Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 03/07/20

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

Saturday, March 7, 2020

Take Aim at the Police Van (Seijun Suzuki, 1960)

Misako Watanabe and Michitaro Mizushima in Take Aim at the Police Van

Cast: Michitaro Mizushima, Misako Watanabe, Shoichi Ozawa, Shinsuke Ashida, Mari Shiraki, Toru Abe. Screenplay: Shin'ichi Sekizawa, Kazuo Shimada. Cinematography: Shigeyoshi Mine. Production design: Takehara Sakeguchi. Film editing: Akira Suzuki. Music: Koichi Kawabe.

Seijun Suzuki's early-career Take Aim at the Police Van is a sold, somewhat overplotted excursion into the realms of film noir, but with none of the flash and dazzle of such later films as Story of a Prostitute (1965), Tokyo Drifter (1966), or Branded to Kill (1967). It's the story of Daijiro Tamon (Michitaro Mizushima), a prison guard who's on a bus transporting prisoners when it's attacked and two of the prisoners are shot dead. The attackers get away and Tamon gets suspended -- really scapegoated -- for his inability to stop them, so because he has nothing else to do he decides to figure out what was behind the assault. One of the prisoners who survived the attack, Goro (Shoichi Ozawa), was released on bail the day of the incident, and following up on some things Goro did and said on the bus, Tamon seeks him out. In the process, he winds up uncovering a human trafficking gang, gets slugged and chased a couple of times, and becomes involved with Yuko (Misako Watanabe), the noir "mystery woman" who has some connections to the traffickers. There's big thriller sequence in which Tamon and Yuko are tied up by the bad guys in a gasoline tanker truck that's sent rolling downhill with gas spilling out behind. The bad guys set the trail of gasoline alight and Tamon and Yuko have to free themselves before the burning gas reaches the truck and it explodes. I have to admit that this gimmick was spoiled for me by the TV series Mythbusters, on which Adam and Jamie demonstrated that a truck in that situation probably wouldn't explode, but I also wondered why, if the bad guys wanted to get rid of them, they didn't just kill them outright. But if you go questioning that sort of thing you'll never have any fun at the movies.