Madame Butterfly (1915 silent film)

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  • Madame Butterfly (1915 silent film)

2/1/22 (Tues)

I realized after writing about the Fritz Lang Butterfly that I never posted this review of the older silent version of the opera. I found this film by chance online when doing research for my Kabuki version of Butterfly [which finally debuted in Dec 2024]. The only names I recognized were Mary Pickford in the title role and David Burton as a Japanese prince who wants to marry her – casting that wouldn’t go over well today.

The story is taken broadly from the opera but changed in significant ways. The biggest difference is that Butterfly is not a geisha for hire but the daughter of a well-to-do family, which changes the dynamics considerably. Continue reading →

Hero of the Red Light District (妖刀物語：花の吉原百人斬り)

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  • 妖刀物語：花の吉原百人斬り (Hero of the Red Light District)

12/6/24 (Fri)

Uchida Tomu’s 1960 film draws liberally from the much-revived Meiji-era Kabuki classic Kagotsurube (1888), the story of a lonely pockmarked man whose desperation to be loved makes him an easy mark for unscrupulous people, leading ultimately to tragedy. (The Kabuki was itself based on a real-life incident.) Uchida veers from the popular tale in significant ways that make for an interesting study. A more literal translation of the Japanese title would be something like, “The Story of the Haunted Sword: Glittering Yoshiwara and the Mass Slaying”. (Hyakunin-giri or “mass slaying” literally means slashing 100 persons but is simply meant to indicate a large number of people. The phrase is known for its unfortunate use as a killing contest during Japan’s invasion of China, about which the less said the better. More happily, it can also be a sexual term meaning to bed dozens of people.) The English title is lame: the guy is no hero, and the story involves a street prostitute thrown into the world of courtesans, not quite a red light district.

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Fritz Lang’s Harakiri / Madame Butterfly (1918 silent film)

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  • Fritz Lang’s Harakiri / Madame Butterfly 

11/24/24 (Sun)

I was surprised to find a foreign film called Harakiri at all given Kobayashi Masaki’s masterwork by the same English title, but this was in fact a silent German film made in 1918, when Europe was still in the midst of its Japonisme boom. On top of that, it’s based explicitly on Puccini’s Madame Butterfly, which debuted just a few years earlier (the US release used the opera title rather than the more sensational German title). It follows a US silent Butterfly film with Mary Pickford by just three years and is one of the earliest surviving works by the great Fritz Lang. I initially watched a poorly preserved hour-long version online but found a better 90-minute version the next day and re-watched it.

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High Sierra

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  • High Sierra

11/10/24 (Sun)

Raoul Walsh’s 1941 noir thriller gave Humphrey Bogart his first starring role. While the actor was second-billed here (to Ida Lupino), that wouldn’t last long, especially after his turn later that year in a true classic, The Maltese Falcon. This film, though a big success in its day, has not aged as well.

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The Goddess (神女)

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  • 神女 (The Goddess)

11/9/24 (Sat)

This masterful Shanghai-based silent movie of 1934 was amazingly the prolific Wu Yonggang’s debut work, setting a pretty high standard for his career. It’s impressive that he was able to pull this off at all given the censorship under Nationalist Guomintang rule, though it does have an (overly) explicit moral message that might have helped. It’s still considered one of China’s greatest films.

The title, The Goddess, was also used euphemistically to refer to prostitutes. Both meanings would apply to the unnamed heroine, played by the irreplaceable Ruan Lingyu. Continue reading →

Song of the South

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  • Song of the South

11/4/24 (Mon)

Disney has kept this 1946 children’s film out of circulation in the US for the past several decades – it was last released theatrically in 1986 and has never been available in the US on video or streaming – due to charges of racial insensitivity or worse. That made me all the more curious to see it, and the internet makes that easy enough. I vaguely recall watching it as a kid and, other than the animation, just remember a white boy and girl and black boy running around together and spending time with Uncle Remus.

As usual, the complaints have been blown far out of proportion. Continue reading →

Seisaku’s Wife (清作の妻)

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  • 清作の妻 (Seisaku’s Wife)

11/2/24 (Fri), Tokyo

This 1965 work was being shown at the Tokyo Film Festival as part of a tribute to director Masumura Yasuzo on the 100th anniversary of his birth. It is the time leading up to the outbreak of war with Russia in 1904. The attractive Okane (Wakao Ayako) has been forced by her desperately poor family to serve for the past three years as mistress to a wealthy but much older man. When he dies and leaves her a small fortune, she returns with her mother to their old village. Unfortunately the villagers, partly jealous of Okane’s newfound wealth, deride her for having sold her body, however unwillingly, and refuse to have anything to do with her. She, in return, makes no attempt to ingratiate herself with them or help with the village work.

