A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Thursday, November 15, 2018

The Living Magaroku (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1943)

Toshio Hosokawa and Ken Uehara in The Living Magoroku
Sagara Kiyomatsu: Ken Uehara
Sakabe Katsusuke: Toshio Hosokawa
Yoshihiro Onagi: Yasumi Hara
Makoto Onagi: Kurumi Yamabato
Mrs. Onagi: Mitsuko Yoshikawa

Director: Keisuke Kinoshita
Screenplay: Keisuke Kinoshita
Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda
Art direction: Osamu Motoki

There must have been Japanese movies of the 1940s that were as vicious about the American enemy as our war movies were about the Japanese, that had lines as callous as "Fried Jap coming down!" when a fighter pilot gets shot down in Howard Hawks's Air Force (1943), but we don't see them today. Instead we see the wartime work of directors like Keisuke Kinoshita and Akira Kurosawa, whose films seem surprisingly softcore in comparison with America's wartime movies. Sometimes in The Living Magoroku I think that Kinoshita is pulling a fast one on the military censors. This is a movie designed to support the war effort by encouraging people to forsake tradition and do things previously taboo like plant crops on sacred ground, but that's the least interesting plot thread. Instead, Kinoshita is always directing our attention elsewhere: to the psychosomatic illness of Yoshihiro, or to the young couple whose plans to marry are thwarted by convention, or even to the mystique of ancient swords. Granted, that last plot element has propaganda purposes -- Sagara wants his sword to kill 20 or 30 "American weaklings" -- but its the craftsmanship of swordmaking that gets most of the attention. The result is a war movie that's less bloodthirsty than heartwarming, as Yoshihiro finds his manhood, the couple gets the go-ahead to marry, and Sakabe not only gets a sword that will restore his honor after he carelessly sold the family heirloom but also gets the hand in marriage of Makoto. The ending, with the farmers breaking ground in the previously hallowed Onagi fields, is more like a Soviet propaganda movie about collective farming than like a war-effort flag-waver. Even Kurosawa's The Most Beautiful (1944) was about building war machinery, not about planting crops to feed people.
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