- Beyond Love and Hate, Senkichi Taniguchi (drama, crime)
- Clothes of Deception, Kōzaburō Yoshimura (drama)
- A Spectacular Murder, Bin Katō (crime)
- Children of the Beehive: What Happened Next, Hiroshi Shimizu (docudrama)
- The Good Fairy, Keisuke Kinoshita (melodrama)
Beyond Love and Hate
(Ai to nikushimi no kanata e)
Direction: Senkichi Taniguchi
Screenplay: Akira Kurosawa, Senkichi Taniguchi
Studio: Film Art Association
Genre: drama, crime
Cast: Toshirō Mifune, Mitsuko Mito, Ryō Ikebe, Takashi Shimura, Eitarō Ozawa, Kichijirō Ueda
A young prisoner, Gorō Sakata, suspects his wife of infidelity and decides to escape from prison.
Commentary: Beyond Love and Hate, based on Kōtarō Samukawa’s short story The Escapee (Datsugokusho), shares similarities with two earlier productions by Senkichi Taniguchi, though it more strongly recalls Escape at Dawn than Devil’s Gold. In both films the protagonists escape from prison, in both one of the main roles is played by Ryō Ikebe, and both screenplays were co-written by Akira Kurosawa. The film was also largely shot in Kiso and its surroundings, where part of Kurosawa’s Rashomon was also filmed — a production on which Taniguchi served as co-producer. The cast of Beyond Love and Hate likewise includes actors familiar from Rashomon: Toshirō Mifune and Takashi Shimura. Despite these similarities, Beyond Love and Hate is in many respects a different film from those mentioned — and unfortunately a less successful one. It lacks both the political edge of Escape at Dawn and the vivid psychological portraits that distinguish Rashomon. As a result the production achieved no great success and today remains largely forgotten.
Its main storyline is uncomplicated. The narrative is broken into alternating sequences presenting the fate of prison escapee Gorō Sakata (Toshirō Mifune), sequences devoted to his wife (Mitsuko Mito) and the doctor Kitahara (Ryō Ikebe) as they hide from him, and sequences showing the police’s progress in tracking all of them down. In these last sequences a kindly prison guard (Takashi Shimura) comes to the fore — a man who does not believe in Sakata’s guilt and is therefore met with mockery. Unfortunately, the fragmentation of storylines, the constantly shifting point of view, and the large amounts of time spent watching characters do little more than trudge through forests and marshes mean the film is unable to present any of its characters in full. It does not help that the main action gets underway rather late. The production opens by informing us of the escape of several prisoners and spends as many as 27 minutes on their recapture and a series of flashbacks from which we learn about the friendly relationship between the aforementioned prison guard and Sakata, and about the reasons behind the latter’s decision to escape — information that is then repeated in the main body of the film, rendering this overlong prologue largely redundant.
Sakata has barely six months left until his release, making his decision appear deeply ill-considered and casting a negative light on his character as a whole, presenting him as not particularly intelligent. Giving credence to rumours of his wife’s infidelity — rumours also present in the press, which constitutes a very cursory dig at journalists more concerned with sensationalism than with reporting the truth — he sets off in search of her. When he finds her, she is waiting for him with their young son and the doctor Kitahara, but Sakata’s first impulse is to reach for a rifle and attempt to murder Kitahara. His shooting before any moment of reflection is one of the most significant events in the plot, as it leads to the film’s central reflections on social trust, the care of children, and the acquisition of education as something that takes precedence over physical strength — pointing to the inadequacy of the traditional model of masculinity. These reflections are inevitably motivated by memories of the war, but in order to express them Taniguchi and Kurosawa treat Sakata in an overly instrumental manner. Furthermore, the pursuit — theoretically the main attraction of Beyond Love and Hate — also proves disappointing: the police disappear entirely for the final half hour, leaving the protagonist to confront the consequences of his own recklessness in relative peace.
The fact that Beyond Love and Hate is such an unoriginal and straightforward film is all the more surprising given that it was produced by the Film Art Association — a studio founded by Akira Kurosawa, Mikio Naruse, Senkichi Taniguchi, and Kajiro Yamamoto following a falling-out with the management of Toho, for whom they had previously worked. In the new outfit the filmmakers enjoyed considerably greater artistic freedom and were not required to answer to the demands of superiors, yet nothing in the production suggests that it emerged from a breath of creative liberty. On the contrary, in many respects it comes across as considerably more rigid than its predecessors.
Perhaps, however, its more escapist orientation — visible in its reach for the simpler themes of betrayal, jealousy, and light suspense, unburdened by socio-political weight — should be read as the fulfilment of Taniguchi’s own inclinations. Be that as it may, the film’s greatest assets remain its shots of nature. The forests, marshes, mountains, and even the shots of a dam are extraordinarily attractive and make Beyond Love and Hate a visually dazzling experience on more than a few occasions. The landscapes are in fact the most expressive element of the production — though their beauty only serves to throw the blandness of the main storyline into sharper relief.