Meanwhile, Seisaku (Tamura Takahiro), a local lad, returns from military service in China and is hailed as a hero. Wartime fever has infected the entire village, which sees serving and dying as a glorious act. Seisaku, determined to improve village morale, has forged a large bell that he clangs early each morning to rouse the people to work. They reluctantly do so in deference to him.

Okane, however, ostracized in any case, refuses to play along. This intrigues Seisaku, and slowly but surely they come to fall for each other. Continue reading →

Wolves, Pigs and Men (狼と豚と人間)

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  • 狼と豚と人間 (Wolves, Pigs and Men)

11/1/24 (Fri), Ginza

Fukasaku Kinji’s stellar 1964 work was being shown at the Tokyo Film Festival in a pristine copy in honor of what would have been its star Takakura Ken’s 100th birthday. A violent, relentlessly driving film about three low-life brothers from the slums who become involved on different sides of a dangerous scheme that could be their salvation – or their death warrant. Continue reading →

Orochi (雄呂血)

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  • 雄呂血 (Orochi)

10/31/24 (Thurs)

This silent film of 1925 apparently broke barriers by presenting an antihero fighting the corruption of the ruling class as opposed to the good samurai defending the masses. The video online has excellent Japanese narration by a professional benshi narrator, which I listened to briefly. But benshi tend to add their own commentary and imagined dialogue; silent films were not made with the assumption of any specific narration and, with the intertitles, are (or should be) perfectly understandable as is. I ended up turning the sound off, which worked just fine. The movie does rely too much on expository intertitles, some of which are very long and hard to read (at least on a television). Thank goodness for the English subtitles.

The title Orochi is not the serpent of Kabuki fame. Though it’s the same word in English, the characters here are a strange mix of unrelated kanji, apparently chosen at random (for instance, the middle character ro is simply part of the screenwriter’s name) when the authorities objected to the original Buraikan or ruffian (often mistranslated in the West as outlaw). The odd word presumably perplexed them enough to let it pass. The film was the first to be produced by the production company set up by its star, former Kabuki actor Bando Tsumasaburo, though it was the second one released. The actor, known popularly as Bantsuma, must have liked it: it’s the only of the 200+ films in which he appeared that he kept the original negatives. And what a film.

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Noh: Aritoshi, Funa Benkei (蟻通, 船弁慶)

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  • Noh: 蟻通, 船弁慶 (Aritoshi, Funa Benkei)

3/27/24 (Sun), Tokyo

The two shows today represent, perhaps unintentionally, the oldest and newest strands of Noh, the first written in the art’s infancy and the other toward its final flowering. In addition to the virtues of the separate pieces, the comparison of the two was instructive.

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Tetsuo, The Iron Man (鉄男)

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  • 鉄男 (Tetsuo, The Iron Man)

10/19/24 (Fri)

Tsukamoto Shinya’s (Shadow of Fire) surrealistic 1989 horror fantasy about… actually, I’m not sure what it’s about, but it involves a man, a woman and a male hit-and-run victim who gradually turn into machines. I think. Continue reading →

Slave Play

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  • Slave Play

9/12/24 (Thurs), West End

I had not planned on subjecting myself to what sounded like another diatribe on racism, but having told a friend to select whatever he’d like, I couldn’t complain. The result was predictable in its blame-the-whites attitude.

The first half hour offers three scenes of interracial couples on a plantation in outrageous master-slave relationships, including whips and boot-licking. These turn out to be therapy sessions aimed at confronting the racism that is supposedly hurting their marriages. The couples – a women with a man who had initially been brought by her husband to spice up relations, a gay couple, and a seemingly normal couple – are brought together after their fantasy sessions to discuss their feelings with two therapists.

The entire show reflects the racist attitude of the writer in assuming that the couples’ problems are rooted in racism, specifically from the white side. I’ve heard it all before; the writer is beyond redemption. I don’t feel a need to reflect on it, though I did enjoy the mocking pseudo-intellectual observations by the lesbian shrinks, which were quite funny. While it’s true that this is low-hanging fruit, I wish the rest of the show had been on that level.

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