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

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Monday, September 22, 2025

Undercurrent (Kozaburo Yoshimura, 1956)

Fujiko Yamamoto in Undercurrent

Cast: Fujiko Yamamoto, Ken Uehara, Eitaro Ozawa, Michiko Ai, Eijiro Tono, Kazuko Ichikawa, Michiko Ono, Kimiko Tachibana, Mineko Yorozuyo, Keiko Kawasaki. Screenplay: Sumie Tanaka, Hisao Sawano. Cinematography: Kazuo Miyagawa. Art direction: Akira Naito. Film editing: Shigeo Nishida. Music: Sei Ikeno. 

Kozaburo Yoshimura's Undercurrent (aka Night River) is a romantic melodrama somewhat in the manner of Douglas Sirk, in which a strong woman is troubled by the expectations of the men in her life, including her father, her colleagues, her suitors, and her lover. Kiwa (Fujiko Yamamoto) has built a career as a textile designer when she meets a university professor, Takemura (Ken Uehara), whose wife is an invalid. Their relationship causes a mild scandal, and his wife's death awakens qualms of conscience in Kiwa, just as her career is reaching new levels of success. In an American "woman's picture" of the 1950s, which Undercurrent strongly resembles, the choice between love and career might have easily been resolved in favor of love, but the changes in the role of women in postwar Japan produce a distinctly different effect. Handsomely filmed by Kazuo Miyagawa in a muted palette in which splashes of primary color stand out vividly, Undercurrent benefits from Yamamoto's thoughtful, sensitive performance. 

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