Assassin (Masahiro Shinoda, 1964)

Tetsuro Tanba in Assassin

Cast: Tetsuro Tanba, Shima Iwashita, Eiji Okada, Isao Kimura, Tamotsu Hayakawa, Eitaro Ozawa, Fujio Suga, Muga Takewaki, Takanobu Hozumi, Hideo Kidokoro, Tetsuji Takechi, Gen Shimizu. Screenplay: Nobuo Yamada, based on a book by Ryotaro Shiba. Cinematography: Masao Kosuji. Art direction: Junichi Osumi. Film editing: Eiichi Amano. Music: Toru Takemitsu. 

Masahiro Shinoda's Assassin (also known as Assassination and Ansastsu) is the story of Hachiro Kiyakawa (Tetsuro Tanba), an enigmatic figure who played both sides in the conflict between the Tokugawa shogunate and the imperial forces in 1860s Japan. Tanba gives a commanding performance, and the film is distinguished by Masao Kosuji's cinematography and Toru Takemitsu's score, but Shinoda's decision to tell the story in flashbacks is a challenge to anyone not well-versed in Japanese history, even though he provides several screenfuls of background text at the beginning of the film. 

Demon Pond (Masahiro Shinoda, 1979)

Tamasaburo Bando in Demon Pond

Cast: Tamasaburo Bando, Go Kato, Tsutomo Yamazaki, Hisashi Igawa, Fujio Tokita, Hatsuo Yamaya, Dai Kanai, Koji Nanbara, Toru Abe, Yatsuko Tan'ami, Shigeru Yazaki, Jun Hanamura. Screenplay: Tsutomu Tamara, Haruhiko Mimura, based on a play by Kyoka Izumi. Cinematography: Masao Kosugi, Noritaka Sakamotu. Art direction: Setsu Asakura, Kiyoshi Awazu, Yutaka Yokoyama. Music: Isao Tomita. 

Masahiro Shinoda's fusion of cinema and kabuki, Demon Pond, affords us the opportunity to witness the art of Tamasaburo Bando, the famous onnagata, a male actor specializing in female roles, who appeared primarily on stage. He takes two roles: Yuri, the wife of Akira Hagiwara (Go Kato), and the dragon princess Shirayuki, who dwells under enchantment in the pond of the film's title. If she's ever released from the spell, the pond will inundate the village below. Akira and Yuki have taken it on themselves to remind the princess of the spell that binds her by ringing a bell three times a day. Unfortunately, the arrival of a traveler (Tsutomo Yamazaki) from the outside world who is an old friend of Akira sets in motion a series of events that end in calamity. It's a splendidly acted, well-told fable, enhanced by an eerie electronic score by Isao Tomita that includes themes from Debussy and Mussorgsky, and concluding with a cataclysm of special effects.   

Samurai Spy (Masahiro Shinoda, 1965)

Koji Takahashi and Jitsuko Yoshimura in Samurai Spy

Cast: Koji Takahashi, Shintaro Ishihara, Eitaro Ozawa, Kei Sato, Mutsuhiro Toda, Tetsuro Tanba, Eiji Okada, Seiji Miyaguchi, Minoru Hodaka, Misako Watanabe, Yasunori Irikawa, Jitsuko Yoshimura, Jun Hamamura. Screenplay: Yoshiyuki Fukuda, based on a novel by Koji Nakada. Cinematography: Masao Kusugi. Art direction: Junichi Osumi. Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara. Music: Toru Takemitsu.

