- Escape at Dawn, Senkichi Taniguchi (drama, war)
- Conduct Report on Professor Ishinaka, Mikio Naruse (romantic comedy)
- Devil’s Gold, Senkichi Taniguchi (drama)
- Town of Violence, Satsuo Yamamoto (drama, crime)
- Spring Snow, Kōzaburō Yoshimura (drama, slice-of-life)
- Till We Meet Again, Tasashi Imai (drama, war, romance)
Escape at Dawn
aka Desertion at Dawn
(Akatsuki no dasso)
Direction: Senkichi Taniguchi
Screenplay: Senkichi Taniguchi, Akira Kurosawa
Studio: Shintoho
Genre: drama, war
Cast: Ryō Ikebe, Yoshiko Yamaguchi, Eitarō Ozawa, Hajime Izu, Haruo Tanaka, Setsuko Wakayama, Kan Yanagiya, Yuzaburo Shimada, Ko Yamamuro, Harue Tone, Mitsue Tachibana, Taizō Fukami.
#3 on the Kinema Junpo list.
A Japanese soldier, Mikami, returns to his unit after coming back from a Chinese prisoner-of-war camp. He is met with contempt and hatred, however, because he did not commit suicide while in captivity — something that is regarded as a disgrace to the Imperial Army.
Commentary: The film, an adaptation of Taijiro Tamura’s novel A Story of a Prostitute, is a post-war critique of the Imperial Army — one accepted and even encouraged by the American occupation forces. The protagonist is taken prisoner by the Chinese after losing consciousness on the battlefield, which is why he did not manage to commit suicide in time. Later, the idea of taking his own life is discouraged by his love for a woman he met at a military outpost — a woman who, in another indictment of the army’s conduct, had been sexually assaulted by the unit’s commander. Although the soldier believes in the integrity and justice of his superiors, they decide to falsify a report, kill the protagonist, and officially declare him killed in action. Escape at Dawn thus presents the most inhumane face of the army, primarily that of its higher-ranking officers, while depicting ordinary soldiers as largely intimidated.
Shooting the action in crumbling, austere buildings, with frequent rain and dark greys, conveys the film’s pessimistic mood. The only optimistic scenes — shot in sunlight and visually brighter — take place in China. The country and its people are portrayed in a positive light, and the Communist Party slogans are presented as sincere and inspiring, standing in stark contrast to the inhumanity that characterizes the Japanese. The visual contrast between the bleak, decaying military spaces under Japanese control and the sun-drenched scenes in China also inverts the propagandistic image of Japan as a country bringing order and civilization to the other nations of Asia.
The female lead is played by Yoshiko Yamaguchi. The actress was born in China, where she performed under the pseudonym Li Xianglan, concealing her Japanese roots. She later gained popularity in Japanese-occupied territories, appearing in propaganda films in which she specialized in roles as Chinese women who welcomed Japanese rule in their homeland. After the war she was arrested by the new Chinese authorities and faced the death penalty. She managed to avoid punishment thanks to her Japanese origins and her public condemnation of the films she had appeared in during the Second World War. She moved to Japan in 1946. Her casting can be read as a subtle commentary on Japanese wartime propaganda, but also on imperial fantasies, post-war shame, and the redefinition of national identity within the new post-war order.
In Tamura’s literary source, the character played by Yamaguchi is a Korean woman forced by the Japanese army into sexual slavery for soldiers. Due to the censorship of the time, in Escape at Dawn she was changed into a Japanese singer, and her presence was also significantly reduced, with the focus shifted to the soldier Mikami. This change substantially altered the thematic meaning of the film relative to the novel, by sidestepping the subject of Japan’s imperialist violence against women from colonized territories. The Imperial Army is presented in the film as an institution that exploited and abused primarily the Japanese themselves, with no explicit mention of other nations and no attempt to confront the country’s colonial responsibility.
7/10
Conduct Report on Professor Ishinaka
(Ishinaka sensei gyōjōki)
Direction: Mikio Naruse
Screenplay: Yasutaro Yagi
Studio: Fujimoto Production
Genre: romantic comedy
Cast: Ryō Ikebe, Yūji Hori, Toshirō Mifune, Setsuko Wakayama, Mayuri Mokushô, Yōko Sugi, Atsushi Watanabe, Eitarō Shindō, Haruo Tanaka, Yōnosuke Toba, Zeko Nakamura, Kamatari Fujiwara, Yōyō Kojima, Fujio Nagahama, Shiro Mizutani, Fumindo Matsuo
A collection of three novellas about love in post-war rural Japan.
