close gay circle where he plays the sophisticate. We come to realize that he’s also terribly lonely; having lost his mother at a young age, he yearns for the human touch.

**Spoilers ahead**

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A Look Back: Harry Belafonte

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Harry Belafonte, who died yesterday at 96, is probably better known these days as a civil rights activist than singer or actor, but he was a formidable presence on all fronts. While he was merely serviceable in the great screen version of Carmen Jones (where they strangely dubbed his singing voice), he gave an interesting turn in a later film, The Angel Levine, as a divine being sent from heaven to save a troubled Orthodox Jew. My review of that curiosity is below. RIP.

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Fiddler: Miracle of Miracles

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  • Fiddler: Miracle of Miracles

4/8/22 (Sat)

This disappointing 2019 documentary explores the origins and influence of Fiddler on the Roof, the 1964 work that is one of the crowning achievements of the musical stage. Fiddler, at one point the longest-running show in Broadway history, is nominally about the life of a poor Jewish milkman and his family in a Ukrainian shtetl in the early 20th century, but on a wider level it portrays a community struggling to maintain its identity in a changing world. That universal theme has made the show extraordinarily popular worldwide; it has been a tremendous success for decades here in Japan, which staged one of the first of many foreign (and foreign-language) productions. However, the documentary has other ideas, as suggested in its Wikipedia summary: “Scholars examine the play’s themes of xenophobia, gender equality, civil rights, and religion.” Therein lies the problem.

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Kochiyama Soshun (河内山宗俊)

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  • 河内山宗俊 (Kochiyama Soshun), 2/14/23 (Tues)

The 1936 jidaimono Kochiyama Soshun, given the inexplicable English title of Priest of Darkness, is the second of only three surviving films (out of around two dozen) by the prewar director Yamanaka Sadao. While generally considered the weakest of the three, that’s still a pretty high bar; it’s interestingly one of animator Miyazaki Hayao’s all-time favorites.

The film draws loosely from both the Kochiyama and Naojiro plot strands of the Meiji Era (1881) Kabuki play Kumo ni Magou Ueno no Hatsuhana (The First Flowers of Ueno), one of the all-day extravaganzas by the prolific Kawatake Mokuami. Those stories are usually performed these days as separate plays, but Yamanaka brings them together in an ingenious restructuring of the original. (He did a similar impressive overhaul of another Mokuami work in his next and final film, the supreme Humanity and Paper Balloons.)

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