Samurai Spy begins with a history lesson: a voiceover telling us about the chaos that set in after the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600 and the rivalry between the Tokugawa Shogunate and the Toyotomi Clan. Ordinarily, this kind of information would be helpful to the Western viewer in sorting out what takes place in the film, but such a welter of names and allegiances follows that it left me in a muddle -- one admirer of the film even suggests taking notes. But the point being made by director Masahiro Shinoda seems to be that even the participants in the conflicts of the time weren't sure who was on whose side at any given point. It came down to a spy vs. spy situation, with double crosses at every turn. Let it suffice to say that the central figure in the film is Sasuke Sarutobi, played with steely authority by Koji Takahashi, a spy for his clan who has wearied of unending war, but nevertheless gets caught up in its intrigues. At this point, I simply let myself go with the flow of the film, which is often extraordinarily beautiful. Shinoda intentionally underplays the action usually associated with samurai movies: One fight takes place in a field swept by fog, a kind of now-you-see-it, now-you-don't tease that adds to the film's essential point that in warfare it's not always clear who are the winners and who the losers. Another sequence, beautifully filmed by Masao Kusugi, involves a duel between two men that's viewed from a distance: We see them as small almost antlike figures on a hillside, warily circling each other to the point that we don't know who is who. The nature that surrounds them is blithely indifferent to what seems so important to the combatants. Shinoda uses sound eloquently to reinforce this theme, sometimes introducing the call of a bird in the background to emphasize the beauty that's being violated by mere human concerns. And the movie is certainly flavored by Toru Takemitsu's score. Shinoda is often a difficult filmmaker to comprehend, and I wouldn't recommend his films -- with the possible exception of Pale Flower (1964), which seems to me the most American-inflected of the movies of his that I've seen -- to someone just starting out with Japanese films, but Samurai Spy has incidental pleasures even when you don't quite follow what's going on. Just don't expect the clarity of a Kurosawa-style samurai film.

Pale Flower (Masahiro Shinoda, 1964)

Mariko Kaga and Ryo Ikebe in Pale Flower

Cast: Ryo Ikebe, Mariko Kaga, Takashi Fujiki, Naoki Sugiura, Shin'ichiro Mikami, Isao Sasaki, Koji Nakahara, Chisako Hara, Saiji Miyaguchi, Eijiro Tono, Mikizo Hirata. Screenplay: Masaru Baba, Masahiro Shinoda, based on a novel by Shintaro Ishihara. Cinematography: Masao Kosugi. Art direction: Shigemasa Toda. Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara. Music: Yuji Takahashi, Toru Takemitsu.

Masahiro Shinoda does noir better than almost anybody in Pale Flower, a lush, brooding film about a middle-aged, burning-out yakuza and a beautiful but damned young woman, both played to perfection by, respectively, Ryo Ikebe and Mariko Kaga. Also near perfection: Masao Kosugi's chiaroscuro cinematography and Toru Takemitsu's nervous score. 

Silence (Masahiro Shinoda, 1971)

Silence (Masahiro Shinoda, 1971)

Cast: David Lampson, Don Kenny, Tetsuro Tanba, Mako, Shima Iwashita, Eiji Okada. Screenplay: Masahiro Shinoda, Shusaku Endo, based on a novel by Shusaku Endo. Cinematography: Kazuo Miyagawa. Production design: Mako, Masahiro Shinoda. Music: Toru Takemitsu.

Himiko (Masahiro Shinoda, 1974)

Masao Kusakari and Shima Iwashita in Himiko

Himiko: Shima Iwashita
Takehiko: Masao Kusakari
Adahime: Rie Yokoyama
Mimaki: Choichiro Kawarasaki
Ikume: Kenzo Kawarasaki
Ohkimi: Yoshi Kato
Nashime: Rentaro Mikuni

Director: Masahiro Shinoda
Screenplay: Masahiro Shinoda, Taeko Tomioka
Cinematography: Tatsuo Suzuki
Art direction: Kiyoshi Awazu
Film editing: Sachiko Jamaji
Music: Toru Takemitsu