Commentary: Although the film contains traces of revisionism and attempts to recover the essential qualities of humanity lost under the pressure of the aggressive militarist rhetoric of the pre-war and wartime periods, Naruse’s production is primarily a light romantic comedy with a decidedly upbeat tone. The director is also concerned, among other things, with tracing the generational differences between the pre-war generation and one that grew up without any experience of military life, as well as with the question of the country’s modernization — a Japan encountering not only democracy for the first time in years, but also discovering, in the wake of its defeat, individualist, humanist, and existentialist philosophies.
Naruse approaches these themes ironically, however, and presents the younger generation as more conservative than their elders — almost as if in deliberate defiance of their parents. In the second novella, for instance, the protagonists’ parents, beneath a veneer of traditionalism, conservatism, and restraint, prove more eager for new experiences — such as a nude show — than the young people themselves. Naruse gently strips away their mask of respectability without crossing any of the boundaries imposed on him by the escapist framework of his chosen genre.
6/10
Devil’s Gold
(Ma no ōgon)
Direction: Senkichi Taniguchi
Screenplay: Senkichi Taniguchi, Kenrō Matsuura
Studio: Daiei
Genre: drama
Cast: Masayuki Mori, Michiko Hoshi, Ichirō Izawa, Chieko Sōma, Eijirō Tōno, Jūkichi Uno, Takashi Shimura
After thirteen years spent in the frozen mountains in search of gold, Genji Iwaki returns to his home town to realize his dreams, reunite with his former wife, and find the son of a deceased friend.
Commentary: Based on a novel by Shū Sekikawa, Devil’s Gold is one of three productions by Senkichi Taniguchi made in quick succession, each centring on men who have survived traumatic experiences, been cut off from society, fail to understand the rules governing the world around them, and are presented against a backdrop of harsh nature. In Escape at Dawn, which preceded Devil’s Gold, we follow the return of a soldier taken prisoner by the Chinese who believes in the integrity of his superiors, only to find that they care more about the appearance of honour and the army’s reputation than about human life. In Devil’s Gold, having discovered a vein of gold, Iwaki returns to the city after years in the mountains. The people he encounters, beneath a mask of kindness, honour, and willingness to help, attempt to take from him either the ore, or his money, or both. And in Beyond Love and Hate we follow the fate of a rough-mannered man who has escaped from prison, pursuing his wife and a doctor in the mistaken belief that they are lovers, egged on by a fellow convict acting out of self-interest, while the press feeds on the sensational events and fuels his paranoia. Despite their narrative similarities, each of these films also touches on its own distinct concerns.
During his thirteen years in the mountains, Iwaki missed the war, the occupation of the country, and the rise of the black market. When he asks about the weight of gold and requests conversions of grams and carats into monme, this symbolically signals his ignorance of the new order and the fact that he set out to search for gold before the post-war Westernization of the country had begun. At first — on account of his appearance and lack of manners — he is mistaken for a homeless pauper, but people’s attitude towards him changes the moment they learn of the wealth he possesses. In this simple way Taniguchi points to the hypocrisy of contemporary Japan. The negative portrait of society is deepened by the introduction of an entire gallery of greedy characters. Suffice it to say that in the course of a single day Iwaki encounters more than sixty people — and his interactions with them come to resemble, in a sense, his interactions with the mountains: just as he once sifted through rock in search of precious ore, he now sifts through people in search of those with good hearts.
Unfortunately, despite believing himself a sound judge of character, he is deceived by his former wife, Tsukie. The woman puts on a mask of loving devotion, but in reality lies to Iwaki, claiming to be caring for a gravely ill brother, extracting money and gifts from him while concealing the fact that she has a second husband. The son of the protagonist’s old friend, meanwhile, harbours a hatred of gold prospectors: his father was one of them and, like many such men driven by visions of finding happiness in the mountains, died leaving his child an orphan. The boy’s morality deteriorates throughout the film, driven largely by frustration rooted in poverty, childhood trauma, and the impossibility of marrying the girl who is carrying his child. He grows increasingly aggressive until he ultimately decides to become a murderer and a thief.
