Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 05/18/20

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

Monday, May 18, 2020

Golden Eyes (Jun Fukuda, 1968)

Akira Takarada in Golden Eyes

Cast: Akira Takarada, Beverly Maeda, Tomomi Sawa, Makoto Sato, Andrew Hughes, Yoshio Tsuchiya, Nadao Kirino, Sachio Sakai, Toru Ibuku, Seishiro Kuno, Mari Sakurai. Screenplay: Jun Fukuda, Ei Ogawa, Michio Tsuzuki. Cinematography: Kazuo Yamada. Production design: Shigekazu Ikuno. Film editing: Ryohei Fujii. Music: Masaru Sato.

Golden Eyes -- not to be confused with the real James Bond pic GoldenEye (Martin Campbell, 1995) -- is a followup to Jun Fukada's 1965 Bond spoof Ironfinger. It's just as goofy but a little more slickly made than the first film. It also stars Akira Takarada as the Franco-Japanese spy Andrew Hoshino, who may or may not be an Interpol agent, and who seems to be devoted to his mother -- although this time he gets called on that when someone suggests that "Mom" is a code word or even an acronym for some mysterious agency. The action moves from Beirut to Japan and involves some jaw-droppingly improbable setups like a man impaled on a hook dangling from a helicopter, a group of assassins dressed like nannies pushing perambulators along a desert cliff, and a crate of Champagne used as an assault weapon. There are two pseudo-Bond Babes in this one, a knife-throwing hit-woman (Beverly Maeda) who turns out to be the heroine and a ditzy singer (Tomomi Sawa) who gets an extended take in which she sings a nonsense pop song. There's also a climactic shootout between Hoshino and a blind millionaire called Stonefeller (Andrew Hughes), who "sees" his target by means of a rifle fitted out with a directional microphone. No, really. Someone else made all of this up. It wasn't me.