Three Films Make A Post: Elvis Has Left the Building

Orion: The Man Who Would Be King (2015): It wouldn’t have been difficult to tell this specific tale as an utter freakshow. It is, after all, the of story a horse breeder with musical ambition and a voice naturally a lot like that of Elvis Presley who got roped into the role of “Orion” – a masked singer heavily insinuated to be Elvis returned shortly after his death, somewhat bigger, buffer, and younger, and built to make Sun Records (the Nashville version, so no bad thoughts about Sam Phillips necessary) a whole lot of money, at least for a time.

Director Jeanie Finlay doesn’t at all, but instead creates a sympathetic portrayal of a guy who had a dream he finds fulfilled in a way that’s making him painfully unhappy, and the curious cultural impact of Elvis on the more peculiar parts of American culture. It’s a lovely thing, and that most pleasant of surprises – a documentary about a curiosity that turns out to be a film about people.

Bored Hatamoto: Island of No Return (1960): In this outing of the jidai geki pulp detective series, the Bored Hatamoto (as always embodied quite wonderfully by Utaemon Ichikawa) makes his way to the shadowed streets and the foreigners’ quarter of Nagasaki, where he finds a lot of moody filmmaking by Yasushi Sasaki, who makes much of the sets, those exotic foreigners (like the same two red-headed Western guys wandering through the background of many a scene, or the Japanese guys in blackface wearing turbans), yet another plan to dispose of the shogun (this time via the drug trade), musical numbers, running sword battles and my very favourite trope in this sort of movie – the Japanese actors very badly pretending to be dastardly (sigh) Chinese who turn out to indeed be meant to be Japanese villains pretending to be Japanese.

This is particularly rollicking good fun, with everyone involved in top form. There’s really something to be said for industrialized studio filmmaking, at least when it comes to Toei films from this era (and the next two).

Crimson Bat, the Blind Swordswoman (1969): Apparently, every studio in Japan wanted a slice of the blind swordsperson cake after the success of the Zatoichi films. Shochiku gave us this comparatively short-lived – four entries are next to nothing for a Japanese movie series – entry in the canon, following the adventures of blind swordswoman Oichi (Yoko Matsuyama), in this first film directed by veteran director Sadatsugu Matsuda.

The film’s pacing suffers a bit from too much flashback backstory, but whenever the pretty delightful Yoko Matsuyama stops crying (about her run-away mum, having been blinded by lightning, and years later a murdered gramps) and goes to business with her red sword cane, Matsuda does direct like a young man instead of one right at the end of his career, with some pretty fancy choreography, excellent bad guys (among them eternal villain Bin Amatsu as a gent named “Devil” Denzo), and frame compositions to die (be killed by blind swordswoman?) for.

Case of a Young Lord 1 & 2 (1956)

Original titles: 若さま侍捕物手帖 地獄の皿屋敷 & 若さま侍捕物手帖 べらんめえ活人剣

These two one hour films directed by Kinnosuke Fukada (about whose body of work I otherwise know very little) are really one two-part movie, so I’m treating them as such here.

Edo era Japan. The somewhat excitable city is struck by a curious series of break-ins into the warehouses of a recently deceased pawnbroker during which nothing is stolen. These break-ins are perhaps committed by a mysterious samurai wearing a female oni mask. Because violence appears to be imminent, and indeed soon a murder occurs, the police ask for the help of a young man who’ll only ever be called the Young Lord (Hashizo Okawa) during the course of the series.

He’s apparently a rich loafer from a somewhat important family (one might argue he’s the most important young loafer in the whole of the shogunate), spending his youth on sake, a geisha with a huge crush on him and occasional song, but he’s also a brilliant amateur detective. The Young Lord soon figures out some connections between the break-ins and a plate once bestowed upon the family of a hatamoto by an earlier shogun, the noble marriage market, and other things of interest.

Apart from that mysterious masked samurai, there are others with an interest in the whole affair. Some of them of the kind of murderous disposition (and a bunch of henchmen) that makes it a happy coincidence the Young Lord is also a brilliant swordsman.