Apart from the protagonist — whose only flaws are naivety and lack of education — only two morally irreproachable characters appear in Devil’s Gold. The first is a hotel maid at the establishment where Iwaki is staying, who is also the pregnant girl mentioned above. The second is Tsukie’s husband, whose characterization is an interesting touch that prevents either Iwaki or the viewer from harbouring hatred towards his rival for the woman’s affections. Both the maid and the husband give voice to the conviction that not only poverty but also the possession of too much money are causes of unhappiness. The poor turn to crime in order to survive, while the wealthy sink into stagnation and lose touch with reality and genuine feeling, and with it their humanity.
Gold thus becomes in the film a kind of moral test, causing everyone who confronts it to reveal their true character. Two views of wealth dominate in Devil’s Gold: it is either something achieved through hard work, skill, and loyalty, or something that is the object of trade, temptation, jealousy, and moral corruption. For Iwaki, Tsukie’s husband, and the maid, money and gold are bound up with honest labour, fair earnings, the fulfilment of both professional and social duties, and helping those in need. For the majority of urban society, wealth is something to be stolen, spent on pleasure, or wielded against others. This feeds into the broader picture of poverty and greed in the cities that in 1950 was also being painted by, among others, Satsuo Yamamoto (Town of Violence), Mikio Naruse (The Angry Street), and Hiroshi Shimizu (A Mother’s Love).
Taniguchi thus constructs a dichotomy of nature-and-sincerity versus city-and-moral-corruption. This absolutism in the film’s thematic approach is, unfortunately, somewhat wearisome. The production runs over 111 minutes, but after roughly 30 it begins to repeat itself, circling endlessly around the same themes as expressed in verbose dialogues by rather uninvolving characters. In its final passages the film gains more energy, but the brawl scenes introduced there are very poorly edited and considerably too long. Devil’s Gold also fails to impress on the acting front. Masayuki Mori is initially interesting, particularly as he has been cast against type in the role of an infantile, uneducated, physically powerful man — but the sense of freshness quickly fades. It is a fairly similar performance to the protagonist of Beyond Love and Hate, where the role was given to Toshirō Mifune, who handles a comparable style more naturally. The remaining actors are somewhat expressionless — with the exception of Jūkichi Uno — and they are not helped by a narrative layer that is altogether too predictable.
Devil’s Gold is thus another film about post-war greed and human values, using them to paint a simplified picture of the world. At moments — primarily at the beginning and end — it can be visually striking and thematically intriguing. In its middle passages it unfortunately loses momentum, filling the action with monotonous sequences of scant dramatic weight.
6/10
Town of Violence aka Street of Violence: The Pen Never Lies
(Pen itsuwarazu, bōryoku no machi)
Direction: Satsuo Yamamoto
Screenplay: Yusaku Yamagata, Yasutaro Yagi
Studio: Daiei
Genre: drama, crime
Cast: Kenzo Asada, Tōru Abe, Ryō Ikebe, Kenjiro Uemura, Jūkichi Uno, Shirō Ōsaka, Yoshio Ōmori, Tamotsu Kawasaki, Kanji Kawara, Takashi Kanda, Kokuten Kōdō, Akitake Kôno, Zenpei Saga, Takamaru Sasaki, Gen Shimizu, Masao Shimizu, Takashi Shimura, Masami Shimojō
A journalist investigates corruption and collusion between the chief of a small-town police force and a local yakuza family.
Commentary: By opting for a collective protagonist, the production expresses several ideas, becoming less a film telling a specific story than a propaganda vehicle for the democracy being introduced to post-war Japan. The crime plot frequently gives way to lofty proclamations by the characters, in which they extol the virtues of the democratic system and criticize the entrenched hierarchism of Japanese authority, which had given rise to numerous political and social pathologies.
The film can largely be read as a product of the frustration felt by filmmakers of the time with the prevailing order — fury at the political decisions that had led the country into a losing war, combined with an intoxication with the promises of the new system being introduced under American supervision. Street of Violence is in this context one of many examples of pro-democratic cinema from post-war Japan. For many, democracy appeared to offer a solution to at least some of the country’s problems, which makes the one-sidedness of the film’s presentation forgivable — while its fairly broad portrayal of a web of corruption and criminality is worthy of praise, all the more so because the police and gangsters are depicted so effectively as the most abject embodiment of human evil that viewers can readily despise them.
