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. 

Crazed Fruit (Ko Nakahira, 1956)

Yujiro Ishihara, Mie Kitahara, and Masahiko Tsugawa in Crazed Fruit 

Natsuhisa: Yujiro Ishihara
Haruji: Masahiko Tsugawa
Eri: Mie Kitahara
Frank: Masumi Okada
Eri's Husband: Harold Conway

Director: Ko Nakahira
Screenplay: Shintaro Ishihara
Based on a novel by Shintaro Ishihara
Cinematography: Shigeyoshi Mine
Art direction: Takashi Matsuyama
Film editing: Masanori Tsuji
Music: Masaru Sato, Toru Takemitsu

The eternal triangle, this time involving two brothers, Natsuhisa and Haruji, and a young woman, Eri. Crazed Fruit is somewhat of a landmark movie in Japanese film history, part of a genre known as taiyozoku or "Sun Tribe" movies, featuring the idle, affluent postwar Japanese youth. Every culture had its rebels without a cause in the 1950s, and the Japanese older generation was as scandalized (and titillated) by them as the rest. Crazed Fruit was singled out as more scandalous than most, partly because it seems to relish the erotic energy of the young without condemning it. The focal point of the film is the younger brother, Haruji, who becomes infatuated with a pretty young woman he sees in a train station, and becomes involved with her after he meets her again while out in a motorboat -- she has swum much farther out from shore than is usual, and he gives her a ride back. Her name is Eri, and she mysteriously keeps him away from the place she lives, agreeing to meet him elsewhere. She is taken with Haruji's innocence and shyness -- for a long time they stop short of having sex -- in part because he reminds her of her own lost innocence. She is married to a wealthy middle-aged American businessman, a fact she keeps from him, but which the older brother, Natsuhisa, learns and uses to blackmail her into having an affair with him. Haruji's learning the truth leads to a cataclysmic ending, of course. The material is handled with a good deal of sophistication that somewhat mitigates its exploitative qualities. The film made its young leads into big stars: After outgrowing his rebellious youth persona, Masahiko Tsugawa became a leading man and then a familiar character actor, while Yujiro Ishihara (the screenwriter's young brother) and Mie Kitahara married and became frequent costars -- the TCM commentary on the film calls them "the Bogart and Bacall of Japan."

The Burmese Harp (Kon Ichikawa, 1956)

Shoji Yasui in The Burmese Harp

Capt. Inouye: Rentaro Mikuni
Pvt. Mizushima: Shoji Yasui
Ito: Jun Hamamura
Kobayashi: Taketoshi Naito
Maki: Shunji Kasuga
Baba: Ko Nishimura
Oyama: Tomio Aoki
Old Woman: Tanie Kitabayashi

Director: Kon Ichikawa
Screenplay: Natto Wada
Based on a novel by Michio Takeyama
Cinematography: Minoru Yokayama
Film editing: Masanori Tsujii
Music: Akira Ifukube

No film that contains as many reprises of Henry Bishop's old parlor song "Home, Sweet Home" as Kon Ichikawa's The Burmese Harp does can escape charges of sentimentality. It's sung in both Japanese and English by male choruses accompanied by the titular harp -- which sounds a lot more like a full-size orchestral harp than the smaller Burmese saung that appears on the screen. But although the film contains scenes of the carnage of war, Ichikawa is clearly not aiming for realism here. The source of the film was a novel serialized in a children's magazine in 1946 that became an adult bestseller when it was published as a book. The book was designed as antiwar statement, a corrective to the militarism that had plunged Japan into disaster, and Ichikawa's film, which elaborates on the book's themes of Buddhist pacifism, still retains some of the power to stir sentiments in that direction. It focuses on Mizushima, member of a company of Japanese soldiers led by Capt. Inouye, who had been a music teacher before by war and tries to keep up morale as they trek through the Burmese jungle by having the men sing. Mizushima has found a harp and learned to play it extremely well, accompanying the singing as well as using the harp when he goes on reconnaissance missions, playing one tune for "all clear" and another for "danger." When the war ends, the company is sent to a temporary prison camp, from which Mizushima is sent out to try to persuade a recalcitrant group of Japanese soldiers that the war is over and they should surrender. The fanatics refuse, but Mizushima is unable to leave their hillside stronghold before the deadline passes and the place is shelled, killing most of the holdouts and leaving Mizushima unconscious. The company moves on, thinking Mizushima dead, and are about to be repatriated when they discover that he has survived. A flashback tells how Mizushima became a Buddhist monk, so devoted to the task of burying the Japanese corpses that still remain in the Burmese countryside that he refuses to return to Japan. The Burmese Harp is beautifully filmed by Minoru Yokayama, and became an international hit. There have been charges that the film "whitewashes" the Japanese campaign in Burma, ignoring atrocities committed under orders from the Japanese high command, and this criticism deserves to be heard. But the underlying antiwar fable of the film still holds its strength.