Flowing (Mikio Naruse, 1956)

Kinuyo Tanaka and Isuzu Yamada in Flowing

Cast: Kinuyo Tanaka, Isuzu Yamada, Hideko Takamine, Mariko Okada, Haruko Sugimura, Sumiko Kurishima, Chieko Nakakita, Natsuko Kahara, Seiji Miyaguchi, Daisuke Kato. Screenplay: Toshiro Ide, Aya Koda, Sumie Tanaka, based on a novel by Koda. Cinematography: Masao Tamai. Production design: Satoru Chuko. Film editing: Eiji Ooi. Music: Ichiro Saito. 

Having been a college English teacher and a print journalist, I know something about what it's like to be in a dying profession. So I have some empathy with the women in the geisha house in Mikio Naruse's Flowing. Their story is told largely from the point of view of Rita Yamanaka (Kinuyo Tanaka), whose name the owner of the house, Otsuta (Isuzu Yamada), finds too difficult to pronounce, so she calls her Oharu, a name that will have resonance for anyone who has seen Kenji Mizoguchi's 1952 masterpiece, The Life of Oharu. But unlike Mizoguchi's heroine, this Oharu is a simple woman in a profession that will probably never vanish: a maid. Her quiet ubiquity in the house enables her to see and hear things that heighten her mistress's financial struggles and the household's eventual doom. Equally valuable is the role of Katsuya (Hideko Takamine), Otsuta's daughter, who was trained as a geisha but doesn't want to be one. She regards her mother's profession as a commodification of self. Unfortunately, Katsuya has no marketable skills and is struggling to find her way in a male-dominated world. Naruse's film is a poignant and searching commentary not only on the disappearing way of the geisha but also on the role of women in a society trying to redefine the relationship between the sexes. Tanaka, Yamada, and Takamine are three of the greatest Japanese actors; it's a treat to see them working together, and they're beautifully supported by the rest of the cast.   

Fireworks Over the Sea (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1951)

Tarobei Kamiya: Chishu Ryu
Mie Kamiya: Michiyo Kogure
Miwa Kamiya: Yoko Katsuragi
Sami: Teruko Kishi
Kaoru Uozumi: Isuzu Yamada
Mitsu: Chieko Higashiyama
Shogo: Takashi Miki
Yukiko Nomura: Keiko Tsushima
Tsuyoshi Yabuki: Rentaro Mikuni
Kono Kujirai: Haruko Sugimura
Tamihiko Kujirai: Keiji Sada
Ippei Nagisa: Akira Ishihama

Director: Keisuke Kinoshita
Screenplay: Keisuke Kinoshita
Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda
Art direction: Tatsuo Hamada
Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara
Music: Chuji Kinoshita

Fireworks Over the Sea is an overlong (a little over two hours) and overplotted film about the tribulations of a family-owned fishing company. The always-welcome Chishu Ryu plays the head of the Kamiya family who has to struggle with not only keeping his business literally afloat but also the romantic entanglements of his daughters. There are love scenes and fist fights, as well as a dark family secret, but not much of an attempt on writer-director Keisuke Kinoshita's part to give it all coherent dramatic shape. The music track by Chuji Kioshita, the director's brother, doesn't help much by muttering about behind the scenes, sometimes inappropriately.

Sisters of the Gion (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1936)

Isuzu Yamada and Fumio Okura in Sisters of the Gion

Omocha: Isuzu Yamada
Umekichi: Yoko Umemura
Shimbei Furusawa: Benkei Shiganoya
Sangoro Kudo: Eitaro Shindo
Kimura: Taizo Fukami
Jurakudo: Fumio Okura
Omasa Kudo: Sakurako Iwama

Director: Kenji Mizoguchi
Screenplay: Kenji Mizoguchi, Yoshikata Yoda
Based on a novel by Aleksandr Kuprin
Cinematography: Minoru Miki
Film editing: Tatsuko Sakane

"Why do there even have to be such things as geisha?" laments Omocha at the end of Kenji Mizoguchi's Sisters of the Gion. The line could well be a motto for Mizoguchi's career as a filmmaker, as he returned again and again to the theme outlined in the film, not just for geisha but also for prostitutes, mistresses, and wives: Why do women have to spend so much of their lives employing their talents, intelligence, and energy at pleasing men? In this larger sense it's a theme that preoccupied not only Mizoguchi but also Yasujiro Ozu, Mikio Naruse, and other Japanese filmmakers, especially after the war, when political and social change altered the roles of both sexes. Sisters of the Gion is decidedly pre-war, but it's a film that can hold its own with those of the postwar renaissance of Japanese film. It's both of its time and prophetic of what is to come, embodying the dynamic of tradition and change in its two sisters, Omocha and Umekichi, the former outwardly faithful to but inwardly rebellious against her profession, the latter resigned to its demands. In the end, both suffer defeat, but the film implicitly endorses Omocha's defiant strength.

