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
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
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