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.

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.