Black River (Masaki Kobayashi, 1957)

Tatsuya Nakadai and Ineko Arima in Black River

Shizuko: Ineko Arima
Nishida: Fumio Watanabe
Killer Joe: Tatsuya Nakadai
Landlady: Isuzu Yamada
Okada: Tomo'o Nagai
Okada's Wife: Keiko Awaji
Kurihara: Eijiro Tono
Kin: Seiji Miyaguchi
Sakazaki: Asao Sano

Director: Masaki Kobayashi
Screenplay: Zenzo Matsuyama
Based on a story by Takeo Tomishima
Cinematography: Yuharu Atsuta
Production design: Ninjin Kurabu
Film editing: Yoshiyasu Hamamura
Music: Chuji Kinoshita

Masaki Kobayashi's remarkable slice-of-life drama Black River takes place in a slum near an American army base. It's a festering dump, inhabited by a variety of people, from lowlifes attempting to make a living by exploiting the soldiers to dead-enders with no place else to go. Into this morass wanders a naïve university student, Nishida, in search of cheap lodgings, who tries to make a little money as a used-book seller. He falls for a pretty waitress, Shizuko, who longs to escape from the slum, but their attachment puts him in the line of fire of a swaggering young gangster called Killer Joe, who has his own designs on Shizuko. Presiding over everything is the landlady, who has plans for the property that don't include its tenants. She's played to a fare-thee-well by the great Isuzu Yamada, perhaps best known as the Lady Macbeth equivalent in Akira Kurosawa's Throne of Blood (1957). Here she's outfitted with a snaggly golden-toothed grill, a fitting correlative for the concealment of the moral rot within. But the real scene-stealer of the film is Tatsuya Nakadai as Killer Joe, in one of his first major film appearances, perfectly blending the charisma that would make him a star with the menace that would allow him to play memorable villains as well as heroes.

Tokyo Twilight (Yasujiro Ozu, 1957)

Isuzu Yamada in Tokyo Twilight

Takako Numata: Setsuko Hara
Akiko Sugiyama: Ineko Arima
Shukichi Sugiyama: Chishu Ryu
Kikuko Soma: Isuzu Yamada
Shigeko Takeuchi: Haruko Sugimura
Sakae Soma: Nobuo Nakamura
Gihei Shimomura: Kamatari Fujiwara
Yasuo Namata: Kinzo Shin
Kenji Kimura: Masami Taura

Director: Yasujiro Ozu
Screenplay: Kogo Noda, Yasujiro Ozu
Cinematography: Yuharu Atsuta
Art direction: Tatsuo Hamada
Music: Takanobu Saito