The observation I made about Masahiro Shinoda's The Scandalous Adventures of Buraikan (1970) is equally applicable to his Himiko: I was "culturally ill-equipped" for watching it. The film is based on a legendary or at least semi-historical figure, a queen and shaman who supposedly ruled part of Japan in the third century C.E. In the film, she's treated as a spokeswoman for the Sun God, whose followers sometimes clash with the followers of the Land God and the Mountain God. A young man, Takehiko, who has traveled widely among these other people, enters Himiko's realm. The two fall in love, even though he's really her half-brother. Himiko's task is to deliver the words of the Sun God, but day-to-day business of the realm is handled by a king, Ohkimi, and when Himiko, following the advice of Takehiko, proclaims that the Sun God wants peace with the Land God and the Mountain God, Ohkimi protests. After Ohkimi is assassinated by Nashime, a servant of Himiko's, there's a power struggle involving two brothers, Mimaki and Ikume; Ohkimi has designated Mimaki as his successor. Meanwhile, Takehiko is seduced by Adahime, one of Himiko's acolytes, and when the queen hears of it, she banishes him. Mimaki declares war on the peoples of the Land God and the Mountain God, leading to the deaths of almost all concerned. It's all a tangle, though in many ways a familiar one -- prophecies, power struggles, and wars are universal. What sets the film apart is Shinoda's staging, which alternates between some spectacular natural landscapes -- mountains, forests, and waterfalls -- and stylized interiors. I found the design of the latter a bit too stylized: They look a lot like the interiors of a modern convention center or office building, and the bright and unsubtle way they're lighted doesn't minimize that effect. The acting, too, is stylized, imitating traditional Japanese drama, which makes some of the exposition and declamation too stiff and mannered for my tastes. But there are compensations, such as the fascinating treatment of the followers of the Mountain God, who paint their bodies white, wear tattered garments, and never stand up straight but crouch and creep with an eerie, uncanny effect. The score by Toru Takemitsu is also effectively unearthly.

The Scandalous Adventures of Buraikan (Masahiro Shinoda, 1970)

Tatsuya Nakadai in The Scandalous Adventures of Buraikan

Naojiro Kataoka: Tatsuya Nakadai
Michitose: Shima Iwashita
Soshun Kochiyama: Tetsuro Tanba
Ushimatsu: Shoichi Ozawa
Moritaya Seizo: Fumio Watanabe
Okuna, Naojiro's Mother: Suisen Ichikawa
Kaneko Ichinojo: Masakane Yonekura
Kanoke-boshi: Jun Hamamura

Director: Masahiro Shinoda
Screenplay: Shuji Terayama
Based on a play by Mokuami Kawatake
Cinematography: Kozo Okazaki
Art direction: Shigemasa Toda
Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara
Music: Masaru Sato

I think I was culturally ill-equipped for The Scandalous Adventures of Buraikan, a wittily stylized film that presupposes an acquaintance with Japanese history and culture that I don't possess. From my own culture, I bring a knowledge of 18th-century portrayals of London lowlife, such as the pictures of Hogarth and the satire in John Gay's The Beggar's Opera. Buraikan has echoes for me of those, as well as, in its portrayal of the puritanical reformer's zeal, Shakespeare's Measure for Measure. But for much of the film I felt at sea.

Our Marriage (Masahiro Shinoda, 1961)

Noriko Maki and Chieko Baisho in Our Marriage

Keiko: Noriko Maki
Saeko: Chieko Baisho
Komakura: Shin'ichiro Mikami
Matsumoto: Isao Kimura
Father: Eijiro Tono
Mother: Sadako Sawamura

Director: Masahiro Shinoda
Screenplay: Zenzo Matsuyama, Masahiro Shinoda
Cinematography: Masao Kosugi
Art direction: Chiyoo Umeda
Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara
Music: Naozumi Yamamoto