6/10
Clothes of Deception
(Itsuwareru seisō)
Direction: Kōzaburō Yoshimura
Screenplay: Kaneto Shindō
Studio: Daiei
Genre: drama
Cast: Machiko Kyō, Yasuko Fujita, Keiju Kobayashi, Ichirō Sugai, Eitarō Shindō, Seizaburō Kawazu, Chieko Murata, Emiko Yanagi, Hisako Takihana, Taiji Tonoyama
#3 on the Kinema Junpo list.
The story of an active, assertive woman who uses her charms to lead a comfortable life and support her family, and of her more traditional sister, who seeks happiness in steady work and a relationship with a man.
Commentary: Set in post-war Japan, this is the story of two sisters, with a charismatic geisha emerging at the fore. She is played by Machiko Kyō in an outstanding performance — another career-defining role following A Fool’s Love and Rashomon. Through her appearances in these films she became one of the faces of the new, post-war woman in Japanese cinema: erotic, unstable, self-aware, dangerous. In Clothes of Deception she continues along this acting trajectory with a very bold and energetic performance, portraying a woman who consciously makes use of her sex appeal and powers of seduction to secure financial safety for herself and her loved ones within a patriarchal system. She is thereby an entirely different kind of heroine from those found in most films of the time, and anticipates a new type of protagonist in Japanese cinema.
The production is in my view one of the finest collaborations between Yoshimura and Shindō, presenting a wide range of behaviours without prejudice and constituting an excellent reflection of a modernizing, post-war Japan. On the narrative level it also offers an interestingly drawn intrigue full of jealousy and even aggression, crowned by a tense attack on the main protagonist. It is a far more dynamic and modern drama — both stylistically and in terms of content — than most of what was being made at the time. As such it heralds the changes to come in Japanese cinema, where themes of social survival, sex, money, and so on would no longer provoke moral panic, as well as the arrival of filmmakers such as Shōhei Imamura.
The heroine of Clothes of Deception is not a simple cautionary sign against “modern” women. Although the filmmakers undoubtedly punish her for some of her actions, her active, sexual, calculating, and pragmatic behaviour is not ultimately condemned in full. One might even argue that the “deceptions” practised by the protagonist are less a flaw of character than a social language in which she exists. In a world where public respectability is itself a costume, her use of dress, sexuality, and performance is less an expression of hypocrisy than an act of adaptation.
8/10
A Spectacular Murder
(Kenrantaru satsujin)
Direction: Bin Katō
Screenplay: Hajime Takaiwa
Studio: Daiei
Genre: crime
Cast: Jun Usami, Sumiko Hidaka, Kenji Sugawara, Chizuru Kitagawa, Toshiaki Konoe, Tatsuya Ishiguro, Daisuke Katō
A theatre producer is murdered during the premiere of his show. Inspector Kawano investigates the case.
Commentary: Although crime films never constituted the most popular genre in Japanese cinema, noir-influenced films about police officers and detectives were a constant presence on the country’s screens after the Second World War. Earlier examples already covered here include G-Men of Japan (1948) and A Bullet Hole Underground (1949). A Spectacular Murder, however, focuses less on police procedures and teamwork than on the more traditionally presented investigation of a single detective, Inspector Kawano (Jun Usami).
The criminal mystery begins when a popular theatre producer is shot during the premiere of his new musical. The shot was fired from the stage, and the bullet reached him as he sat in the front row of the auditorium. His death is preceded by a musical number that captures the spirit of Japan’s popular culture of the time, drawing liberally from the pop culture of the American occupier, and — through the quasi-criminal subject matter of the song being performed — foreshadowing the film’s theme. The fact that the first crime is committed during a musical spectacle continues a tradition established by earlier crime productions from Daiei (such as Stolen Music Festival [1946] and The Disappearance of the Butterfly [1947]), and anticipates similar scenes found in, among others, the films about Kōsuke Kindaichi, where criminal motifs are combined with the stylistics of the thriller and horror cinema. An important element of Japanese crime films was also the changing of identities by numerous characters, both positive and negative — achieved not only through straightforward lies but also through imaginative disguises in the tradition of Edogawa Ranpo’s fiction. This motif was heavily exploited in the 1950s, for example in the series of films about the detective Tarao Bannai and his Edo-period equivalent Tōyama no Kin-san. The film also invites narrative comparisons with the American Murder at the Vanities (1934) and other Hollywood crime pictures in which crimes are committed during various concerts and musical performances.