In commenting on Mikio Naruse's Sound of the Mountain (1954), I noted that some critics saw his film as a kind of reaction against films by Yasujiro Ozu like Late Spring (1949) in which the plot climaxes with the marriage of a young woman. Naruse was exploring the fact that marriage is not always, or even seldom, the fulfillment of things that the bride and her family have wished for. But I also noted that Ozu himself is not above his own skepticism about marriage, and no film of his depicts that skepticism more keenly and tragically than Tokyo Twilight, in which a father whose own marriage has failed is trying to cope with the failed marriage of one daughter and the troubled love life of another. The father in this case is played, as it so often was in Ozu's films, by Chishu Ryu, Ozu's favorite actor. I can see why Ozu liked him so much: Is there any other actor who can say "Hmm" with such eloquence and variety of intonation than Ryu? He has many opportunities to pack that internalized sound with meaning in Tokyo Twilight, expressing everything from doubt to contentment to disapproval, or just reinforcing his character's stoic resignation to the misfortunes that life continues to bring him. Shukichi Sugiyama and his three children were abandoned by his wife during the war, when he was stationed in Seoul, and he has done what he can to raise the family. The son from the marriage has died in an accident several years earlier, and now his daughter, Takako, has left her husband, bringing their toddler daughter to live with Shukichi. The other daughter, Akiko, has a disastrous fling with the irresponsible Kenji, who leaves her pregnant and looking for the money to have an abortion. The various secrets that the family, packed into one of the boxlike homes Ozu has made into such eloquent settings (expressing both closeness and confinement), only become more pressing when the girls' mother, Kikuko, returns to their lives: She and her new husband (the man she left Shukichi for has died) run a mah jongg parlor that Akiko, searching for Kenji, finds herself in. Kikuko overhears the young woman's name and, realizing she's her daughter, strikes up a conversation, asking about the family without revealing the truth. But then Shukichi's sister accidentally encounters Kikuko while shopping and brings him the news that she's returned. When Takako overhears, she goes to Kikuko and asks her not to reveal her identity to Akiko. But secrets will out, and Akiko, racked with guilt not only for the abortion but also for having been arrested under suspicion of prostitution while waiting for Kenji in a bar, decides that she has inherited a bad streak from Kikuko, even questioning whether Shukichi is her actual father. Events are set in motion that culminate in Takako denouncing Kikuko, who decides to leave town. There is a poignant scene at the end in which Kikuko, hoping that she has made amends with Takako, looks out of the window of the train for her daughter to say goodbye. If you know Isuzu Yamada only as the sinister "Lady Macbeth" of Akira Kurosawa's Throne of Blood (1957), her performance as the woman who has spent a lifetime of quiet regret will be eye-opening. As usual, Ozu transcends the potential for sentimental excess and arrives at just the right blend of pathos and quiet endurance.

Throne of Blood (Akira Kurosawa, 1957)

Chieko Naniwa in Throne of Blood

Taketoki Washizu: Toshiro Mifune
Lady Asaji Washizu: Isuzu Yamada
Noriyashi Odakura: Takashi Shimura
Yoshiteru Miki: Akira Kubo
Kunimaru Tsuzuki: Hiroshi Tachikawa
Yoshiaki Miki: Minoru Chiaki
Kuniharu Tsuzuki: Takamaru Sazaki
The Ghost Woman: Chieko Naniwa

Director: Akira Kurosawa
Screenplay: Hideo Oguni, Shinobu Hashimoto, Ryuzo Kikushima, Akira Kurosawa
Based on a play by William Shakespeare
Cinematography: Asakazu Nakai
Production design: Yoshiro Muraki
Music: Masaru Sato

To call Throne of Blood the best film version of Shakespeare's Macbeth, as some have done, does a disservice to those filmmakers who have wrangled with the difficult beauty of Shakespeare's language, like Orson Welles in 1948 or even Justin Kurzel (who pretty much threw the language out of consideration) in 2015. But it also distorts Akira Kurosawa's achievement, which is not to provide us with a kind of Japanese Masterplots version of Macbeth, but to grasp the essence of Shakespeare's tormented vision of ambition and the limits of civilization. Moving the action from medieval Scotland to medieval Japan could be just as gimmicky as staging Shakespeare's play in the Old West or outer space, except that Kurosawa has the skill to make Throne of Blood stand on its own, even for those who have no knowledge of Shakespeare. It's an action film, a ghost story, and a portrait of a marriage -- the contrast of the blustering Washizu and his icy spouse is beautifully handled by Toshiro Mifune and Isuzu Yamada. And the final assault on Washizu is one of the most exciting -- and dangerous -- stunts ever pulled off by a director and a movie star, involving sharpshooting archers and careful choreography as Mifune battles his way through a forest of real arrows. We miss the language, of course -- Macbeth contains some of Shakespeare's most gorgeous speeches -- but Kurosawa gives us some compensations. 

