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.

Carmen's Innocent Love (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1952)

Cast: Hideko Takamine, Masao Wakahara, Chikage Awashima, Toshiko Kobayashi, Eiko Miyoshi, Chieko Higashiyama. Screenplay: Keisuke Kinoshita. Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda. Art direction: Tatsuo Hamada. Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara. Music: Chuji Kinoshita, Toshiro Mayuzumi.

Hideko Takamine returns as the ditsy strip tease artist, first seen in Keisuke Kinoshita's popular Carmen Comes Home (1951), who really thinks that stripping is an art. She gets involved with an avant-garde sculptor, whose mother is a fierce political activist, but the comedy is rather scattershot. The great character actress Chieko Higashiyama, for example, plays a maid who is terrified of another atomic bomb, freaking out at any loud noise. That this anxiety is played for laughs strikes us as odd, but the film is one of the first that was made after the end of the occupation in Japan, which forbade any mention of the bomb.

Carmen Comes Home (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1951)

Toshiko Kobayashi and Hideko Takamine in Carmen Comes Home

Cast: Hideko Takamine, Shuji Sano, Chishu Ryo, Toshiko Kobayashi, Kuniko Igawa, Takeshi Sakamoto, Bontaro Miake, Keiji Sada, Yuko Mochizuki. Screenplay: Keisuke Kinoshita. Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda. Production design: Motoji Kojima. Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara. Music: Chuji Kinoshita, Toshiro Mayuzumi.

Two giddy Tokyo showgirls descend upon a Japanese village, the birthplace of one of them, Kin Aoyama, whose stage name is Lily Carmen. She's played by the emerging Japanese superstar Hideko Takamine, and her friend, Maya Akemi, by Toshiko Kobayashi. Naturally, their big-city style turns the village upside down, especially when they decide to put on a show and the town learns that they're not just "dancers" but strippers. This first Japanese feature in color was a huge hit, spawning a sequel, Carmen's Innocent Love (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1952), firmly establishing Takamine's stardom, and accelerating writer-director Kinoshita's extraordinarily prolific career.

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. 

Here's to the Young Lady (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1949)

Setsuko Hara and Shuji Sano in Here's to the Young Lady

Keizo Ishizu: Shuji Sano
Yasuko Ikeda: Setsuko Hara
Sato: Takeshi Sakamoto
Goro: Keiji Sada
Yasuko's Mother: Chieko Higashiyama
Yasuko's Sister: Masami Morikawa
Yasuko's Brother-in-law: Junji Masuda
Yasuko's Father: Yasushi Nagata
Yasuko's Grandmother: Fusako Fujima
Yasuko's Grandfather: Sugisaku Aoyama
Bar Owner: Sachiko Murase

Director: Keisuke Kinoshita
Screenplay: Keisuke Kinoshita
Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda
Art direction: Motoji Kojima
Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara, Shizuko Osawa
Music: Chuji Kinoshita

