Category Archives: Film

I Know Where I’m Going

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  • I Know Where I’m Going

8/2/21 (Mon)

A 1945 romantic comedy by the Archers. It starts out like a screwball comedy, showing the lead female as a gritty infant crawling determinedly forward, as a little girl commanding Santa to bring her silk stockings, and as a snooty student. Shifting forward, the grown-up woman Joan (a fun Wendy Hiller), in full Katherine Hepburn mode, announces to her put-out middle-class father in Manchester that she is off to Scotland to marry a mega-rich industrialist around his age. All goes well at first as Joan travels in first-class cabins and ships, imagining herself in future luxury in a hilarious dream sequence. Unfortunately she arrives in Scotland to discover that a huge gale has shut down all boat transport to her intended’s island – the best-laid plans, as a famous Scot once said. So near and yet so far, she stays impatiently for days in the nearby village, where Torquil (Roger Livesey), a handsome young officer on leave (one of the few references to the war), is trying to get to the same island. It turns out that he is the laird (lord) of the island and has rented it to Joan’s fiancée. This is where screwball humor becomes more earthy and interesting.

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The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp

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  • The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp

7/22/21 (Thurs)

I had assumed somehow that this 1943 film by the Archers would be a gentle satire for wartime audiences given the title, which refers to a buffoonish soldier in a hugely popular cartoon of the day. But it uses that association instead as the starting point for a more interesting exploration of just how the character, here in the form of a Major-General Candy, got to where he is. It’s a thoughtful comedy showing the rise and decline of a soldier who fought eminently in the turn-of-the-century Boer War and WWI, only to be dumped in WWII for his old ideals. More generally, it’s about the inescapable nature of aging and the passing of generations.

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Funeral Parade of Roses (薔薇の葬列)

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  • 薔薇の葬列 (Funeral Parade of Roses)

7/16/21 (Fri)

Matsumoto Toshio’s uncategorizable 1969 film about “gay boys”, a phrase used here mainly to refer to transvestites or male-to-female transgenders (the line isn’t clearly drawn). Having just seen John Cassavetes’ fragmented Shadows of ten years earlier, I thought I was ready for anything, but this psychedelic romp steps even further into the Twilight Zone. It’s drawn loosely from Oedipus Rex, which forms a framework of sorts, but that’s hardly the point in this house-of-mirrors experience.

The nominal story, set in contemporary Tokyo, revolves around the young and beautiful bar “hostess” Eddie (i.e., Oedipus – get it?), who is battling the bar’s aging kimono-clad Mama-san for the affections of an older gent. Eddie, whose long-absent father exists in his mind only as an old photo with the face burnt out, is haunted by memories of his mother laughing at his effeminate nature, beating him mercilessly after catching him putting on makeup, and screaming in horror as he stabs her to death when he finds her with a man (whom he also murders). Somehow he has found his way into Tokyo’s underground gay world, where he reigns as the most popular hostess at his bar among businessmen looking for a thrill. He ultimately wins the older gent, unwittingly causing the distraught Mama-san to commit suicide, and takes over the bar. Anyone familiar with Oedipus can see the rest coming, but it follows it more closely than I had imagined (too closely, to be honest) with one real shocker a la Buñuel in an expressionistic ending. Let’s just say that I’m glad the film’s in black-and-white.

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Fires on the Plain (野火)

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  • 野火 (Fires on the Plain)

7/11/21 (Sun)

Kon Ichikawa’s eye-opening 1959 film is a grim look at the actual lived experience of Japanese soldiers in WWII on the losing end of the battle in Leyte. There’s no glamour, heroism or dignity here as the desperate soldiers, pursued by the advancing Americans, escape through the forests and rough landscape toward a small coastal town on rumors of a possible rescue. Food is scarce and hope is scarcer as they scrounge to survive. They maintain military order on the surface, but their morals gradually break down as fatigue, starvation, injury and fear take their toll both physically and mentally. While the war itself is never shown, death is a constant presence, and the film has no compunction about showing rotten flesh, amputated limbs, filthy bodies covered in dirt and excrement, blood spurting or oozing from wounds, and other delights. It’s all a bit much after a while, and I started to become inured to the horrors, though maybe that was the point.

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Shadows

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  • Shadows

7/7/21 (Wed)

This short but rambling 1959 feature by John Cassavetes is supposedly a landmark in independent cinema, but I won’t hold that against it. He made a reportedly impenetrable improvised version two years earlier (which explains the background shot on Broadway showing The Most Happy Fella) but remade it with several re-shot scenes in a fuller and more scripted version. Given how disjointed the result is, I can’t imagine the original.

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The Sun Tribe and the Dying Shogunate (幕末太陽傳)

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  • 幕末太陽傳 (The Sun Tribe and the Dying Shogunate)

8/7/21 (Sat), 9:30-11:30p, home

Kawashima Yuzo’s 1957 star-studded farce, headed by comedian Frankie Sakai, was at one point rated by Japanese critics as the fourth greatest Japanese film ever made, right up there with Tokyo Story and The Seven Samurai – how’s that for a recommendation? I was suspicious given the slapstick nature of most Japanese comedy of those years, but curiosity eventually got the better of me. I’m glad it did.

