- Carmen Comes Home, Keisuke Kinoshita (comedy-drama)
- Home Sweet Home, Noboru Nakamura (drama)
- Ginza Cosmetics, Mikio Naruse (drama)
- Boyhood, Keisuke Kinoshita (drama, war)
Carmen Comes Home
(Karumen kokyo ni kaeru)
Direction and screenplay: Keisuke Kinoshita
Studio: Shochiku
Genre: comedy-drama
Cast: Hideko Takamine, Shūji Sano, Chishū Ryū, Kuniko Igawa, Takeshi Sakamoto, Bontarō Miake, Keiji Sada, Toshiko Kobayashi, Kōji Mitsui, Yūko Mochizuki
The first colour film in Japan.
#4 on the Kinema Junpo list.
A popular Tokyo dancer named Lily Carmen, who specializes in so-called nude shows, visits her home village.
Commentary: Carmen Comes Home is a production maintained in a light, comedic tone. Hideko Takamine plays Lily Carmen, a star of Tokyo’s nude shows — performances that were, by the standards of the time, fairly daring in their eroticism and were promoted in Japan by the American occupation authorities. One day, accompanied by her friend Maya (Toshiko Kobayashi), Carmen returns to her home village, where her manner, her profession, and her skimpy outfits disrupt the peaceful, traditional rhythm of the small community’s life.
The choice of genre for the first Japanese film made in colour may come as something of a surprise — particularly in the context of early colour productions from other countries. According to an unconfirmed story, Shochiku employees discovered a small supply of colour film stock in the studio’s archive entirely by accident. Management reportedly concluded that since such stock was already in their possession, it was worth putting to use. They decided to entrust it to Keisuke Kinoshita, and although he was of course a talented director, the choice seems a somewhat unexpected one given that the studio also worked with such filmmakers as Kenji Mizoguchi — already known at the time for artistically elaborate historical productions. Intuition — or commercial instinct — would most likely have suggested that the first colour film should be a visually sumptuous work, perhaps richly coloured historical cinema or fantasy filled with spectacular imagery; but Kinoshita went in precisely the opposite direction and chose to make a delicate contemporary comedy set in a small village with a relatively small cast. In truth, the only choices that might be considered more commercially minded are — despite everything — the genre itself, the nude show motifs, and the casting of the popular and attractive Hideko Takamine in the lead. More than one viewer certainly came to the cinema to see the actress dancing in a skimpy costume with erotic undertones, and such a viewer was certainly not disappointed by the scenes presented to them.
Lily Carmen and her friend are presented as self-assured, if somewhat naive, women who are proud of their profession and regard it as an important artistic pursuit. They are at the same time very pleasant, charming, and good-hearted. As viewers we can easily imagine them being presented in a more sensationalist style — in the manner of American cinema, for instance — as femmes fatales leading men astray, as proud women exposing small-town hypocrisy, or as lost women being cleansed of the “sins” of their “immoral” ways in the pastoral, traditionalist space of the village. Fortunately none of this occurs in Carmen Comes Home: not only are the girls as far as possible from any wrongdoing or desire to exploit others, they are also entirely free from any trace of sin, and consequently there is no attempt here to present their form of dance as anything other than an artistic pursuit. And although it is a form of art not widely known — and indeed sometimes not highly regarded — among the traditional village community, this does not mean that the community is so closed in its world as to be incapable of recognizing the merits of works from outside its sphere of interest. Kinoshita thus portrays the villagers as, in the vast majority, free of prejudice. The exceptions are few, and even when they appear they do not alter the viewer’s overall perception of the community. One such exception is Carmen’s father, who does not accept his daughter’s profession, but beyond ignoring her performances (and occasionally drinking himself into a stupor at home) does nothing further; he also accepts the money she gives him, which he uses to help develop the local school — making the indirect yet clearly positive results of the girls’ profession visible to us. It is also worth noting that most of the villagers treat them not with a sense of moral superiority but rather with a feeling of incomprehension. These are people who have had no previous contact with modern forms and customs — in other words, they have not had the opportunity to encounter them. Their ignorance, however, does not lead them to regard these things as bad or improper.
