Take Aim at the Police Van (Seijun Suzuki, 1960)

Misako Watanabe and Michitaro Mizushima in Take Aim at the Police Van

Cast: Michitaro Mizushima, Misako Watanabe, Shoichi Ozawa, Shinsuke Ashida, Mari Shiraki, Toru Abe. Screenplay: Shin'ichi Sekizawa, Kazuo Shimada. Cinematography: Shigeyoshi Mine. Production design: Takehara Sakeguchi. Film editing: Akira Suzuki. Music: Koichi Kawabe.

Seijun Suzuki's early-career Take Aim at the Police Van is a sold, somewhat overplotted excursion into the realms of film noir, but with none of the flash and dazzle of such later films as Story of a Prostitute (1965), Tokyo Drifter (1966), or Branded to Kill (1967). It's the story of Daijiro Tamon (Michitaro Mizushima), a prison guard who's on a bus transporting prisoners when it's attacked and two of the prisoners are shot dead. The attackers get away and Tamon gets suspended -- really scapegoated -- for his inability to stop them, so because he has nothing else to do he decides to figure out what was behind the assault. One of the prisoners who survived the attack, Goro (Shoichi Ozawa), was released on bail the day of the incident, and following up on some things Goro did and said on the bus, Tamon seeks him out. In the process, he winds up uncovering a human trafficking gang, gets slugged and chased a couple of times, and becomes involved with Yuko (Misako Watanabe), the noir "mystery woman" who has some connections to the traffickers. There's big thriller sequence in which Tamon and Yuko are tied up by the bad guys in a gasoline tanker truck that's sent rolling downhill with gas spilling out behind. The bad guys set the trail of gasoline alight and Tamon and Yuko have to free themselves before the burning gas reaches the truck and it explodes. I have to admit that this gimmick was spoiled for me by the TV series Mythbusters, on which Adam and Jamie demonstrated that a truck in that situation probably wouldn't explode, but I also wondered why, if the bad guys wanted to get rid of them, they didn't just kill them outright. But if you go questioning that sort of thing you'll never have any fun at the movies.

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.

The Inheritance (Masaki Kobayashi, 1962)

Keiko Kishi in The Inheritance

Yasuko Miyagawa: Keiko Kishi
Senzo Kawahara: So Yamamura
Kikuo Furukawa: Tatsuya Nakadai
Satoe Kawahara: Misako Watanabe
Naruto Yoshida: Seiji Miyaguchi
Junichi Fujii: Minoru Chiaki
Mariko: Mari Yoshimura
Sadao: Yusuke Kawazu

Director: Masaki Kobayashi
Screenplay: Koichi Inagaki
Based on a novel by Norio Najo
Cinematography: Takashi Kawamata
Art direction: Shigemasa Toda
Film editing: Keiichi Uraoka
Music: Toru Takemitsu

Looking as chic and mysterious as Anouk Aimée, Delphine Seyrig, or Monica Vitti ever did in the French and Italian films of the era, Yasuko Miyagawa steps from her car, dons her sunglasses, and goes for a bit of window-shopping. But in front of a jewelry store window, she is stopped by a man she once knew. She agrees to join him in a cafe, where the flashback that constitutes most of Masaki Kobayashi's The Inheritance unfolds in her narrative. When they knew each other, she was a secretary and he was a lawyer for the wealthy businessman Senzo Kawahara, and both of them had key roles in determining who would benefit from Kawahara's will. The rest is a noir fable, based on the oldest of plot premises: Where there's a will, there are people scheming to benefit from it. Upon learning that he has cancer and only a short while to live, Kawahara set his managers the task of locating his illegitimate children: He and his wife, Satoe, have none from their marriage. And in the search for the heirs, even the searchers are prone to make deals with the potential legatees. By law, Satoe stands to inherit a third of her husband's 300 million yen estate, but she of course wants more, which means making sure that none of her husband's offspring earns his favor. And then there are the offspring, some of whom have adoptive families that would benefit from being included in the will, while others have come of age and want to curry favor with the father they've never met. No holds are barred: not only fraud but also murder and rape. But mainly the film is the story of Yasuko, beautifully played by Keiko Kishi, transforming from the self-effacing secretary into the consummate schemer, motivated at least as much by revenge as by greed. It's a nasty tale, but an involving one.

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.