The Warped Ones (Koreyoshi Kurahara, 1960)

Tamio Kawaji in The Warped Ones

Akira: Tamio Kawaji
Yuki: Yuko Chiyo
Masaru: Eiji Go
Kashiwagi: Hiroyuki Nagato
Fumiko: Noriko Matsumoto
Shinji Kumaki: Kojiro Kusanagi
Gill: Chico Roland
Yuki's Mother: Chigusa Takayama
Neighbor: Reiko Arai
Woman in Atelier: Yoko Kosono

Director: Koreyoshi Kurahara
Screenplay: Nobuo Yamada
Cinematography: Yoshio Mamiya
Production design: Kazuhiko Chiba
Film editing: Akira Suzuki
Music: Toshiro Mayuzumi

The TCM programmer who scheduled Koreyoshi Kurahara's The Warped Ones right after Michael Haneke's Funny Games (1997) evidently has a dark sense of humor. Both are fine examples of movies about people doing bad things and getting away with it. Funny Games ends with its mass murderer smirking at the camera, and while the bad-boy protagonist of The Warped Ones doesn't get away with murder, since as far as we know he hasn't committed one, he does get away with rape, theft, and assault. The film ends with Akira and his prostitute friend, Fumiko, laughing it up at an abortion clinic, amused that they are there with the virtuous Kashiwagi and Yuki because the former has impregnated Fumiko and the latter is pregnant with Akira's child. The Warped Ones belongs to a genre known as taiyozoku, or "Sun Tribe" films, portrayals of the undisciplined youth of postwar Japan. Among them are movies like Ko Nakahira's Crazed Fruit (1956) and three released the same year as The Warped Ones, Nagisa Oshima's Cruel Story of Youth and The Sun's Burial and Masahiro Shinoda's Youth in Fury. But even hard-edged directors like Oshima and Shinoda couldn't resist putting a moral spin on their portraits of wayward youth. Kurahara could, and The Warped Ones is all the more fascinating for its willingness to see the world the way Akira sees it. Tamio Kawaji gives an amazing over-the-top performance in the role, never quite standing still for a moment. He doesn't walk, he dances, prances, skips, and contorts, and Yoshio Mamiya's camera swirls and jogs along with him, ever restless, ever kinetic. Even in closeups his face is constantly in motion, often with a cigarette stuck between his lip and teeth or in the corner of his mouth. He is the embodiment of a certain kind of existential freedom, so self-centered that he refuses, unlike his friend, Masaru, to join a gang that might multiply his opportunities for mayhem. The only thing on Earth to which he pays obeisance is jazz, provided by Toshiro Mayuzumi's score. But even without punishing Akira for his considerable crimes, the film manages to make the point that he's no role model. Instead, he's an object lesson in the impossibility of achieving pure freedom.   

Endless Desire (Shohei Imamura, 1958)

Hiroyuki Nagato and Misako Watanabe in Endless Desire

Satoru: Hiroyuki Nagato
Shima Hashimoto: Misako Watanabe
Onuma: Taiji Tonoyama
Ryochi: Shoichi Ozawa
Ryuko: Hitome Nozoe
Yakuza: Takeshi Kato

Director: Shohei Imamura
Screenplay: Shohei Imamura, Hisashi Yamanouchi
Based on a novel by Shinji Fujiwara
Cinematography: Shinsaku Himeda
Production design: Kazu Otsuka
Film editing: Mutsuo Tanji
Music: Toshiro Mayuzumi

Commenting on lesser-known films, even though they've been made available on Filmstruck by the Criterion Collection, can be a problem. The IMDb listing for Endless Desire is curiously incomplete, lacking some cast names and identification of which roles some actors are playing, and there's little commentary available online to help refresh my memory of some plot details and to provide background information on the film. Which is a pity, because Endless Desire is an involving black comedy, that a few commentators have likened to Alexander Mackendrick's The Ladykillers (1955) and Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs (1992). It's less genially whimsical than the former and less explicitly bloody than the latter, but it holds its own in their company. The setup is this: Ten years after the surrender of Japan, a small group of former soldiers gather as planned to try to relocate a barrel full of morphine that was buried when the war ended. They expect to meet their former lieutenant, but discover that he's dead and that a woman, Shima Hashimoto, who says she is his sister, plans to help them recover the stash. In the meantime, however, a shopping district has grown up over the site, so the group leases an empty shop planning to tunnel over to the presumed location. And so it goes, as the greedy tunnelers squabble toward their goal, with Shima directing their moves and fending off such amorous advances as she may not wish to entertain. Somehow caught up in all of this is young Satoru, whom the landlord insists the treasure-hunters must hire in their phony real-estate office, and the pretty Ryuko, whom Satoru loves but who keeps him at an arm's length. The whole thing builds to a cataclysm, of course, in which the plans are complicated by the municipal authorities' decision to raze the shopping district over the tunnelers' heads, and the general greed leads to their killing one another off. This is early Imamura, and a film that he was pressed by the studio into doing, but it has much of his characteristic sardonic humor and jaundiced view of human beings.

Pigs and Battleships (Shohei Imamura, 1961)

Jitsuko Yoshimura in Pigs and Battleships

Kinta: Hiroyuki Nagato
Haruko: Jitsuko Yoshimura
Himori: Masao Mishima
Slasher Tetsuji: Tetsuro Tanba
Hoshino: Shiro Osaka
Ohachi: Takeshi Kato
Gunji, Gangster in Check Shirt: Shoichi Ozawa
Katsuyo: Yoko Minimida
Kikuo: Hideo Sato
Kan'ichi: Eijiro Tono
Sakiyama: Akira Yamauchi
Hiromi: Sanae Nakahara
Haruko's Mother: Kin Sugai
Harukoma: Bumon Kahara

Director: Shohei Imamura
Screenplay: Hisashi Yamanouchi, Gisashi Yamauchi
Based on a novel by Kazu Otsuka
Cinematography: Shinsaku Himeda
Art direction: Kimihiko Nakamura
Film editing: Mutsuo Tanji
Music: Toshiro Mayuzumi

It seems to be common in critiques of Shohei Imamura's work to contrast him with his mentor, Yasujiro Ozu. The world of Ozu's films is that of the settled middle class families, with their marriageable daughters and salarymen breadwinners, filmed in the stately, low camera angle style that almost immediately identifies Ozu's work. Imamura's films are full of low-lifes, people struggling to get along by any means necessary, and are full of flamboyant camerawork, such as the spectacularly crowded widescreen compositions in Pigs and Battleships. A contrast of Ozu and Imamura is rather like a contrast of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens: Both do things with radically different means, the one with a raucous, satiric assortment of colorful characters, the other with a quiet, ironic examination of manners and mores. But both Ozu and Imamura share something: an admiration for strong women. In the case of Pigs and Battleships, it's Haruko, struggling to find herself in the hurlyburly of Yokosuka, the port city infested with American sailors. She has had the misfortune to fall in love with the goofball Kinta, who wants to make his name as a yakuza, getting involved with the gang's pig-raising scheme. Hiroyuki Nagato gives a hilariously loosey-goosey performance as Kinta, mugging like Jerry Lewis when he really wants to be Humphrey Bogart. It's not entirely clear what Jitsuko Yoshimura's Haruko really sees in Kinta, but the performance of the two actors together is highly entertaining. Although the film plays mostly for comedy, culminating in the destruction of much of the red-light district by a stampede of pigs, it features several murders and the rape of Haruko by three American sailors, with the result that it's dominated by a kind of Swiftian satiric tone.