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
11/17/20 (Tues)
Sentimental slop. The 1943 original was shown at the Tokyo International Film Festival a few weeks ago, piquing my interest. The one available online was a popular color remake by the same director, Hiroshi Inagaki, starring Mifune Toshiro and Takamine Hideko. Continue reading
10/19/20 (Mon), Tokyo
The Press Club was holding a special screening of this 2019 film in honor of this month’s Tokyo International Film Festival, where director Fukada Koji’s works will be spotlighted. The movie was co-produced by a French company and was apparently a big hit in France, where art films are more appreciated. Its appeal elsewhere, including Japan, has been more limited. Continue reading
5/14/20 (Thurs)
A 1955 film, also known as Hooray for Marriage, by Toyoda Shiro based on a novel set in Osaka in the late 1920s. The wayward son of a prominent shopkeeper has dumped his wife and child for a beautiful geisha from a poor family, prompting his father to disinherit him for sullying the family name. The geisha is hoping to be the man’s next bride. Silly her. Continue reading
11/27/20 (Fri)
This 1965 work is one of Kurosawa’s most popular and acclaimed films, so I was looking forward to seeing it despite the off-putting three-hour running time.
The setting is a rural village in the mid-19th century towards the end of the Edo Era. A privileged medical student (Kayama Yuzo) expecting to serve as the shogun’s physician pays greetings at a poor public clinic in what he believes a formality, only to learn that he has in fact been assigned there. He detests his surroundings, complaining of the low life and stink (“the smell of the poor”, he is told), and imperiously refuses to wear the uniform or follow the rules. He is eventually won over by the clinic’s virtuous head doctor, known as Red Beard (Mifune Toshiro), who seeks to heal his patients’ souls as well as their bodies (shades of the earlier Drunken Angel). Moreover, his experience with a sickly young waif in the film’s second half brings him an understanding of the struggles of the kindly townspeople. He eventually receives his commission to the shogun, but turns the offer down in order to stay and help the underprivileged (probably a good thing since the already struggling shogunate was overthrown just a few years later).
A film full of clichés and melodrama. Continue reading
11/25/20 (Wed)
This fantastic 1961 samurai flick is set a century earlier in 1860, a turbulent period in Japan when the shogunate was tottering. Continue reading
11/22/20 (Sun)
One of Kurosawa’s first postwar flicks and his first film with Mifune Toshiro. It amounts to a rather heavy-handed look at yakuza culture as well as the race for riches that threatens to undermine the societal ties that bind. It featured exaggerated performances by both leads, who do lots of declaiming in place of normal speech. There is nothing natural in Shimura Takashi’s gruff language or treatment of others, while Mifune is charismatic but over-the-top in trying to be the tough gangster, putting on a show even in intimate moments. It’s hard to believe in either of these guys.
The story itself is interesting. Continue reading
11/20/20 (Fri)
This 1946 film, made under the watch of Occupation censors, was Kurosawa Akira’s first postwar work and one of his only films to focus on a woman. Continue reading
1/5/21 (Tues)
Nakahira Ko’s seminal 1956 film, which put the so-called taiyozoku (太陽族) or “sun tribe” on the map, is essentially Japan’s Look Back in Anger, a sensationalist look at disaffected youth in the postwar era that electrified the staid Japanese film world. It was adapted by Ishihara Shintaro from his novelette, which was bundled with two similar stories that were all made into films the same year (this being by far the best). The series includes the notorious Season of the Sun (太陽の季節), known infamously for the scene in which the main character slams his erect organ through the paper shoji screen. The title of that story led an interviewer to refer in an article to the Sun Tribe, a label that came to define a generation. (The story is alluded to in this film in the boat’s English name, Sun Season.) Ishihara makes a brief appearance in the film as one of a group of thugs, but more important was his insistence that the filmmakers cast his younger brother Yujiro, creating a legend.
11/14/20 (Sat), Tokyo
This 1963 Kurosawa work is really two films. In the first half, a well off industrialist (Mifune Toshiro) is battling for control of a major shoe company with other board members who want to cut corners on product quality for greater profit. The industrialist refuses to give in and throws his entire fortune into a secret deal that will give him a majority stake.
Just when that deal is set to go through, he receives a call that his son has been kidnapped. Frantically, he agrees to pay the enormous ransom with the money he had gathered despite knowing that this will ruin him financially. Then unexpectedly the son wanders in. It turns out that the kidnapper has mistakenly taken the chauffeur’s son instead. The industrialist is now faced with a moral dilemma: does he save the boy at devastating cost to himself, or save his own family from a bleak future? Continue reading
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