It goes without saying (though I've said it often enough) that cultural differences are a hindrance to our understanding or enjoyment of films made in other countries, but Masahiro Shinoda's Our Marriage brought the point home for me in an unusual way. It's a simple, elegantly made film, scarcely over an hour long, about two sisters and the pressures on women to get married. That's nothing we haven't seen in films by Naruse and Ozu and others, but Shinoda is particularly focused on social and economic change -- not just in the role of women in Japan but also on a society in which upward mobility is becoming possible and desirable. Keiko and Saeko are office workers in a factory, the daughters of a man struggling to make ends meet by harvesting seaweed. His job has become more difficult because of industrial pollution, and his wife sometimes has to borrow money from the daughters to pay bills. So the parents begin looking for a husband for 22-year-old Keiko. The father wants her to marry the son of the union chief at the factory, a widower nearing 30, but another man, Matsumoto, who works for a dry goods company, also shows interest in her. The parents disapprove of Matsumoto because he traded in the black market in the postwar years, but he has since cleaned up his act. The complication is that Keiko has met a handsome young factory worker, Komakura. Saeko, who has a secret crush on Komakura, wants Keiko to marry him, and Keiko is certainly not averse to the idea except that Komakura doesn't make much money. Things work themselves out after some family drama, of course. But the cultural difference that mars the film for me is not the tension between arranged marriages and marrying for love -- that's familiar enough even in the Western tradition. The problem is that the music arranger has chosen the tune of the old spiritual "Michael, Row Your Boat Ashore" as the film's main theme. Anyone who grew up singing it around a campfire, or knows the recorded versions by Pete Seeger and Harry Belafonte, is going to have a hard time reconciling the music with the story.

A Flame at the Pier (Masahiro Shinoda, 1962)

Koji Nanbara and Takashi Fujiki in A Flame at the Pier

Saburo Minakami: Takashi Fujiki
Yuki: Mariko Kaga
Tetsuro Kitani: Koji Nanbara
Kaga: Tamotsu Hayakawa
Reiko Matsudaira: Kyoko Kishida
Tommy: Shinji Tanaka
Kohei Matsudaira: So Yamamura

Director: Masahiro Shinoda
Screenplay: Ichiro Mizunuma, Masahiro Shinoda, Shuji Terayama
Cinematography: Masao Kosugi
Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara
Music: Toru Takemitsu

Imagine that instead of Marlon Brando, Elvis Presley had been cast as Terry Malloy in Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront (1954) and that Budd Schulberg's screenplay had been rewritten to give him a couple of songs to sing. Then you'd have a pretty good sense of what Masahiro Shinoda's A Flame at the Pier* is like. That's not meant to belittle Takashi Fujiki's performance in the film, which is closer to Brando (or really James Dean) than to Presley. Clearly, Fujiki's singing ability -- he had a side career as a pop singer -- inspired the filmmakers to arrange for these fairly well-integrated musical moments. The standout is a command performance put on by Fujiki's character, Sabu, who has been roped into doing an a capella rock number at a party for some rich people, friends of the owner of the shipping company for which Sabu works. The song is about a tour of hell, which is pretty much where Sabu finds himself. He works as an enforcer on the Yokohama docks, where the workers are trying to unionize. His loyalties are to his boss, Kitani, who is the company man in charge of keeping the dockworkers from organizing. Sabu believes that when he was a toddler during the war, Kitani rescued him from a fire and was crippled during the rescue. When he's not pushing the dockworkers around, trying to get them to go back to work after a sitdown strike, Sabu is wooing a pretty waitress, Yuki. But after his performance at the party, he's seduced by Reiko, who is married to the owner of the shipping company and is also having an affair with Kitani. Eventually, all of these plot threads tangle when Sabu is asked to rough up one of the men trying to organize the union but accidentally kills him. The murdered man turns out to be Yuki's father. Sabu also learns from Reiko the truth about what crippled Kitani. A Flame at the Pier rises above this overplotted narrative because of the performances, especially by Fujiki and Mariko Kaga as the young lovers, as well as Masao Kosugi's eloquent black-and-white cinematography, and a score by Toru Takemitsu.

*The retitling and/or translation of Japanese film titles for English-speaking countries is always mysterious. A Flame at the Pier has also been titled Tears on the Lion's Mane, which seems to be, if Google Translate is to be trusted, a little closer to the Japanese title, Namida o shishi no tategami ni. There are certainly a pier, a lion, and considerable tears in the film, but the attempt at poetry in both titles rings false as a label for what is essentially a gritty dockside melodrama.

