Gate of Hell (Teinosuke Kinugasa, 1953)

Machiko Kyo in Gate of Hell

Morito Endo: Kazuo Hasegawa
Kesa: Machiko Kyo
Wataru Watanabe: Isao Yamagata
Shigemori: Yataro Kurokawa
Rokuro: Kotaro Bando
Kogenta: Jun Tazaki
Kiyomori: Koreya Senda

Director: Teinosuke Kinugasa
Screenplay: Teinosuke Kinugasa, Masaichi Nagata
Based on a play by Kan Kikuchi
Cinematography: Kohei Sugiyama
Production design: Hiroshi Ozawa
Film editing: Shigeo Nishida
Music: Yasushi Akutagawa

Can a movie be too stylish for its own good? As Pauline Kael says of Gate of Hell, "It's as if the director, Teinosuke Kinugasa, had read those critics who compare every Japanese movie to a Japanese print and had decided to give them more pictorial effects than they could handle -- delicately choreographed battles, the flow and texture of garments, and everywhere the grace of movement and composition." What gets lost in Gate of Hell is the simple dignity of its story about a wife who sacrifices herself for her husband's sake. The film won an Oscar* for costume design, one of those rare Academy Awards to go to a film not made in English, and it certainly deserved it. But when the eye is continually caught by the color and texture of surfaces, the film risks being superficial. Fortunately, the wife, Kesa, is played by the superb Machiko Kyo, who makes the character into more than a mannequin for exquisite robes.

*The award was presented to Sanzo Wada, whereas the credited costume design is Shima Yoshizane. I haven't been able to discover whether Sanzo Wada is the same person as the credited "color consultant" for the film, Mitsuzo Wada, but Sanzo was a noted designer and the author of the six-volume Dictionary of Color Combinations, so it seems likely.

The Demon (Yoshitaro Nomura, 1978)

Hiroki Iwase and Ken Ogata in The Demon

Sokichi Takeshita: Ken Ogata
Oume: Shima Iwashita
Riichi: Hiroki Iwase
Kikuyo: Mayumi Ogawa
Yoshiko: Miyuki Yoshizawa

Director: Yoshitaro Nomura
Screenplay: Masato Ide
Based on a novel by Seicho Matsumoto
Cinematography: Takashi Kawamata
Art direction: Kyohei Morita
Film editing: Kazuo Ota
Music: Yasushi Akutagawa

The title suggests a horror film, which in its profoundly disturbing way The Demon is. Except there are no supernatural demons to be exorcised in Yoshitaro Nomura's film. There are only horribly flawed human beings who do things that we encounter frequently in the news media: They abuse children. Nomura is so unsparing in his treatment of the subject that for many the film will be impossible to watch, and only the distancing inherent in the medium of film made it possible for me to work through its more disturbing moments. I had to remind myself of what a tremendous acting job Ken Ogata brings off as he plays Sokichi, whose mistress one day dumps their three small children -- an infant, a 4-year-old girl, and a 6-year old boy -- on him and his wife, Oume, who until this point hasn't known of their existence. I steeled myself by admiring the camerawork and editing when Sokichi, pressured by Oume, sneaks away from the little girl and abandons her amid a throng of tourists, only to have their eyes meet as the elevator door taking him away closes. He has already allowed Oume to "accidentally" bring about the death of the infant, and there is worse to come when they plot to rid themselves of the boy. In the end, however, I'm not certain that The Demon entirely justifies telling us of the horrors inflicted on the children. There is an ironic ending that suggests justice will be done, although whether that justice is in measure to the pain that has been inflicted is doubtful. The result is a kind of nihilistic acceptance that things like this occur and will continue to occur, despite our disgust at them, and there's not much we can do about them.

Fires on the Plain (Kon Ichikawa, 1959)

Tamura: Eiji Funakoshi
Yasuda: Osamu Takizawa
Nakamatsu: Mickey Curtis
Sergeant: Mantaro Ushio
Army surgeon: Kyu Sazanaka
Officer: Yoshihiro Hamaguchi
Soldier: Hikaru Hoshi
Soldier: Asao Sano
Soldier: Masaya Tsukida

Director: Kon Ichikawa
Screenplay: Natto Wada
Based on a novel by Shohei Ooka
Cinematography: Setsuo Kobayashi
Production design: Atsuji Shibata
Film editing: Tatsuji Nakashizu
Music: Yasushi Akutagawa