In the pivotal scene of Carmen and Maya’s performance in the village, the residents simply watch politely — the male portion of the audience with somewhat more excitement than the female, naturally. No controversy erupts, nobody is shocked; they are simply getting to know a form of art unfamiliar to them. They may not understand it, it may not be to their taste, but they accept it and have no difficulty with the fact that others may enjoy it. The scantily clad dances are therefore not characterized pejoratively — quite the contrary: they are entertainment, contact with which has not only failed to demoralize the audience but has introduced a little colour into their frequently monotonous lives. The protagonist’s sister even seems positively proud of Carmen’s talent. Ultimately the performance constitutes a kind of cultural exchange, after which the dancers return cheerfully to Tokyo to continue their careers while the villagers return to their traditional lives. Only the children dancing in the school yard serve as a reminder that something interesting recently occurred, and that changes await the village in the future. Kinoshita thus takes no side between tradition and modernity, but rather sides with sincerity and honest art (symbolized also by the blind musician who appears in the film), with human warmth and mutual assistance — while standing against exploitation and greed.
One could of course criticize Kinoshita for an overly idealized portrait of Japan at the time and an unrealistic depiction of the entertainment industry, with its lies, poverty, alcohol, drugs, and criminals entirely absent from the film. In Carmen Comes Home Kinoshita instead shows almost exclusively the positive sides of both worlds presented, striving perhaps to depict how things ought to be rather than how they are, and to offer reassurance to both the inhabitants of the small village and the dancers of Tokyo. Or perhaps he was simply avoiding heavy themes in the country’s first colour production so as not to diminish its chances of commercial success. Either way, Carmen Comes Home is a historically significant and at the same time genuinely valuable, very skillfully made, engaging, and heartening film — one that is decidedly worth recommending.
In the context of the film’s production it is worth adding that the Fujifilm technicians working on it feared that artificial lighting would adversely affect image quality and therefore suggested shooting in natural light. This required that virtually the entire film be set in outdoor spaces, which were found at a considerable distance — roughly 150 kilometres — from the studio facilities. Carmen Comes Home therefore takes place almost entirely — with the exception of one scene — in the open air of a small, idyllic village. The pastoral character of the production was thus partly an artistic decision and partly a consequence of technological constraints.
The Fujicolor process used during filming had first been employed in Japan in one scene of Eleven Girls Students (Jūichinin no jogakusei, Motoyoshi Oda), a production from Toho dating from 1946. It was subsequently used more than twenty times in newsreels, partially colour productions, and recordings of kabuki performers. Carmen Comes Home, however, was the first feature-length film to be made in its entirety using this process.
There was nevertheless a concern that recording such a long work using Fujicolor might end in failure, and so a black-and-white version of the film was produced simultaneously alongside the colour one. This meant twice as much work, which was particularly burdensome for the actors and make-up artists. The colour version required a reddish make-up to ensure a realistic skin tone on the new film stock — make-up that unfortunately looked extremely poor when captured on black-and-white stock, meaning that all make-up had to be changed before every retake of each scene. These changes were not limited to the face but applied to entire bodies, as the two main female characters very frequently appear with bare shoulders and décolletage, and there is no shortage of scenes drawing the viewer’s attention to their legs. This was all the more taxing for them given that the cosmetics of the time clogged the pores of the skin — a thoroughly unpleasant experience when filming during a hot summer, in sunny outdoor locations besides. Hideko Takamine later said in an interview: “I really thought this film was going to kill me.” In recognition of her sacrifice she was given by the studio a six-month holiday in Paris. Upon her return to Japan the finest period of her career began; by 1955 she was the highest-paid actress in the country.