For a sick day morning of light entertainment, there’s little that’s better than this sort of jidai geki/chanbara mystery Toei were so adept at at the time. This series – two thirds of which are available with decent English subtitles if one knows where to look – is based on a newspaper series by Masayuki Jo, and adds a lot of pulpy fun to the nicely plotted mystery business, including not just that delights like that samurai in the wonderful mask (whose identity reveal is even more delightful in a “were they even allowed to do that in 1956?” sort of way), running battles with hordes of assassin mooks, and an honest to the godhood of your choice mechanical death-trap.

This joyful pulp goodness is filmed by Fukada with a sense of verve and the usual high technical skill of Japanese studio filmmaking of the era. The night sword fights are particularly well staged, even though this still belongs to the “waving swords around” era of sword fighting choreography, and doesn’t feature the blood or cutting noises that would come to be so stylistically important to all sorts of Japanese genre cinema in the coming decade.

Ozawa makes for a pleasant lead, and shows a particularly effective ability of shifting from lightness to grimness and earnestness, so we the audience have no problem believing that his pretty young man is also very dangerous indeed when ne needs to be.

In short: Bored Hatamoto: The Cave of the Vampire Bats (1961)

Original title: Hatamoto taikutsu otoko: Nazo no nanairo goten

This is a late example of the “Bored Hatamoto” (sometimes also translated as “Idle Vassal”) series of fun jidai geki concerning the adventures of Hatamoto (which means a directed vassal of the Shogun who is only responsible to the Shogun himself but neither lords nor laws below him) Saotome Mondonosuke (Utaemon Ichikawa), a supposedly idle and bored guy who always stumbles into conspiracies and over mysteries, which he beats with his talent for making friends in all classes of a highly stratified society, his – of course – indomitable swordplay, and rather a lot of pulpy detective moves.

It’s generally a light and fun series that I assume was at the time made for an audience of all ages, and this entry, as directed by Yasushi Sasaki, is no exception. This is not one of those samurai films terribly interested in social or historical criticism, psychology, or extreme craziness (1961 would have been pretty early for that last one anyway), but is all about showing Mondonosuke outwitting and outfighting a group of evildoers trying to cheat someone into the shogun’s succession, even if they have to murder and besmirch the honour of innocent shrine maidens who know too much, or turn a perfectly harmless cave full of bats into something frightening to the peasantry. Too bad for them that Mondonosuke comes upon the first murder, as committed by a masked man in ninja style garb with an excellent tiny cape supposed to suggest bat wings, and starts poking his nose in all sorts of places.

And what a nice bit of fun the film is, with a couple of not spectacular yet highly enjoyable fight scenes, a mystery that’s rather easy to solve yet still entertaining to watch unravel, the high quality sets and locations you expect from this sort of Japanese film, and a cast (full of faces everyone who watches Japanese popular cinema of this time will know) that plays the broad characters with verve.

Sasaki’s a competent director too, perhaps a bit too fond of melodramatic zooms on Ichikawa’s face, but keeping things rolling along merrily and economically.


The film’s only actual weakness to my eyes is its overuse of the two songs on its soundtrack. Sure, there’s a degree of plot relevance to one of them, but we get to hear each one three or four times – rather a lot in a film of less than ninety minutes length.

Past Misdeeds: Magistrate Toyama: Falcon Magistrate (1957)

This is a re-run with only the slightest of edits, so please don’t ask me what the heck I was thinking when I wrote any given entry into this section.

Original title: はやぶさ奉行

Edo period Japan. Kagemoto Toyama (Chiezo Kataoka), known to his friends as Kinshiro, is the son of a well-respected magistrate. Father and son don’t see eye to eye at all because Kinshiro has spent parts of his life mixing it up with the lower classes and clearly not seeing anything wrong with that. In fact, father and son don’t seem to have spoken to each other for a long time, and that won’t change during the course of the film.