Osaka Elegy (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1936)

It's easy to imagine Kenji Mizoguchi's Osaka Elegy remade into a 1930s "women's picture" starring Bette Davis, except that nothing made in Hollywood under the infantilizing Production Code would have had the depth and insight into the real problems of women that Mizoguchi's film does. Mizoguchi's direction frames the story elegantly: He begins with a shot of the neon-lighted city, backed by the pop standard "Stairway to the Stars" on the soundtrack, as day gradually breaks and the glamour of the neon fades into the drab reality of the daytime city. We go to the home of Sonosuke Asai (Benkei Shiganoya), the head of a large pharmaceuticals company, where he berates the maids for small infractions and quarrels with his shrewish wife, Sumiko (Yoko Umemura). The opening sets a tone of disillusionment that pervades the entire film, which becomes a sharp commentary on both traditional and contemporary sexual roles. The film's protagonist is Ayako (Isuzu Yamada), switchboard operator at Asai Pharmaceuticals, whom Asai wants to become his mistress. Ayako is reluctant -- she has a boyfriend, Nishimura (Kensaku Hara), another employee at the company -- but her feckless father (Shinpachiro Asaka) has been skimming from the till at work and has lost the money in the stock market. So she quits her job, lets Asai set her up in a fancy modern apartment, and sends her father the money he needs. After Asai's wife uncovers the arrangement, a friend of Asai's, Fujino (Eitaro Shindo), tries to move in on Ayako. But Ayako reconnects with Nishimura, who proposes to her. Uncertain how he will respond to the truth about her life -- she has told him she works in a beauty parlor -- she postpones her answer. Then she learns from her younger sister that their brother is being forced to drop out of the university because her father can't pay the tuition. She gets the money by pretending to yield to Fujino's advances, but runs to Nishimura and agrees to marry him, while also confessing her liaison with Asai. As Nishimura is pondering this information, a furious Fujino arrives and after being turned away, calls the police, charging her with theft. Nishimura cravenly tells the police that he was innocently dragged into the affair by Ayako, but because it's her first offense she is released into her father's custody. Her family, whose money problems she has dutifully solved, shuns her and her brother calls her a "delinquent." Ayako walks out into the night and we follow her to a bridge, where she looks down into the trash-filled waters. But as we wonder if she is going to commit suicide, the family doctor, who has been present at several of the crisis points in her story, happens to meet her on the bridge. She asks him if there is a cure for delinquency, and when he says no, she accepts the judgment and, holding her head high, walks away toward the camera. Yamada's terrific performance was one of several she gave for Mizoguchi, establishing her as a specialist in strong female roles -- she is perhaps best-known by Western audiences as the Lady Macbeth equivalent in Akira Kurosawa's Throne of Blood (1957).

The Lower Depths (Akira Kurosawa, 1957)

Bokuzen Hidari in The Lower Depths

Toshiro Mifune was to Akira Kurosawa as John Wayne was to John Ford: a charismatic leading man. But like Ford, Kurosawa had a kind of stock company of actors who regularly appeared in his films. Among them was Bokuzen Hidari, who was something like Kurosawa's equivalent of Ford's Hank Worden: a somewhat goofy-looking character player, usually employed as comic relief. Hidari appeared in nine of Kurosawa's films, but he had his most prominent role in The Lower Depths, Kurosawa's adaptation of Maxim Gorky's play about a collection of society's outcasts living in a decaying flophouse. As Kahei, an elderly pilgrim who seeks shelter with the group of drunks, prostitutes, thieves, and gamblers, Hidari becomes something of the conscience of the group, a grandfatherly presence who counsels hope and dispenses wisdom that is usually not heeded. It is a standout performance in a film that showcases brilliant acting on the part of the entire ensemble. Mifune has a key role, in which he demonstrates his usual hyperactive virility, but never overshadows the work of the company, which also includes Isuzu Yamada as the grasping landlady, Osugi, who has the hots for Mifune's Sutekichi; Ganjiro Nakamura as Rokubei, her jealous husband; and Kyoko Kagawa as Okayo, Osugi's sister, who is also attracted to Sutekichi. The Lower Depths betrays its theatrical origins in its confinement to a single set (with outlying areas), but Kurosawa's camera, under the supervision of cinematographer Kazuo Yamazaki, never makes the film feel static. It ranges from pathos -- the death of a consumptive woman -- to violence in the altercations among the various tenants to black comedy. A high-spirited musical moment at the end, in which some of the tenants improvise a song and dance, is interrupted by the news that the drunken actor (Kamatari Fujiwara) has killed himself, which leads to a bitter, memorable curtain line. Kurosawa's reputation has declined in recent years, partly from a perception that he catered more to Western tastes than his contemporaries Yasujiro Ozu and Kenji Mizoguchi, but The Lower Depths reveals him as a master in his direction of actors.