7/10
Home Sweet Home
(Waga ya wa tanoshi, lit. Our Family is Happy)
Direction: Noboru Nakamura
Screenplay: Sumie Tanaka, Takao Yanai
Studio: Shochiku
Genre: drama
Cast: Chishū Ryū, Isuzu Yamada, Hideko Takamine, Keiji Sada, Mutsuko Sakura, Kokuten Kōdō, Kaoru Kusuda, Sugisaku Aoyama, Junji Masuda, Reiko Minakami, Keiko Kishi
The story of a middle-income family trying to make ends meet and pursue their dreams. Unfortunately the father is robbed of his money, leaving the family threatened with eviction.
Commentary: This is a classic example of Japanese cinema depicting the family life of the time. As such it is very predictable and offers nothing that has not already been seen many times and in better execution. Even despite an excellent cast, the film remains no more than a solid, pleasant entry striving to find its place within popular domestic drama. It constitutes one of a series of early post-war portraits of a middle-income family trying to preserve its dignity in the face of the economic pressures of life as salaried workers — rent, the threat of theft, children’s ambitions, and family obligations.
Viewed in a broader historical context, the film reflects the wider identity of the Shochiku studio, which specialized in domestic dramas. The production’s conventionality cannot be considered one of its merits, but it certainly provides a good example of the studio’s norms, which contemporary viewers easily recognized and to which most — particularly in the post-war period — responded positively.
An interesting detail is the text featured on the film’s poster. At the centre of the graphic is a white board being held by one of the characters. Unlike the customary promotional tagline, this is in fact an advertisement for an entirely different production, titled Hana mo arashi mo (Both Flowers and Storms, Yasushi Sasaki, 1949). The film is practically unknown outside Japan and, as far as I am able to determine, has no official English title. The lead roles were played by Michiyo Kogure and Masao Wakahara. Shochiku was thus promoting two films on a single poster, suggesting to viewers that if they enjoyed one of them they should also see the other.
6/10
Ginza Cosmetics
(Ginza keshō)
Direction: Mikio Naruse
Screenplay: Matsuo Kishi
Studio: Ito Productions
Genre: drama
Cast: Kinuyo Tanaka, Ranko Hanai, Yūji Hori, Kyōko Kagawa, Eijirō Yanagi, Eijirō Tōno, Yoshihiro Nishikubo, Haruo Tanaka, Yoshio Kosugi, Masao Mishima, Tamae Kiyokawa
The film offers a glimpse into the life of a middle-aged single mother working as a hostess in one of the bars of Tokyo’s entertainment district, the titular Ginza.
Commentary: Ginza Cosmetics is regarded, alongside The Dancer, as a prelude to the period of Mikio Naruse’s excellence, which began in 1951 with Repast (Meshi). Unlike The Dancing Girl (Maihime), however, which is capable of stirring genuine emotion in the viewer, Ginza Cosmetics — at least in my experience — is a film without much expression. Its main weakness is the absence of a clear central storyline, which means that successive events seem to constitute a series of loosely connected sequences rather than a cohesive narrative structure. This could be interpreted as a reflection of the randomness of human life, but it undeniably diminishes engagement with the plot, frequently leaving the viewer in the position of a passive observer of an attractive spectacle.