Still, when first a carpenter is murdered during a public swimming performance, then a second carpenter is struck down right in front of Kinshiro’s eyes, and finally a female acquaintance of his is murdered because she just might have seen something during the first murder, Kinshiro takes it upon himself to investigate. And wouldn’t you know it, his ability to speak eye to eye with commoners and his willingness to relate to people based on their merit instead of their class turns out to be quite the useful tool in an investigation that – this being the sort of film it is – of course leads him on the trail of a conspiracy to kill the shogun. Just as useful will be Kinshiro’s friendship with wealth-redistributing thief Nezumi Kozo, his sword fighting skills, and his ability to go undercover as a mildly eccentric, prostitute-charming carpenter.

Falcon Magistrate’s hero Kagemoto Toyama is an actual historical figure that must have enticed the popular imagination quite a bit, because the historical magistrate (who was quite liberal for his time and class as far as I understand, but certainly not as awesome as the fictional version) turned into a fictional one popping up in all kinds of popular fiction, kabuki plays, TV shows and a six or eight part (depending on which English language source you believe) series of Toei movies starring the prestigious jidai geki specialist actor and charisma bomb Chiezo Kataoka, of which this is the first one.

Toyama as folklore and pop culture sees him is quite the fascinating expression of the dreams of a highly classist society. He’s a samurai who respects the peasant class and even identifies with its members, who speaks truth to power and has the power and influence himself to serve justice particularly against the villains of his own class, all the while transgressing class borders as if they were the social construct they actually are, a character who is not just willing to team up with a thief like Nezumi but also shows a degree of humorous appreciation for the man’s deeds, even though he’s tutting at them. Nezumi for his part is a parallel case to Kagemoto, also based on a historical figure that grew into something much bigger than the real man probably was. In his own cycle, Nezumi Kozo (which is a nick name that translates into Rat Boy or Young Rat, people who speak Japanese tell me) is generally sticking it to the man, spurning those in power for their sins and giving their money to the poor.

There is of course a bit of paternalistic noblesse oblige in the Toyama character, though the film at hand doesn’t go very far into this part of the character – too authentic are his interactions with the non-ruling class characters, and he’s never making fun of them, as you’d otherwise see when this approach goes wrong.These still are – however you look at it – quite subversive heroes in their folkloric incarnations.

Toyama does keep quite a bit of this aura in this movie version directed by Kinnosuke Fukada (about whose work I know basically nothing, alas), which might come as a bit of a surprise in a genre that at this point in time probably drew at least some of its pull from the power of nostalgia, the wish of a post-war country for a simpler and clearer time. At least, that’s the view of the genre the more rebellious jidai geki and chambara films of the 60s and beyond seem to have been working against. The more films of the era before this new wave I see, the more I’m inclined to say that’s a half truth at best, though, the younger directors in their Sturm und Drang underplaying those qualities of the earlier films they are actually continuing.

Of course, Magistrate Toyama is not all subversion all the time. This is after all film where the not exactly nice and progressive shogun is saved from revolutionaries; though these are revolutionaries of the kind who really don’t want to change anything about the order of things but only about who’s sitting on top. One of the film’s conspirators is also only driven to the deed because he’s convinced the shogun has tasked him with a costly construction project to ruin him; given precedents in actual Tokugawa shogunate history, he’s probably even right. The thing is, Toyama isn’t setting out to investigate a threat against the shogunate, he’s setting out to find the reason why three innocents are murdered, and just tenaciously follows through where this leads him.


On a stylistic level, Falcon Magistrate is a very typical Toei jidai geki/pulpy mystery film, with the high technical level and the extremely solid and dependable cast that suggests. While Fukada isn’t a great stylist, he keeps things moving nicely, finds time for a handful of moodily shot scenes, some minor yet satisfying sword fight set pieces, and does a very fine job with the film’s dramatic climax as well as a pleasantly short, to the point, and effective court room courtyard scene to tie things up. I suspect it’s the sort of genre movie everyone involved in Toei’s production machine could have made in his sleep; it’s also very satisfying and enjoyable, if you care about the tales’ more subversive elements or not. As if that wasn’t enough, there’s also the joy of watching Chiezo Kataoka, at this point in time not looking like any sort of leading man you’d have found in a Hollywood film of the same era, but oozing easy charisma and a joy of living that makes him utterly believable as this particular hero.