The Japanese title, Bakumatsu Taiyoden, was rendered online as Sun in the Last Days of the Shogunate (I’ve switched that for my own title). In fact, “sun” here is a jokey reference to the so-called “Sun Tribe”, groups of nihilistic youth that featured so prominently in books and movies at the time. That was reinforced with the appearance of idol Ishihara Yujiro, who is playing essentially the same disaffected Sun Tribe youth role that propelled him to stardom a year earlier in the sensational Crazed Fruit. (That’s true as well for his tribal cohort, the tall half-Danish hunk Okada Masumi, whose exotic looks stand out in this period piece; a running joke has him repeatedly reassuring doubters that he is a Japanese born in Shinagawa.) Bakumatsu is a word used to describe the final years of the dying shogunate (bakufu), which the characters at the time of course wouldn’t have known was dying despite the evident signs in the air. The inn portrayed here is the actual location where Ishihara’s character plotted the 1863 burning of the British Embassy that is reenacted in the film’s climax. Having Ishihara in this historical role is like dressing James Dean in waistcoat and powdered wig and placing him at Valley Forge in “Yankee Without a Cause”. That suggested that the film would be a topical parody filled with inside jokes whose relevance has long since died out. That it succeeds nevertheless is a testament to the strength of the concept and writing.

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My Sin: Sakubei’s Story (己が罪作兵衛)

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  • 己が罪作兵衛 (My Sin: Sakubei’s Story)

6/19/21 (Sun), 内子座 (愛媛)

This affecting silent 20-minute drama of 1930 by Sasaki Tsunejiro is apparently all that is left of a much longer piece. It is a remake of a popular story but shifts the focus from the woman to the old fisherman after a hugely successful stage portrayal by Inoue Masao, who repeats his performance here. The story’s original title Onoga Tsumi (“My Sin”) was simply combined here with the fisherman’s name, Sakubei, which doesn’t make much sense given that he was blameless in the story. I guess they didn’t want to mess with a famous title. 

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Youth of the Beast (野獣の青春)

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  • 野獣の青春 (Youth of the Beast)

6/17/21 (Thurs)

This 1963 yakuza film was evidently the first to define Suzuki Seijun’s surreal style. It’s a fairly straightforward story for him, albeit intricately plotted. Jo (Shishido Jo – he seems to play Jo-named characters a lot), a lone-wolf gangster and former policeman, seeks to avenge the death of a former colleague by playing two gangs off against each other. The colleague had been found dead with a call girl in an apparent double suicide, including a suicide note allegedly written by the woman. Jo, however, suspects that the death was not self-inflicted. His violent search for the truth drives the film.

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Pale Flower (乾いた花)

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  • 乾いた花 (Pale Flower)

6/15/21 (Tues)

Shinoda Masahiro’s 1963 nihilistic yakuza noir film is long on atmosphere, short on narrative, aiming mainly to show the emptiness of the hero Muraki’s life, a not-uncommon theme in Japan in those days after the Anpo (US-Japan Security Treaty) protests. Continue reading →

Your Name Engraved Herein (刻在你心底的名字)

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  • 刻在你心底的名字 (Your Name Engraved Herein)

5/29/21 (Sun)

A tear-jerker about two gay guys in Taiwan who can’t quite come out. It’s just after the military government was ditched in favor of democracy in the late 1980s, and attitudes towards homosexuality are still evolving, including the arrest of a gay activist, gay bashing in the school and family issues. Continue reading →

McCabe & Mrs. Miller

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  • McCabe & Mrs. Miller

5/28/21 (Fri)

Robert Altman’s 1971 follow-up to his smash hit M*A*S*H. McCabe (Warren Beatty) rides confidently into an output out West (way west – Washington State), hardly a town yet, and hits the saloon. After first confirming the location of the back door, the cooler-than-cool dude brings out his cards and sets up a poker game. Seeing an all-male environment, he gets the idea of opening a brothel. He drags in three bedraggled countrywomen from a nearby town and sets them up in shoddy tents, which manages to attract business. Then Mrs. Miller (Julie Christie) arrives in town, a young cockney widow reduced to selling her body to survive. (Not quite clear what a cockney is doing out in the Far West, but those were adventurous times.) She distinguishes herself right away by charging $5 for her services, more than three times the going rate – and gets it. She figures that the brothel could make a lot more money if it went upscale, and badgers McCabe into joining hands, telling him he knows nothing about women or hygiene or business. The worldly wise Mrs. Miller clearly has the upper hand in the relationship, undermining McCabe’s sense of his skills. That’s where the fun starts.

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M*A*S*H

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  • M*A*S*H

5/22/21 (Sat)

Now this is how black comedy should be done. In Robert Altman’s 1970 classic, three male surgeons arrive at a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital (MASH) in Korea during the Korean War and proceed to turn life upside down. The macho nature of the film feels perfect given that these guys are working in the middle of a brutal conflict, as if the only way of fighting the insanity of war is with more insanity. (The film was made during the Vietnam conflict, the obvious reference here.) The injured keep coming in as fast as the doctors can stitch them up, and the juxtaposition of the men’s zany exploits with the gory surgical scenes highlights what’s really at stake here. The doctors have to develop a fairly thick skin; in one case, a doctor dryly demands the help of a priest who’s declaring last rites on another patient: “I’m sorry, Dago, but this man is still alive and that other man is dead, and that’s a fact. Now hold this with two fingers.” A nurse screams at one point that this is “an insane asylum”, and in a way she’s right.

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