As in most entries in Naruse’s filmography, this one too concerns the lives of middle-class women — in other words, working women trying to survive from day to day in an impoverished and ideologically schizophrenic post-war Japan. The heroine of Ginza Cosmetics — Yukiko Suji (Kinuyo Tanaka) — is a former geisha, now working as a hostess in the Ginza in order to support herself and the young son (Yoshihiro Nishikubo) she is raising alone. And as is typically the case with good-natured women in Japanese dramas, she becomes a target for exploitation by men. Another characteristic feature of such dramas is the placement of the heroine at a crossroads between the old, traditional Japan and the country’s advancing modernization. It is worth noting in this context that, contrary to productions such as The Angry Street (Ikari no machi, 1950), in Ginza Cosmetics Naruse does not entirely demonize the clubs and entertainment districts — like the titular Ginza — but rather encourages the search for hidden virtues and goodness amid the corruption and moral decay that are visible at first glance. Perhaps this shift stems simply from the fact that the production is an adaptation of a novel by Tomoichirō Inoue, who approaches such questions differently from Fumio Niwa, whose novel served as the basis for the screenplay of The Angry Street. Either way, this time it proves possible to extract positive qualities from both the traditional and the modern world. This does not, of course, mean that the characters are able to move towards a happy life — only towards a life in accordance with their own conscience, which is perhaps small consolation given that they must ultimately keep silent about their troubles — particularly if they are women — and endure their suffering in silence.
It comes as no surprise in this context that men are presented in a negative light here. Poor men posing as wealthy, failures living off women’s financial support, hypocrites, and the like make up the male landscape of the production, filling it in the process with both dramatic and comedic scenes. It is largely through the contrast between the men and Yukiko that the tragic nature of human life becomes apparent. The only positively characterized man is an intelligent young man (Yūji Hori) of rural origin — thereby expressing the filmmakers’ positive attitude towards the countryside as the last bastion of tradition — who combines empathy, respect for others, and a love of poetry with a distaste for colourful districts and crowds. Hence, even if the main characters seem to combine tradition and modernity with varying degrees of success, the young man’s presence constitutes a clear expression of longing for a simple, idyllic life far from urban spaces, which are characterized as at least two-faced. The young man’s intellect also awakens the protagonist’s own, suggesting that her true self has been suppressed and revealing that someone like her never had and never will have the opportunity to fully spread her wings. The true tragedy depicted in the film therefore concerns not Yukiko’s work as a hostess but the gradual realization that within Japan’s social space her intelligence and sensitivity could never flourish.
As a slow drama devoid of turning points or any desire to build tension, Ginza Cosmetics unfolds without much emotional engagement. One of the most interesting aspects of the film is consequently its depiction of the action from the perspective of the Ginza bars of the time, which provides an intriguing insight into the entertainment world of that district, the work of hostesses, and so on. In the background we also observe a modernizing Japan through the ongoing construction work in Tokyo and the emerging modern high-rises.
The lead role was played by one of Japan’s most celebrated actresses internationally: Kinuyo Tanaka. Before the 1950s, in October 1949, she had embarked on a three-month journey to the United States as one of the first post-war cultural ambassadors, and upon returning to Japan decided to leave the Shochiku studio, where she had begun working in 1924. As an independent actress she continued to collaborate with the country’s most distinguished directors, including Kenji Mizoguchi, with whose films she is most widely associated outside Japan. In 1950 she appeared, among others, in Keisuke Kinoshita’s Wedding Ring (Konyaku yubiwa) and in the year’s biggest box-office hit, Yasujirō Ozu’s The Munekata Sisters (Munekata kyōdai). Her casting in the lead role certainly aided the production’s reception, though it achieved neither great commercial nor critical success (despite placing twenty-fourth on the Kinema Junpo list). Tanaka — as always — delivered an outstanding performance and is arguably the film’s greatest asset. One of the main supporting roles was also played by Kyōko Kagawa, two years before her breakthrough performance in Yasujirō Ozu’s Tokyo Story (Tōkyō monogatari). As an interesting footnote, the film’s assistant director was Teruo Ishii, the future cult filmmaker of numerous exploitation productions.
6/10
Boyhood
(Shonenki)
Direction: Keisuke Kinoshita
Screenplay: Sumie Tanaka, Keisuke Kinoshita
Studio: Shochiku
Genre: drama, war
Cast: Akiko Tamura, Akira Ishihama, Chishū Ryū, Rentaro Mikuni, Toshiko Kobayashi, Mutsuko Sakura, Takeshi Sakamoto
A family whose members do not support Japan’s involvement in the war moves to the countryside, where they are met with social ostracism.