Stop me if you've seen this one: A middle-aged working-class single man meets a pretty young woman from the upper classes and.... Okay, right. It's a romantic cliché, one that's so irresistible that Samuel Goldwyn once ordered a screenplay to be written on the basis of a title alone, The Cowboy and the Lady (H.C. Potter, 1938), and it's the inspiration for the teaming of Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn. But what sets Keisuke Kinoshita's Here's to the Young Lady apart is its country and time of origin: postwar Japan. In part the film is a manifestation of the occupying forces' desire to bring about a more egalitarian Japan, one in which a system of caste and class would be broken down, but it's also a reflection of economic reality in a recovering country whose male population had been decimated by the war. So Keizo Ishizu, a 34-year-old man who owns a thriving auto repair business and has dreams of getting into manufacturing, is introduced by his friend Sato to Yasuko Ikeda, from a cultured and educated family, as a potential wife. Ishizu is smitten instantly by the lovely but very shy young woman, but he also has doubts that she would ever be interested in him -- and he is sort of a schlub, whose chief recreation is drinking at his favorite bar. But then Ishizu visits Yasuko at her home and meets her family, learning that they are on the brink of financial disaster. Kinoshita starts with mostly long shots of the living room of the Ikeda home, but then switches to some shots from Ishizu's point of view that reveal the threadbare upholstery and well-worn furnishings. It turns out that Yasuko's father is in prison because after the war he was tricked into joining a company that was on the shady side. When its fraudulent practices were exposed, he honorably took the blame, even though it's suggested that he was ignorant of them. Moreover, a loan is about to come due, one that was taken out to help the family -- which includes Yasuko's mother, grandparents, sister and brother-in-law -- to survive. Ishizu has every reason to flee from this entanglement, but he's so taken with Yasuko that he agrees to court her for a while to see if their marriage would work out. She suggests that they go to the ballet, where he winds up in tears -- partly because he realizes that he can never be a match for her in culture. He takes her to a boxing match, where she winces at the violence but nevertheless winds up cheering for one of the fighters. And so on as obstacles to their marriage rise. We know how it will end, but Kinoshita makes that ending almost plausible, especially with the help of a talented cast that features the always magnificent Setsuko Hara. One blot on the film is the overbearing and sometimes inappropriate use of Chuji Kinoshita's repetitive score, augmented by the overuse of Chopin's Fantaisie-Impromptu in C# minor, the one spoiled for many of us by its use as the melody for the popular song "I'm Always Chasing Rainbows."

Phoenix (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1947)

Kinuyo Tanaka in Phoenix

Sayoko Aihara: Kinuyo Tanaka
Shinichi Yasaka: Keiji Sada
Naoya Yasaka: Isamu Kosugi
Moto Yasaka: Toyo Takahashi
Yuji Yasaka: Akira Yamanouchi
Hiroshi Aihara: Tamotsu Kawasaki
Housekeeper: Eiko Takamatsu

Director: Keisuke Kinoshita
Screenplay: Keisuke Kinoshita, Yoshiro Kawazu
Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda
Production design: Motoji Kojima
Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara
Music: Chuji Kinoshita

Keisuke Kinoshita's Phoenix probably had much more resonance for the Japanese audiences who saw it in 1947 than it does for us today, when it can easily be dismissed as a tearjerking love story. For those first audiences, the heroine, Sayoko, a war widow with a three-year-old child, could easily be seen as emblematic of the hopes of the Japanese people -- hence the film's title. We see much of Sayoko's story in flashback: her first encounter with Shinichi, the man with whom she falls in love; her rejection by his stern, conservative father; her own family's attempt to force her into an arranged marriage that would cement a business deal with a weapons manufacturer; her lonely life with her brother, who is dying of tuberculosis; the capitulation of Shinichi's father, who agrees to let them be married during Shinichi's brief furlough before he returns to the war in which he's killed. After all this, Sayoko lives with her late husband's family, essentially a factotum, tasked with keeping the large Yasaka family on point and occasionally getting scolded by her father-in-law. But she tells her brother-in-law that she's happy, pinning her hopes on her small child and on her plans one day to open a shop as a seamstress. Kinoshita is often a shameless sentimentalist, but here he has first-rate actors, Kinuyo Tanaka and Keiji Sada, as the ill-fated couple. They have real chemistry together, even though Tanaka was 16 years older than Sada.

