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.
A Look Back: Funny Girl
The production of Funny Girl due on Broadway next year, the first in nearly 60 years, appears basically a revival of the successful London production of 2015 with the same director, Michael Meyer, and same revised book by Harvey Fierstein. It played first at the small Menier Chocolate Factory, where it was a complete sellout, and then moved to the West End for another half-year. Here are some thoughts from the former.
This is the first big-time revival of the show since its initial run in the mid 1960s, meaning anyone who saw it as a teenager then would now be retirement age. The first question on anyone’s mind is: who’s going to play Barbra? Continue reading
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
5/22/21 (Sat)
Milos Forman’s 1967 farce was his final film in then-Czechoslovakia before absconding to greater glory in Hollywood (Cuckoo’s Nest, Amadeus, Hair, Larry Flynt). Firemen in a small town are putting on a ball to honor their retiring president, which falls into turmoil due to their petty individual concerns and paranoia all around. At the opening, a worker putting up a banner is left hanging dangerously from the ceiling when his colleague, distracted by a trifling argument over a stolen cake, takes his hands off the ladder. Others run over to help, but we find that they are less concerned with the desperate man than with the banner and the party’s image. That sets the tone for the film, which is one rapid crisis after another until the last ironic image. It is really about the bureaucratic mindset of the organizers and crumbling values of society under the Communist regime. 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
(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: My Fair Lady (1956)
Love is the universal theme of the traditional Broadway musical (and opera, for that matter). Regardless of the setting or characters or tone, the stories would invariably revolve around a pair of lovers and their travails, usually ending with the sweethearts blissfully reunited (musical) or dead (opera). Then came My Fair Lady.
sekenbanashi 