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. 

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.

The Young Rebels (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1980)

Tomisaburo Wakayama in The Young Rebels 

Journalist: Go Kato
Asakawa Senjo: Tomisaburo Wakayama
Takiko: Junko Mihara
Yukio: Tatsuya Okamoto
Orie: Tomoko Saito

Director: Keisuke Kinoshita
Screenplay: Keisuke Kinoshita
Cinematography: Masao Kosugi

The title of Keisuke Kinoshita's polemical pseudo-documentary, The Young Rebels, sounds like that of a Hollywood film from the 1950s, the era of naive, sensational, and didactic dramas about "juvenile delinquency." Which is exactly what The Young Rebels turns out to be: an exploitation film about why kids go wrong. The answer is a simple one: their parents. The kids, Kinoshita is saying, are not all right: They ride around on motorcycles, they cut school, they shoplift, and they have sex. This was not exactly news in 1980: Nagisa Oshima, for example, was onto these facts in 1960, when he made Cruel Story of Youth, and he blamed it on dysfunctional parenting in 1969's Boy. But Oshima's films are about people more than they are about problems. Kinoshita has lost sight of the people in his obsession with the problem, and the result is a scattershot film designed to ferret out examples of parental irresponsibility both high -- affluent parents who are so obsessed with climbing the corporate or social ladders that they either ignore their children or spoil them -- and low -- parents who are so mired in poverty and its attendant ills like alcoholism and crime that they abuse their children. The narrative framework of the film is as simplistic as its point of view: a journalist goes in search of answers and interviews children and parents. Kinoshita is enough of an artist that he knows how to tell the several stories uncovered by the journalist, which gives The Young Rebels enough dramatic substance to keep the polemic at bay during the storytelling, but the piling on of miseries turns into overkill. Eventually, the journalist visits a kind of reform school in Hokkaido, the north of Japan, where wayward boys are nurtured back into society -- but there's even some recidivism there. At the end, the point seems to be that every kid needs a loving mother and father -- the Japanese title translates as a cry for help: "Father! Mother!" It has been pointed out that people raised children for millennia until, sometime in the mid-20th century, they became self-conscious about it and turned it into a problem. Kinoshita's humorless and even hopeless polemic does little to solve the problem, especially when the film often seems bogged down in fogeyism: A scene of joyriding motorcycle gangs, for example, is treated as a vision from hell.