Woman (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1948)

Mitsuko Mito and Eitaro Ozawa in Woman

Toshiko: Mitsuko Mito
Tadashi: Eitaro Ozawa

Director: Keisuke Kinoshita
Screenplay: Keisuke Kinoshita
Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda
Art direction: Kazue Hirataka
Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara
Music: Chuji Kinoshita

Keisuke Kinoshita can often be accused of trying too much or of not trying enough. Both faults are on display in his Woman, a noirish story of a thief and his mistress. Kinoshita's love for trying out effects that don't quite work is on display in the artily tilted camerawork that adds an expressionist note to scenes that don't really demand it. It's the sort of thing that a film student might attempt for a class, not something you expect from a director who had been working for five years and already had eight features to his credit, including the well-received Morning for the Osone Family (1946). Still, the scenes are shot well by Kinoshita's regular cinematographer, Hiroshi Kusuda. Where Kinoshita gets sloppy is more troubling: The dialogue is badly post-synched, especially noticeable in the extreme closeups that dominate the film toward the end. And once again, Kinoshita lets his brother Chuji's score meander around behind scenes where it feels awkwardly matched to the mood. But Woman is also one of Kinoshita's better films, overcoming its weaknesses with a fine economy of story. It's only a little over an hour long, but it packs a lot of intensity of feeling into that run time. Eitaro Ozawa plays Tadashi, a crook who has just made a big score with a home invasion and persuades his mistress, Toshiko, played by Mitsuko Mito, to go on the run with him to a seaside resort where he will meet up with his accomplices and settle up the proceeds of the theft. She has a steady gig as a dancer in the chorus of a musical revue that she's reluctant to ditch, but he's persuasive in his own brutally infatuated way. The bulk of the film deals with their on-again, off-again relationship: Will she stay or will she go? Ozawa is the more expressive of the two actors, which is fine because he has the more volatile role, switching in an instant from anger at her reluctance to pleading for her submission to menacing her with a knife. Mito's face can be inexpressive at key moments, making Toshiko a rather enigmatic character, but she manages to suggest the deep conflict at work within: Having risen from bar hostess (a step up from prostitution) to chorus girl, she seems to think her life has taken an upward turn that staying with Tadashi might reverse, even though he promises her a life of riches. The denouement comes when Tadashi asks her to sell a piece of the stolen goods for him. She refuses, but just at that moment there's a shout of "Fire!" and people start running to see the burning building. The keeper of the shop where Tadashi plans to sell the loot steps out to join the rubberneckers, pulling the door shut behind him but not locking it, and to Toshiko's horror, Tadashi takes the opportunity to slip into the store and filch some more goodies. She decides enough is enough and tries to run away, with Tadashi in pursuit through a gathering crowd. Kinoshita stages the fire and the melee around it very well, giving some needed action to what has been a rather talky film. In the end, Tadashi is caught and Toshiko returns to the chorus line, a somewhat flat and anticlimactic ending to a film that has generated some real tension.

The Portrait (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1948)

Chieko Higashiyama, Kuniko Miyake, and Ichiro Sugai in The Portrait

Midori: Kuniko Igawa
Kaneko: Eitaro Ozawa
Tamai: Kamatari Fujiwara
Nomura, the Artist: Ichiro Sugai
The Artist's Wife: Chieko Higashiyama
Kumiko, the Daughter-in-Law: Kuniko Miyake
Yoko, the Artist's Daughter: Yoko Katsuragi
Midori's Friend: Mitsuko Miura
Nakajima, Yoko's Boyfriend: Keiji Sada
Ichiro, the Artist's Son: Toru Abe

Director: Keisuke Kinoshita
Screenplay: Akira Kurosawa
Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda
Production design: Motoji Kojima
Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara
Music: Chuji Kinoshita