Past Misdeeds: The Third Shadow (1963)

Original title: Daisanno Kagemusha

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts without any re-writes or improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

Japan in the 16th Century. It is the Sengoku (which means "warring states") era and the country is in a state of perpetual civil war between numerous warlords of huge ambition and dubious sanity. One of these warlords, Yasutaka Ikemoto (Raizo Ichikawa, star of the Nemuri Kyoshiro and Shinobi films), seems to be bound for greatness and already dreams of the whole of Japan united under his rule.

A man like him must be mindful of his enemies, though, and Yasutaka tries to prolong his life through the use of "shadows", doubles whose dubious honour it is to take his place when it comes to the unpleasant business of dying.

The young farmer Kyonosuke Ninomiya (also Raizo Ichikawa), a descendent of a line of impoverished samurai now earning their bread as farmers, has long dreamed of following the way of his ancestors to glory and money. His dream seems to come true when the First Retainer of Yasutaka lays eyes on him and proposes to take him into the service of his master.

Once in Yasutaka's castle, Kyonosuke learns that his new job won't be as glorious as he had imagined. The young man looks exactly like his new master and therefore makes an ideal third double. When he is not learning to act exactly like his master does, he and his two colleagues in the double business are hidden away from prying eyes.

Well, at least the payment is good, and when the Lord of the house is unwilling to spend time with his once favourite concubine Kohagi (Masayo Banri), Kyonosuke's double powers are put to the final test that is at once a rather cruel reward. Still, a shadow's life doesn't look too bad to him, until Yasutaka loses an eye in one of his battles. Obviously, a good double can't keep walking around with two. This double business isn't something you can cancel, either - the choice for the shadows is "lose your eye or lose your life".

The same night when Kyonosuke and one of the other doubles lose an eye, and the first double his life when trying to escape, Yasutaka's castle is attacked.

Kyonosuke escapes with his Lord, but when Yasutaka loses an arm, and tries to entice the freshly mutilated man into bringing him to the castle of the allied Miki, Kyonosuke's desperation and bitterness explode and he kills Yasutaka.

On his flight from his former master's land, Kyonosuke meets the First Retainer again. The crafty and power-hungry samurai coerces the young man into taking on the role of Yasutaka full time - well, that or dying - to continue the way to conquest the dead Lord once began. After a time, Kyonosuke begins to dare to develop his own dreams and ambitions, but does a normal human being with normal human dreams stand a chance against members of a ruling class without even a hint of a conscience?

I don't know much about The Third Shadow's director Umetsugu Inoue, except that he would leave Japan a few years after making this film and start work as a contract director for the Shaw Brothers and become somewhat renown for films in diverse genres that are often described with adjectives like "flamboyant".

This is not a film that foreshadows these future Hong Kong films, though. Instead, it is very typical for the wave of excellent and pessimistic Jidai Geki and Chambara that started to conquer a certain stuffiness in both samurai film genres in the first half of the 60s.

Inoue's directorial style here is an interesting mixture of lighting techniques usually found in stage plays, austere framing and extremely economic storytelling.

You won't find a single superfluous cut here, no scene that isn't exactly built as it needs to be; one could argue that the film could use some flourish, but its visual presentation and narrative flow are in exact correspondence to the bleak feeling of futility that pervades it. Poor Kyonosuke never has a chance for a better life, not as a poor farmer with illusions of the greatness of war, not when he is nothing more than another man's shadow and not when he decides to try to become that man and fulfil ambitions that are not his own. Being himself is of course completely out of the question and once Kyonosuke tries to become himself, he is doomed to death and madness. Being human is just not something that is allowed in a time and place where a person's status is more important than what a person truly is. The war machine of the Sengoku era just eats up everyone it can get a hold of to fuel more war. If you think that this could be a commentary on Japan, 1963, you are probably right.

It's all exactly as depressing as it sounds. The Third Shadow gets more melodramatic in the effective way of Japanese movies of its time the longer the film goes on, but Inoue never loses control of his film for a second.