Youth in Fury (Masahiro Shinoda, 1960)

Shima Iwashita and Shin'ichiro Mikami in Youth in Fury

Takuya Shimojo: Shin'ichiro Mikami
Yoko Katsura: Shima Iwashita
Setsuko Kitamura: Kayoko Honoo
Fumie Sono: Hizuro Takachiho
Seiichi Mizushima: Kazuya Kosaka
Michihiko Kihara: Junichiro Yamashita
Shizue: Yachiyo Otori
Oseto: Yunosuke Ito

Director: Masahiro Shinoda
Screenplay: Shuji Terayama
Based on a story by Eiji Shinba
Cinematography: Masao Kosugi
Film editing: Keiichi Uraoka
Music: Toru Takemitsu

Like the French New Wave directors, the Japanese also found themes and stories in the insurgent, rebellious post-World War II generation. But unlike such films as Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless (1960) and Bande à Part (1964) or François Truffaut's The 400 Blows (1959), the Japanese equivalents never quite caught on internationally. Perhaps it's because the French found a new approach to the material, where the Japanese directors were more directly inspired by the tone and technique of American movies like The Wild One (László Benedek, 1953) and Rebel Without a Cause (Nicholas Ray, 1955), which had a more moralistic or didactic tone, blaming the eruption of youthful rebellion on societal neglect. Even so shrewd a director as Nagisa Oshima, in his second feature, Cruel Story of Youth (1960), seems constrained to portray the departure of his young rebels from the old ways as shocking, whereas Godard and Truffaut relish their liberation from old moral norms. Youth in Fury (also known as Dry Lake) was also a second feature for Masahiro Shinoda, and it centers on young people caught up in the political revolt that culminated in student riots against the 1960 Japanese-American mutual security treaty. One of them is Takuya Shimojo, who is politically engaged but also confused -- he decorates his walls with pictures of political figures ranging from FDR to Hitler to Fidel Castro. Essentially he's a nihilist. He becomes involved with Yoko Katsura, whose father, a politician, has recently committed suicide, brought on by threats to expose his corruption. Her family is left penniless by his death, and with the consent of their mother, her older sister has agreed to sleep with a conservative politician who helps the family out with money. Eventually, Takuya's rejection of conventional morality will get him arrested: He hired a drunken boxer to beat up the man who had been engaged to Yoko's sister but jilted her after her father's suicide; instead the thug slashed the man's face with a razor. Yoko, the "nice girl," ends by being swept up in the crowds of students protesting the treaty. The problem with Youth in Fury is that it's overloaded with secondary characters, such as the rich young layabout who tries to rape Yoko, and Takuya's old girlfriend who resents his taking up with Yoko, as well as a group of politically engaged young idealists with whom Takuya first works but finally rejects. Shinoda has trouble sorting out and delineating these various characters, so that the film sometimes loses focus. But it's propelled by a good score by Toru Takemitsu -- like many films of its day, it relies more on jazz than on rock, which was just beginning to become the dominant musical idiom.

With Beauty and Sorrow (Masahiro Shinoda, 1965)

Mariko Kaga in With Beauty and Sorrow

Otoko Ueno: Kaoru Yachigusa
Keiko Sakami: Mariko Kaga
Toshio Oki: So Yamamura
Taichiro Oki: Kei Yamamoto
Fumiko Oki: Misako Watanabe
Otoko's Mother: Haruko Sugimura

Director: Masahiro Shinoda
Screenplay: Nobuo Yamada
Based on a novel by Yasunari Kawabata
Cinematography: Masao Kosugi
Art direction: Junichi Osumi
Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara
Music: Toru Takemitsu