A Spectacular Murder — despite its title — does not present a particularly remarkable murder. Like the aforementioned G-Men of Japan and A Bullet Hole Underground, it connects the crime to arms smugglers and roots its motives in the wartime past, suggesting — more or less consciously — unhealed wartime traumas still casting their shadow over Japanese society. Like those earlier films, it also scatters red herrings that are for the most part easy to see through, and when it finally reveals the killer’s identity it reaches for shootout scenes and a police manhunt. This makes the production structurally unoriginal. It is further undermined by the absence of a compelling detective. In the productions just mentioned, the protagonist was collective in nature, and among the police officers were characters played by charismatic actors such as Chiezō Kataoka and Takashi Shimura. In A Spectacular Murder the investigation is conducted almost exclusively by Kawano, but we never get to know him well, and his manner of speaking is colourless and focused solely on the criminal puzzle. Jun Usami, furthermore, was not among Japan’s most gifted actors, which means the production’s hero is rather expressionless. The screen detectives of the 1950s played by Chiezō Kataoka, Ryō Ikebe, and Seizaburō Kawazu are far more compelling presences. Ultimately, then, A Spectacular Murder is a competently made film, but one lacking any particular distinction.
6/10
Children of the Beehive: What Happened Next
(Sono ato no hachi no su no kodomotachi)
Direction and screenplay: Hiroshi Shimizu
Studio: Hachi no su eiga-bu
Genre: docudrama
Cast: Shinichiro Kubota, Masaru Oba, Mitsuo Harada, Eiko Tajima, Norio Tani, Setsuko Himori, Nobue Baba, Yotaka Iwamoto
A sequel to Children of the Beehive.
Children orphaned by the war live in a small commune under the care of a young veteran.
Commentary: The film was shot entirely in the area around the Izu mountains and makes use mostly of non-professional actors, including real war orphans and local officials, giving it a quasi-documentary character. Shimizu ended Children of the Beehive with the sight of children gathering into a small community. In the sequel he takes a closer look at the commune formed by a group of orphans and their guardian, to which visitors arrive bearing help — not always welcome — having been moved to do so partly by watching the previous film. Their assistance is not always appreciated, as the children have developed a smoothly functioning, almost self-sufficient community. Attempts by outsiders to organize their lives, even when driven by idealistic motives, are therefore experienced by the children as interference and as a disruption of an established order. The fact that they are able to thrive successfully as a cooperative group attests at the same time to the necessity of building human relationships, as it is only in this way that the wounds of war can be healed and people can help one another overcome deep trauma.
The production has an episodic structure, with each successive section beginning with the arrival of new visitors to the group — a journalist, high school girls, and others. While most of them wish to offer support or draw public attention to the children’s situation as an inspiring one, some of the visitors are in reality motivated by selfish impulses. For them, helping the children is a means of presenting themselves — if only to themselves — in a more favourable light; their assistance is only ostensibly directed towards the orphans and in reality amounts to attempts at self-justification or even the exploitation of people in need of support. Shimizu is therefore not blind to social dangers.
As director and screenwriter, he frequently revealed himself to be an advocate of the idea of placing children who, for various reasons, do not fit into the outside world into communities where they could find happiness and in some sense shelter from various injustices and cruelties — as he demonstrated, for example, in The Shiinomi School. Such an approach can, however, result in children being entirely unprepared for their subsequent existence in the mercantile world, to which they must sooner or later inevitably make the transition. His conviction that the soul is healed through the building of a supportive community, through work, and through unencumbered time spent in nature is, however, difficult to dispute.
6/10
The Good Fairy
(Zemma)
Direction: Keisuke Kinoshita
Screenplay: Kōgo Noda, Keisuke Kinoshita
Studio: Shochiku
Genre: melodrama
Cast: Masayuki Mori, Chikage Awashima, Rentarō Mikuni, Yōko Katsuragi, Chishū Ryū, Koreya Senda, Toshiko Kobayashi
A young reporter is assigned to cover the story of the Finance Minister’s wife fleeing her husband. It soon emerges that she is a former — and still unextinguished — love of his superior. In the meantime, the reporter himself falls mutually in love with the woman’s nineteen-year-old sister.
Commentary: In many respects The Good Fairy is a typical representative of Keisuke Kinoshita’s melodramatic output, and those who are not admirers of his romantic films will likely find little here for themselves. The heavily sentimental and at times excessively mawkish film theoretically centres on the characters of newspaper editor Yoshio Nakanuma (Masayuki Mori) and the Finance Minister’s wife Itsuko Kitaura (Chikage Awashima). In reality, however, the central figure is the young journalist played by the debuting Rentarō Mikuni, who from his very first role demonstrates his great acting talent. Kinoshita presents him as a person of wholly sincere and pure heart, possessed of a flawless idealism bordering on obsession, and suggests that this black-and-white way of perceiving the world is the only righteous one.