What isn't achieved by the director is achieved by Ichikawa's wonderful performance in a difficult triple role that is as intense and complex as any I have seen from him.

Technorati-Markierungen: japanese movies,reviews,jidai geki,raizo ichikawa,umetsugu inoue

On ExB: Magistrate Toyama: Falcon Magistrate (1957)

If you go by Western cult film web sites like mine, there wasn’t much happening in Japanese genre films before the new wave of samurai and yakuza films of the mid 60s and onwards. That’s of course not true, because the Japanese studios had been churning out genre movies in absurd tempo throughout the 50s, and while these films weren’t generally as rebellious, or crazy, or visually inventive as what would follow, it would be rather bizarre if they were all without merit or interest.

Indeed, once you dive into sub-genres like the jidai geki pulp mystery (insert fancy Japanese genre name here), you’ll quickly find pearls like Magistrate Toyama: Falcon Magistrate, the film my column over at the stately Exploder Button will have to say quite a bit about.

Technorati-Markierungen: japanese movies,reviews,jidai geki,mystery,kinnosuke fukada,chiezo kataoka

In short: Case of Umon: One-Eyed Wolf (1959)

aka Umon Torimonocho: Katame no okami

This is one among many movies concerning the adventures of Tokugawa shogunate era constable and master detective Kondo Umon (here played by Ryutaro Otomo). In this particular case, Umon and his annoying comic relief sidekick stumble upon the bodies of half a dozen men hanging from the same tree, which is a curious thing to encounter even in suicide-prone old Japan, so Kondo quickly deduces this is in fact a case of murder. From there, our hero follows leads to a conspiracy to murder the shogun himself. Only one man can save the reign of the cruel tyrant (waitaminute…)!

As expected, this is one of those slightly stiff and often somewhat hokey pieces of jidai geki made in the somewhat conservative style samurai movies were starting to move away from at the end of the 50’s, towards more morally and artistically complex endeavours. So expect rather larger than life melodramatic declamation as main acting style, a rather simple world view, and one-dimensional characters.

That doesn’t mean One-Eyed Wolf isn’t entertaining if you take it for what it is, at least from my historical point in time. It’s the kind of thing that probably was called the Japanese variant of “an entertainment”, perhaps comparable to series hero B-Western, though of course – Japanese studios had their pride and a deep talent pool -  made to a higher visual standard than the adventures of Hopalong Cassidy. This is, after all, a Toei production, and therefore graced with very pretty sets and sound stages of old Edo that just happen to look exactly like the ones I’ve seen in other Toei productions of this type.

If you can cope with the film’s lack of depth – and way too much comic relief, alas – you might just be like me and get to the point where you fall into the natural state of entertainment movies about detectives solving preposterous and needlessly complicated plots can’t help but provide, particularly those that find our detective ending up in one of those typical samurai movie battles of one man cutting through a veritable army of henchmen. Otomo is appropriately heroic, if not very exciting, the rest of the cast is full of faces I know from dozens of other Toei films.

Some of One-Eyed Wolf’s pulpier ideas are pleasantly weird, and director Tadashi Sawashima at the very least keeps things rolling along nicely and dynamically enough. From time to time Sawashima even shows a bit of visual brilliance: the first reveal of the corpses that bring Umon on the case is wonderfully creepy, there are quite a few shots reminding of very atmospheric paintings, and the film’s grand finale is dominated by very unsubtle yet also pretty effective and artful montages of the kind that always make me think “Eisenstein”.

Consequently, Case of Umon: The One-Eyed Wolf won’t be a film to rock anybody’s world, but it’s a nice time nonetheless.

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The Third Shadow

My newest review on WTF-Film concerns a rather fantastic - if bleak - film by future Shaw Brothers director Umetsugu Inoue starring Raizo Ichikawa. It's Japan in the Sengoku era, and life is painful.

Read more about it on WTF-film here.

 

Technorati-Tags: japanese movies,jidai geki,raizo ichikawa,umetsugu inoue,reviews,masayo banri