Some mannered acting and stagy blocking mars Masahiro Shinoda's otherwise involving With Beauty and Sorrow, a revenge drama that doesn't quite transcend its genre. Toshio Oki, a womanizing novelist whose wife just barely puts up with his extramarital exploits, once had an affair with the young artist Otoko Ueno. She became pregnant but lost the baby at birth, and suffered severe psychological trauma. Now she lives with a young woman, Keiko, her student and her lover. Otoko has recovered her emotional stability, and even agrees to meet Oki when he telephones her on a visit to Kyoto, sending Keiko to his hotel to take him to the restaurant where they will reunite. But Keiko is, as even Otoko suggests, a little "crazy," and after the meeting begins to plot ways to bring about her lover's revenge on Oki. Eventually, this involves Keiko's seducing not only Oki but also his son, Taichiro, a graduate student of medieval Japanese history, with predictably disastrous consequences. Old pro So Yamamura is excellent as Oki, and it's good to see the great Haruko Sugimura, veteran of many films by Shinoda's mentor, Yasujiro Ozu, in the small part of Otoko's mother. But the younger actors, particularly Mariko Kaga as Keiko and Kei Yamamoto as Taichiro, turn what might have been an affecting portrayal of doomed characters into melodrama. The film benefits from Toru Takemitsu's score, though it sometimes feels a bit at odds with the soap-operatic events on screen.

Moonlight Serenade (Masahiro Shinoda, 1997)

Moonlight Serenade is an entertaining mélange of several genres: historical drama, coming-of-age tale, and family drama, with a touch of road movie and two romantic subplots, all kept more or less in focus by a framing story that turns it into a film about the endurance of the Japanese people in the face of everything that life can throw at them. It begins with Keita Onda (Kyozo Nagatsuka), a man in his 60s, watching the news reports about the 1995 earthquake that devastated Kobe. The film flashes back to 10-year-old Keita (Hideyuki Kasahara) watching, from a safe distance, the red sky over a burning Kobe after an American air raid. Like the other boys watching the fiery sky, who claim that the sight gives them an erection, Keita is more excited than frightened. Then the war ends, and Keita's family is marshaled his father, Koichi (also played by Nagatsuka), into a difficult journey from Awaji, where they now live, to the ancestral home in Kyushu. Keita is entrusted with seeing after the box that supposedly contains the ashes of his elder brother, who enlisted in the Japanese navy at 17 and was killed two years later when his ship hit a mine. (What the box actually contains is one of the film's surprises.) The family also consists of Koichi's wife, Fuji (Shima Iwashita), and their 18-year-old son, Koji (Jun Toba), and small daughter, Hideko (Sayuri Kawauchi). The neighbors are astonished that anyone should be making such a perilous trip across American-occupied Japan; the trains are unreliable and overcrowded and ships are still prey to undetonated mines. Gossip builds that Koichi, a tough police officer and a notoriously hidebound traditionalist, intends for his family to commit ritual suicide when they reach the ancestral burial place. The journey is in fact difficult and often suspenseful, but director Masahiro Shinoda, working from a screenplay by Katsuo Naruse from a novel by Yu Aku, maintains a light touch, infusing the difficult journey with humor. The film develops a love interest for Koji in the form of Yukiko (Hinano Yoshikawa), an orphaned girl who is also going to Kyushu, to live with relatives she has never seen. Koji, who hates his father, plans to run away somewhere along the journey, and when he meets Yukiko, he tries to persuade her to join him. A group of secondary characters joins the family on shipboard, including a black marketer (Junji Takada), whose stash of whiskey helps break down Koichi's stiff reserve (along with his policeman's distaste for the black market), and a traveling film exhibitor whose collection of movies includes some illicit samurai films that have been banned by the occupying Americans for their militarism. Keita, naturally, is enchanted by the movies, and there's a charming scene late in the film in which he goes to a theater to see Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942) with his father. Unfortunately, Keita can't follow the American romance -- some of the words in the Japanese subtitles are too hard for him, he says -- and his father only says he'll have to be older to understand it. Moonlight Serenade is one of the late films by Shinoda, who apprenticed with Yasujiro Ozu and became a prominent member of the "Japanese New Wave" in the 1960s. It displays his skill at storytelling, handling several subplots and surprises, and has a fine sympathetic treatment of the people caught up in the postwar crisis. But it's a bit old-fashioned for a movie made in the 1990s, too overloaded with characters and incidents for its own good, and the frame story seems unnecessary.