Mikuni is assigned to conduct a journalistic investigation into the aforementioned Kitaura’s flight from her husband. In the course of his duties he meets the woman’s nineteen-year-old sister, Mikako Toba (Yōko Katsuragi). Love quickly blossoms between the two young people, but — unsurprisingly — it is a love doomed to tragedy from the outset, for Mikako is gravely ill and certain death awaits her. The approaching end in no way dampens Mikuni’s ardour; on the contrary, it inflames it further, which serves to underscore the purity of the man’s character. This purity is further emphasized through his other behaviour: although he is friends with Nakanuma, he breaks off the acquaintance upon learning that the latter has treated his mistress (Toshiko Kobayashi) cruelly. The young man will also not hesitate to quarrel with the newspaper’s editor-in-chief or enter into conflict with the corrupt Finance Minister in order to help Itsuko obtain a divorce — for in Japan of that era only a man could initiate divorce proceedings if the woman had not provided grounds deemed sufficient in the eyes of the law to justify her decision to leave her husband. Against the backdrop of Mikuni’s struggles, the relationship between Nakanuma and Kitaura develops: they were in love in their youth, but the woman chose position over love and married the current Finance Minister. Now they have a chance to reunite, but their personal problems stand in the way.
Thematically the production primarily contrasts the idealistic worldview expressed by Mikuni with the mercantile one represented by the pejoratively characterized tabloid press. The father of Mikako and Itsuko, Ryōen Toba (Chishū Ryū), who lives in the mountains, provides the ultimate confirmation of the film’s message. When we first meet him he admits that he had intended to become a Buddhist monk but had lost his faith in humanity. When we encounter him near the end of The Good Fairy it transpires that Mikuni’s conduct has restored that faith and given meaning to his existence.
Unfortunately the protagonist is a character of exceptionally naive romanticism, which ultimately makes him rather unrealistic. His constant opposition to the established order of the world is not only obsessive but — particularly towards the end — borders on outright madness. As a result his humanism does not feel close to the viewer; on the contrary, it is the somewhat more calculating but still fundamentally decent Nakanuma who becomes the character most familiar and comprehensible to us, and the most plausible. Much of the credit for this goes to Mori, who plays with restraint and remarkable naturalism. Also worthy of attention on the acting front is Ryū who — as always — provides a steady anchor for the entire picture; though his performance is understated, his extraordinary naturalness and magnetism effectively draw the viewer’s eye. The rest of the cast, portraying characters of varying degrees of hedonism, perform solidly without distinguishing themselves in any particular way, though Awashima leaves an impression — and, similarly to the character of Nakanuma, her conduct, despite her character’s negative traits, is easier to understand than Mikuni’s behaviour. It is worth noting here that in presenting her as a greedy person, Kinoshita entirely overlooks the fact that in 1950s Japan it was simply harder for women to survive without a man’s material support. Finding oneself in a good match was usually the only chance of attaining a decent life, yet in the melodramatic setting of The Good Fairy this kind of behaviour is characterized pejoratively, since we observe it through the prism of sentimental romanticism.
The film’s greatest weakness, however, is its fragmentation across several storylines and the jumps between a romantic drama and a drama critiquing tabloid journalism, where there is no room for the innocence represented by Mikuni and Mikako. The numerous subsidiary storylines introduce unnecessary confusion, all the more so since their primary function is to present one character after another in a negative light, in order to expose the blamelessness of the young protagonists time and again. The unfortunate result is that almost everyone here comes across as rather one-dimensional. Kinoshita thus sketches a heavily exaggerated and not entirely narratively coherent — though still worthwhile — morality tale: a morality tale with a forceful message that resounds most clearly in simple acts of kindness, suggesting that it is from these that the repair of a broken world must begin.
The whole culminates in a fairly grotesque finale that may convince some viewers of the type of moralism Kinoshita presents, while likely alienating others from it entirely. It depicts Mikuni as a madman whose goodness is too great to fit within the real world, suggesting that the film may be — as the title implies — a fairy tale set in a reality resembling our own. One cannot fail to mention the sequence of pre-finale scenes, which constitute one of the production’s greatest strengths. Through rapid narration placing one obstacle after another before Mikuni and Nakanuma, Kinoshita succeeds in this sequence in generating a tension absent from the rest of the film.
The cinematography is also a considerable asset. Hiroshi Kusuda offers a wealth of memorable shots; in his hands even snow-covered landscapes filmed on studio sets look attractive. The Good Fairy is therefore an interesting film, though also one that is difficult to consider worthy of the same attention as the productions of Yasujirō Ozu, Akira Kurosawa, or Kenji Mizoguchi.
6/10