War films often have much in common with horror movies: the impending dread, the omnipresence of death and mutilation. But none that I've seen goes quite so far in that direction as Kon Ichikawa's Fires on the Plain, which eventually takes on the character of a zombie movie. I don't mean that flippantly or facetiously, because Fires on the Plain is very much a serious film, thoughtful and unsparing in its treatment of the horrors of war. But the images of a swarm of Japanese soldiers crawling across a road in the near-dark and of starving, wounded men staggering toward a hoped-for rescue inevitably evoke those movies and TV series about the walking undead. From the beginning, the film's protagonist, Tamura, is one of those undead figures: Gaunt and tubercular, he is turned away from his company of soldiers making a last-ditch stand because he is of no use as a fighter, and sent back to the field hospital from which he has already been turned away. The officer who sends him off gives him a grenade and tells him that if the hospital won't take him, he's to blow himself up. Tamura doesn't do that, but he begins a long trek across Leyte as things go ever worse for the Japanese, targets not only of the American army but even more so of the vengeful Filipinos -- at one point, an American convoy stops to take prisoners, but a Filipina accompanying the Americans gleefully guns them down instead. Eventually, the most zombie-like thing of all happens to Tamura: He comes face to face with starving soldiers who are eating human flesh. Some of them call it "monkey meat," but one mad and dying man offers his own body to Tamura as food. With this premise, the film could have gone deep into sensationalism -- or worse, into Christian iconography -- but Ichikawa makes it clear that the cannibalism he portrays is a metaphor for the ultimate degradation of war. Critics are often puzzled by Ichikawa's career, which is marked by a great variety of films, all of them made with extreme technical finesse. His other great anti-war film, The Burmese Harp (1956), for example, has moments of lyricism and tenderness that are completely absent from Fires on the Plain. So if you're looking for the consistency of an auteur, you won't find it in his work. But that doesn't keep him from being an extraordinarily daring filmmaker.   

Odd Obsession (Kon Ichikawa, 1959)

Tatsuya Nakadai in Odd Obsession 

Ikuko Kenmochi: Machiko Kyo
Kenji Kenmochi: Ganjiro Nakamura
Toshiko Kenmochi: Junko Kano
Kimura: Tatsuya Nakadai
Hana: Tanie Kitabayashi
Masseur: Ichiro Sugai
Dr. Kodama: Mantaro Ushio
Dr. Soma: Jun Hamamura

Director: Kon Ichikawa
Screenplay: Keiji Hasebe, Kon Ichikawa, Notto Wada
Based on a novel by Jun'ichiro Tanizaki
Cinematography: Kazuo Miyagawa
Music: Yasushi Akutagawa

As with so many foreign-language films, the English title Odd Obsession seems to miss the mark a little, but the Japanese title, Kagi, which means "The Key," also seems a little off-target, even though it was taken from the novel on which the film was based. If I were retitling it, I'd call the film something like "The Jealousy Cure," which is not only in keeping with the plot but is also supported by the way the film opens, as if presenting a case study: We see a man in a physician's white coat standing before an anatomy chart, speaking directly at the camera. He describes the various effects of aging on the body before turning away to enter the action of the scene. We learn that he is Kimura, an intern in the clinic of Dr. Soma, who is treating a post-middle-aged man, Kenji Kenmochi, for sexual dysfunction. The doctor advises Kenji that the injections he has been giving him are probably ineffective, and that he should try to find other ways of dealing with the problem. Kimura has also been dating Kenji's daughter, Toshiko, and he has let slip to her that her father is seeing Dr. Soma. She passes the information along to her mother, Ikuko, whom we then see visiting Dr. Soma to find out if there is something she can do for her husband. It's an awkward encounter: Ikuko is rather embarrassed by the subject of their sex life, but she resolves to do what she can to help. Kenji then discovers that his libido is stirred by the thought of anyone having sex with his much younger wife, and when Kimura comes to dinner, Kenji begins to plot ways of bringing his wife and the young and handsome intern together. As Kimura and Ikuko begin an affair -- the key from the Japanese title is the one she gives Kimura to the back gate -- Kenji's sex drive reawakens, with the added consequence of dangerously elevating his blood pressure. Odd Obsession is not so much a case study, however, as an ironic dark comedy, one in which the follies of the various characters lead to what might be a tragic conclusion if viewed from another angle than the one Ichikawa chooses. It's also a showcase for the versatility of Tatsuya Nakadai and Michiko Kyo, who reteamed seven years later for the more serious The Face of Another (Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1966). I think Ichikawa is a little too interested in "trying things out," such as the opening segue from breaking the fourth wall into starting the action of the film, or the freeze frames that interrupt the action in the opening section, tricks that don't feel consistent with the rest of Odd Obsession.

Watched on Turner Classic Movies