Cruel Gun Story (Takumi Furukawa, 1964)

Joe Shishido and Yuji Kodaka in Cruel Gun Story

Togawa: Joe Shishido
Rie: Chieko Matsubara
Takizawa: Tamio Kawaji
Shirai: Yuji Kodaka
Keiko: Minako Katsuki
Matsumoto: Hiroshi Nihon'yanagi
Kondo: Hiroshi Kondo
Okada: Shobun Inoue
Saeki: Saburo Hiromatsu
Yanagida: Junichi Yamanobe

Director: Takumi Furukawa
Screenplay: Hisatoshi Kai, Haruhiko Oyabu
Cinematography: Saburo Isayama
Art direction: Toshiyuki Matsui
Film editing: Masanori Tsujii
Music: Masayoshi Ikeda

My first impulse on watching Takumi Furukawa's Cruel Gun Story, with its whiplash double-crossings and piled-on violent deaths that reminded me of Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs (1992) and Pulp Fiction (1994), was to call it "Tarantino-esque." But that's getting it backward. Tarantino has said that he's "enamored with" the films of Nikkatsu, the studio that made Cruel Gun Story a good 30 years before Pulp Fiction, so by rights we should be calling his films "Nikkatsu-esque." Furukawa's film stars Joe Shishido, who was as essential to Japanese gangster films as James Cagney or Edward G. Robinson were to Warner Bros. gangster films of the 1930s. His glowering, jowly mug, usually with a cigarette plugged in its middle, is the essence of the tough guy. And like most tough guys, Shishido's Togawa has a heart of gold, devoted to his sister, crippled when she was struck by a car. She's the reason why, fresh out of prison, he signs on to a caper that involves the heist of an armored car. It's so elaborate a scheme, involving road detours and sabotaging the police radio and using a winch to pull the car onto a larger truck, that anyone who has ever seen a movie knows that it's going to go wrong. But even when it does, Togawa is able to come up with a Plan B, and then a Plan C, and so on, as double-crossers emerge from all corners. There's a sultry femme named Keiko to add a little sex to the plot, but not enough to deter Togawa from getting revenge on the big boss who got him into this mess. The whole thing ends with more corpses than the last act of Hamlet, but it's done with such stylish efficiency that if feels like a better film than it probably really is. Which, come to think of it, is also Tarantino-esque. 

Repast (Mikio Naruse, 1951)

Setsuko Hara and Ken Uehara in Repast

Michiyo Okamoto: Setsuko Hara
Hatsunosuke Okamoto: Ken Uehara
Satoko Okamoto: Yukiko Shimazaki
Mitsuko Murata: Yoko Sugi
Seiko Tomiyasu: Akiko Kazami
Matsu Murata: Haruko Sugimura
Koyoshi Dohya: Ranko Hanai
Kazuo Takenaka: Hiroshi Nihon'yanagi
Shinzo Murata: Keiju Kobayashi

Director: Mikio Naruse
Screenplay: Toshiro Ide, Sumie Tanaka, Yasunari Kawabata
Based on a novel by Fumiko Hayashi
Cinematography: Masao Tamai
Art direction: Satoru Chuko
Music: Fumio Hayasaka

Repast is one of those beautifully layered films by Mikio Naruse that defy simplistic judgments about the characters. Superficially, it's a story about a failing marriage that tempts you to take sides: Michiyo and Hatsunosuke have been married long enough that the tenderness has rubbed off of the relationship, and they have no children to provide a distraction from the routine of living together. She suffers the tedium and toil of keeping house, and he comes home from his salaryman's job in an office tired and frustrated. They are scraping by financially, and live in a less than desirable neighborhood. Initially the focus seems to be on the woman's lot -- she's the one we see doing all the lonely work of managing the house, whereas he at least has the opportunity to get out and fraternize with his fellow office workers. And when his lively young niece, Satoko, comes to visit -- actually to escape from family pressure to settle down and get married -- Michiyo finds herself slaving for both her husband and his niece. Eventually, things come to a head and Michiyo goes to Tokyo, taking Satoko back to her parents and leaving Hatsunosuke to fend for himself, which he doesn't do a particularly good job of. But Naruse is careful to let us see his side of things as well, and when Michiyo returns to him -- after making a few steps toward finding a job and leaving him permanently -- it's possible to see this as not a defeat for her so much as an acknowledgement that some remnants of their original affection remain and that she has decided to try to build a more equitable relationship on them. The performances of Setsuko Hara and Ken Uehara, who starred in several other films for Naruse, have that lived-in quality necessary for such a muted and ambivalent conclusion.

Cruel Story of Youth (Nagisa Oshima, 1960)

Yusuke Kawazu and Miyuki Kuwano in Cruel Story of Youth

Makoto: Miyuki Kuwano
Kiyoshi: Yusuke Kawazu
Yuki: Yoshiko Kuga
Dr. Akimoto: Fumio Watanabe
Horio: Hiroshi Nihon'yanagi

Director: Nagisa Oshima
Screenplay: Nagisa Oshima
Cinematography: Takashi Kawamata
Music: Riichiro Manabe

In addition to the shamelessly exploitative title Naked Youth, Cruel Story of Youth has also been released as A Story of the Cruelties of Youth. So is it the story that's cruel or the youth in it? Those who know Japanese can probably tell me which is closer to the original title, Seishun Zankoku Monogotari, but I suspect the ambiguity is intentional. It's a cruel story about cruel young people, with the usual implication that society -- postwar, consumerist, America-influenced Japan -- is to blame for the cruelties inflicted upon and by them. With its hot pops of color and unsparing widescreen closeups, the film puts us uncomfortably close to its young protagonists, Makoto and Kiyoshi. Makoto is just barely out of adolescence -- Miyuki Kuwano was 18 when the film was made -- but carelessly determined to grow up fast. She hangs out in bars and cadges rides with middle-aged salarymen until the night when one of them decides to take her to a hotel instead of her home. When she refuses, he tries to rape her. But a young passerby intervenes and beats the man, threatening to take him to the police until the man hands over a walletful of money. The next day, Makoto and her rescuer, Kiyoshi, meet up to spend the money together. He's just a bit older -- Yusuke Kawazu was 25, three years younger than the film's director, Nagisa Oshima -- and over the course of their day together on a river he slaps her around, pushes her into the water and taunts her when she can't swim, and seduces her with his mockery of her inquisitiveness about sex. When he doesn't call her again, she seeks him out and they become lovers. They also become criminals: She goes back to her game of hooking rides with salarymen and he follows them, choosing a moment when the men start to get handsy with Makoto -- sometimes she provokes them to do so -- to beat and rob them. Naturally, things don't get better from here on out, especially after Makoto gets pregnant. We can object to the film's sentimental attempt to redeem Kiyoshi, who starts out as an abusive young thug but is transformed by love, and there's some awkward coincidence plotting, like an abortionist who turns out to be Makoto's sister's old boyfriend. But Oshima's portrait of a lost generation has some of the power of the American films that inspired it, Rebel Without a Cause (Nicholas Ray, 1955) and Gun Crazy (Joseph H. Lewis, 1950), as well as the French New Wave films about the anomie of the young by Claude Chabrol and Jean-Luc Godard. It was only Oshima's second feature, but it signaled the start of a major career.

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