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
(英語の後に日本語が続きます)
(A sample chapter that I wrote for a planned book on the Broadway musical intended for Japanese publication. I hadn’t planned to release this in English, but here it is in slightly revised form.)
History of the Broadway Musical: Fiddler on the Roof (1964)
It is a strange but true fact that the overwhelming number of the great Broadway musical writers have been Jewish or part-Jewish – Gershwin, Rodgers & Hart, Berlin, Kern, Loesser, Lerner & Loewe, Rodgers & Hammerstein, Kander & Ebb, Bernstein, Sondheim, Schwartz, Boublil & Schönberg, and many more. Jewish creators have been responsible for most of the epic works still produced today: in addition to every work in this book, the list encompasses all of the first seven Pulitzer-winning musicals, and extends from the Golden Age classics like The King & I and The Sound of Music to newer hits like A Chorus Line, Chicago, Rent, Les Miserables and Wicked. And that includes not just the songwriters; in fact, a large proportion of the key musical book writers and producers were Jewish as well. This is not true just of musicals, of course – Jews are also overrepresented among major playwrights (e.g. Miller, Ionesco, Stoppard, Pinter) – but their influence on the development of the musical has been decisive. Furthermore, they make up a good part of the theatrical audience. When I produced a Japanese drama off Broadway some years ago, I was told that one iron rule is never to open a show on a Jewish holiday since only Jewish viewers could be relied on to show up, even for an obscure Japanese play. Why this is true is a subject for another book, but the Jewish presence in New York theater is undeniably immense.
Nevertheless, another strange fact is that few of the big musicals have Jewish subject matter. The style and sense of humor in Broadway musicals have always heavily reflected Jewish archetypes, but not the contents; characterizations are Jewish but not the characters. Jewish writers have shown a preference for big, broad, romantic shows aimed for universal appeal; they wrote not for themselves but for the world. The general thinking was that musicals with Jewish themes would have limited appeal. The Jewish population was small relative to the mass public, so even with their strong theatergoing habits, they could only spark a show to success, not ensure it. Thus, despite what would seem a built-in audience, few large-scale musicals until the 1960s had an explicitly Jewish theme, and none had long-running appeal. Until Fiddler. Continue reading
6/7/21 (Mon)
Mizoguchi Kenji’s 1946 work on the famed ukiyoe artist was evidently one of the first movies to be approved after the war by the American occupying forces. Mizoguchi is widely said to have seen himself in the story of the devoted artist, which here involves censorship and female issues, but the same can probably by said for any film about a struggling artist from Lust for Life onwards. Given the director’s usual concern with the difficulties of women in Japanese society, I had assumed the female half of the title would be the film’s centerpiece.
In fact, though the five women dominate the narrative, the thematic focus is Utamaro’s obsession with his art. Continue reading
6/6/21 (Sun)
After Imamura Shohei’s previous work, the madcap Pigs and Battleships, I was ready for anything. This 1963 film – the literal Japanese title is a more clinical Chronicle of Japanese Insects – followed an effective two-year ban of the director by Nikkatsu for his over-the-top and over-the-budget Pigs. Still, Imamura, unbowed, held nothing back in his new piece about a ruthless woman who does whatever she can to survive. The brutal results ironically became the biggest-grossing film in his career, which presumably mollified the studio’s concerns.
6/1/21 (Tues)
The wild 1961 film that put director Imamura Shohei on the map (and got him banned from studio for two years). It’s a black comedy mixed with social satire about Japanese civilians and American sailors in Yokosuka, a coastal town near Tokyo that hosts a major US naval base, around 1960.
4/29/21 (Thurs)
An amateurish murder mystery from 1961, based on a popular book, that wouldn’t pass muster even as a daytime television film. A woman is just a week into her arranged marriage when her husband mysteriously disappears. He is found dead at the bottom of a cliff, an incident that is ruled a suicide – but is it? The women comes to find that there is more to her husband’s past than she had imagined.
Three films by the unjustly neglected Shimizu Hiroshi. Continue reading
2/14/21 (Sun)
The notorious director Suzuki Seijun has essentially torn his 1967 movie into pieces, thrown them into the air, and spliced them together wherever they landed. It’s as if Picasso and Dali were fighting for the same brush. This is a big inside joke for fans of yakuza flicks, an irritation to the rest of us.
1/7/21 (Thurs)
I had a bit of time at the end of the day and picked this 1945 film because it was an early Kurosawa piece (just his fourth film), started at war end under Japanese censorship and completed just after the war under US censorship; it was based on the popular and eminently film-worthy Kabuki classic Kanjincho (itself based on the Noh classic Ataka); and, not least, it was short at just one hour.
12/13/20 (Sun)
Inagaki Hiroshi’s 1959 adaptation of Cyrano as a Japanese period flick, also known less literally as Samurai Saga (though neither is a particularly good title). I learned about this after seeing the previous day’s Cyrano, My Love, and while I wasn’t wild about Inagaki’s Rickshaw Man, the idea of Mifune Toshiro as Cyrano – not too far in spirit from his roles in Yojimbo and Sanjuro – was too perfect to pass up.
12/12/20 (Fri)
A 1964 film by Naruse, surprisingly still filming in black-and-white. A country woman Reiko (Takamine Hideko) lost her husband in the war after only six months of marriage, and their small Tokyo shop was destroyed by wartime bombing. In the 18 years since, she has effectively single-handedly rebuilt the store to even greater prosperity while continuing to live with her mother-in-law. Continue reading
12/4/20 (Fri)
Naruse’s 1954 adaptation of several short stories by Hayashi Fumiko about former geisha trying to make their way in the postwar world. Continue reading
sekenbanashi 