The production also presents two sources from which revolution capable of dismantling social injustice flows, or ought to flow: young people who want their country to be honest, safe, and modern, and journalists fulfilling their mission of exposing problems and helping to resolve them. In this respect its thematic message differs from more mainstream productions such as G-Man of Japan or Bullet Hole Underground, where the prevailing conviction is that one should have faith in a system capable of reforming itself. Street of Violence argues plainly that the system must be monitored and democratized.
It is also worth noting that by portraying contemporary mafia-style organizations in a realistic manner, Street of Violence stands as a precursor to the popular yakuza eiga genre — which would, however, present a far more romanticized image of criminals for many years to come.
8/10
Spring Snow
(Shunsetsu)
Direction: Kōzaburō Yoshimura
Screenplay: Kaneto Shindō
Studio: Shochiku
Genre: drama, slice-of-life
Cast: Yasuko Fujita, Akiko Sawamura, Ichirō Ryūzaki, Teiji Takahashi, Takashi Shimura, Shūji Sano
The story of the impoverished Yoshikawa family. The eldest daughter works on the railway but keeps postponing marriage due to the family’s financial obligations. The younger daughter becomes a servant in a wealthy household. The father loses his job, and the rest of the family is unemployed.
Commentary: The production is a classic example of the positive, uplifting post-war cinema of Japan. The main characters, though living in poverty, hold on to hope for a better tomorrow; they resist the temptation of promises of quick wealth, honesty is their highest honour, and step by step they rebuild their home — prefiguring thereby the broader effort to rebuild the nation. The film opens with a scene of sowing grain in hard, unyielding soil, symbolizing the struggle for survival in difficult times. In the final scene, the grain begins to sprout, expressing the conviction that hard work and discipline will lead the nation to flourish.
7/10
Till We Meet Again
(Mata au hi made; lit.: Until the Day We See Each Other Again)
Direction: Tadashi Imai
Screenplay: Yoko Mizuki, Toshio Yasumi
Studio: Toho
Genre: drama, war, romance
Cast: Yoshiko Kuga, Eiji Okada, Osamu Takizawa, Akitake Kôno, Akiko Kazami, Haruko Sugimura, Kôichi Hayashi, Hiroshi Akutagawa, Akira Ōizumi, Hiroshi Kondō
#1 on the Kinema Junpo list.
Two young people fall in love as Japan, under nationalist rule, moves towards war.
Commentary: As this is a film made shortly after the end of the World War, it comes as no surprise that Imai uses the romance at the narrative centre of the story to take a critical look at the period of armed conflict. The director weaves a two-layered plot in Till We Meet Again: its first level is a fairly sentimental romance, while the second is the wartime backdrop against which the story unfolds.
The main male character — a young man named Saburo Tajima — comes from a family that upholds strict discipline and regards patriotism as the highest duty of every Japanese person. This is especially true of Saburo’s older brother, who becomes in the film a symbol of the archetypal citizen whose mind has been thoroughly washed by nationalist wartime propaganda. He is a soldier who spouts empty slogans and sincerely believes he is attacking other nations in order to bring peace to the world. In his view, this is the only righteous path, the sacred duty of the nation, and anyone who thinks otherwise is a traitor — or at the very least not worthy of calling himself Japanese. In short, he embodies the classic far-right mentality that admits no perspective other than the (wrongly conceived) national one. Imai clearly positions himself against this kind of thinking, which he confirms through the man’s utterly senseless death.
Ono — the main female character — is a young woman from a lower social class who makes posters and tries to make ends meet together with her widowed mother. The class differences between the wealthy Tajima and the impoverished Ono are not Imai’s primary concern. The director swiftly overcomes this obstacle through the couple’s feelings for each other, underscoring the purity of their love — which ultimately makes the tragedy that accompanies their fate all the more painful for the viewer. One might also venture to read the sidelining of the class problem as a reinforcement of the film’s anti-war message. Their love briefly creates a space beyond social hierarchy, state ideology, and family expectations — a private utopia that cannot survive in a world defined by military mobilization and the rigid rules of social life.
There is also a subplot involving Ono’s difficulty in selling her posters. Advertising agencies regard them as worthless, because in wartime it is not aesthetic or artistic values that matter, but propagandistic ones. The wartime order of things is interested solely in content with the potential to motivate ever more brutal fighting, and seeks to extinguish morality and human impulse with full deliberation. This demonstrates that the country’s visual culture too had been militarized, and underscores the all-pervasive reach of the propaganda machine of the time.
8/10