Commentary: Between the comedic Carmen films, Keisuke Kinoshita also made in 1951 a drama set during the wartime year of 1944. Boyhood is a revisionist production in which, through the point of view of a teenage boy, Kinoshita first presents society’s belief in the rightness of the war and then the eventual vindication of the protagonist’s older and wiser father, who from the very beginning had regarded Japan’s involvement in the military conflict as senseless and ruinous. In tracing the concerns and problems that torment the protagonist, Kinoshita charts across the film the negative impact of the war and militarist propaganda on social life, and the shifting public opinion confronted with the fact that the war was leading not to victory but was being continued not for the good of the nation but out of a destructive sense of pride and superiority — one that drove the country to persist in a lost cause at the cost of its citizens’ lives rather than admit the error and lay down arms.
The family of the protagonist Ichiro (Akira Ishihama), fleeing the dangers threatening Tokyo as a target of bombing raids, moves to rural Suwa. The boy’s father (Chishū Ryū) is a liberal pacifist who opposes Japan’s involvement in the war. His son — influenced primarily by opinions he has heard and propagandistic slogans — neither shares nor understands his father’s view. His situation is made all the harder by the fact that not only in the city but in his new place of residence too he is surrounded by people who loudly and aggressively support the country’s military policy. He must therefore endure both the frustration caused by his inability to understand his parents and his inability to join the army (for reasons of health as well as by his father’s decision), and the brutal attacks and mockery from those around him, who regard his family as at best unpatriotic and perhaps even criminal. Their opinion is “confirmed” by the fact that Ichiro’s father is a professor of English literature — which makes them social outcasts whom most people want nothing to do with, condemning them to hard labour, exclusion, and a life in poverty.
Ichiro in this context is naturally a representation of a nation that is itself (re-)coming of age — a nation that allowed itself to be persuaded of the rightness of the war; he is closed in a world where he encounters almost exclusively people convincing him of the soundness of aggressive policy, so he cannot understand the behaviour of those who do not believe in the point of the conflict. There is no possibility, however, of conducting any genuine discussion, since he is surrounded either by people with washed minds or — like his father — by people who believe he should form his own point of view independently. Lost in uncertainty and surrounded by aggression, Ichiro naturally begins to perceive his father as the source of his suffering. Yet ultimately — confirming the words repeatedly addressed to him, that “to understand he must grow up” — understanding comes to him too, with age, observation, and above all experience. This understanding is, however, in a sense forced upon him, as it is upon the Japanese nation: the country loses the war, the lies about victory are exposed, and with their exposure collapses any faith that the assurances of the authorities were ever true.
To underscore his message, Kinoshita employs imperialist military propaganda music as an ironic commentary pointing to the gap between the public narrative and reality. Ultimately his Ichiro and his Japan grow up and, out of chaos, choose to set out on the path of peace, love, and respect for others. How long they will follow it, and whether all will join it, is unfortunately left unknown.
The lead role in Boyhood was played by Akira Ishihama, known in Poland most widely for his role in Masaki Kobayashi’s Harakiri (Seppuku, 1962). The production marks the actor’s debut — he appeared in it at the age of sixteen, having auditioned for the role following a recommendation to Shochiku from his older sister. His performance was very positively received by the studio’s management, leading to a contract being signed with the young actor. Alongside Ishihama, the film also features Akiko Tamura as the protagonist’s mother, Chishū Ryū as his father, and Rentarō Mikuni in the role of one of the teachers. Mikuni had made his debut in the same year, appearing in another Kinoshita film — The Good Fairy (Zemma); his third screen role was also for Kinoshita, in Fireworks Over the Sea (Uni no hanabi), likewise released in 1951. It can therefore be said that it was Kinoshita who launched this gifted actor, casting him in both leading and supporting roles and thereby revealing the charisma of the young Mikuni, who would go on to achieve considerable success and wide recognition.
6+/10