Keisuke Kinoshita's The Portrait deserves to be a little better known, if only because its screenplay is by Akira Kurosawa. Not that it's a masterpiece, or even a particularly felicitous example of Kurosawa's screenwriting, but it's one of the better films of the enormously prolific and sometimes misguided Kinoshita. IMDb, oddly, gives only the names of the cast members, not indicating what roles they play, which can be something of a challenge to those of us who aren't completely familiar with Japanese actors. Fortunately, I was able to track down a cast list and a useful summary on French Wikipedia. At the core of the film is an old trope: the portrait that reveals the truth. In this case, it reminds Midori, the mistress of real-estate hustler Kaneko, of her innocent past, causing her to break off their relationship. Kaneko has entered into partnership with Tamai to buy a rather rundown and ill-planned house, make some renovations, and flip it for double the price. The problem is the tenants, an artist named Nomura and his family. Kaneko is reluctant to evict them outright -- this guy is in real estate? -- so he concocts a plan: He will move Midori, who has somewhat of a temper, into the upstairs room of the house, and she'll prove such a torment to Nomura and his family that they'll be glad to leave. But things start to go awry almost immediately: The family think that Midori is Kuneko's daughter instead of his mistress. Naturally, she's somewhat flattered by this misconception. She softens even more when Nomura wants to paint her portrait, and falls completely when the family downstairs prove to be kind and affectionate people. Watching Yoko, the daughter, dance with her boyfriend under a full moon, and then be joined by Nomura and his wife, Midori starts to turn against Kaneko. But then even Kaneko is softened by the tenants and abandons his scheme. This is typical movie sentimentality, a fault Kinoshita (and sometimes Kurosawa) was often guilty of, but there is a bittersweet touch to the ending when Midori, having seen her portrait on display at a museum, walks away into an unknown future.

Fireworks Over the Sea (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1951)

Tarobei Kamiya: Chishu Ryu
Mie Kamiya: Michiyo Kogure
Miwa Kamiya: Yoko Katsuragi
Sami: Teruko Kishi
Kaoru Uozumi: Isuzu Yamada
Mitsu: Chieko Higashiyama
Shogo: Takashi Miki
Yukiko Nomura: Keiko Tsushima
Tsuyoshi Yabuki: Rentaro Mikuni
Kono Kujirai: Haruko Sugimura
Tamihiko Kujirai: Keiji Sada
Ippei Nagisa: Akira Ishihama

Director: Keisuke Kinoshita
Screenplay: Keisuke Kinoshita
Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda
Art direction: Tatsuo Hamada
Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara
Music: Chuji Kinoshita

Fireworks Over the Sea is an overlong (a little over two hours) and overplotted film about the tribulations of a family-owned fishing company. The always-welcome Chishu Ryu plays the head of the Kamiya family who has to struggle with not only keeping his business literally afloat but also the romantic entanglements of his daughters. There are love scenes and fist fights, as well as a dark family secret, but not much of an attempt on writer-director Keisuke Kinoshita's part to give it all coherent dramatic shape. The music track by Chuji Kioshita, the director's brother, doesn't help much by muttering about behind the scenes, sometimes inappropriately.

The Good Fairy (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1951)

Chikage Awashima and Rentaro Mikuni in The Good Fairy

Yoshio Nakanuma: Masayuki Mori
Itsuko Kitaura: Chikage Awashima
Rentaro Mikuni: Rentaro Mikuni
Mikako Toba: Yoko Katsuragi
Ryoen Toba: Chishu Ryu
Tsuyoki Kitaura: Koreya Senda
Suzue: Toshiko Kobayashi

Director: Keisuke Kinoshita
Screenplay: Keisuke Kinoshita, Kogo Noda
Based on a novel by Kunio Kishida
Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda
Art direction: Tatsuo Hamada
Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara
Music: Chuji Kinoshita

The Good Fairy is a shamelessly tearjerking snarl of plot threads, any one of which might have made a coherent movie, but together make for a complete mess. Nor would any of them justify the oddness of the title. (The original is Zen-ma, but Google Translate failed me.) It begins when Yoshio Nakanuma, a newspaper assigning editor, sends a young reporter, Rentaro Mikuni,* to track down Itsuko Kitaura, the runaway wife of a wealthy businessman. Naturally, there are complications: Nakanuma was once in love with Itsuko, who has a younger sister, Mikako, with whom Rentaro falls in love. She's dying, however, and by the film's end Rentaro is so devoted to her that he persuades her father, a former Buddhist priest, to let him marry Mikako on her deathbed. But Rentaro wants Nakanuma to witness the marriage, and by the time he gets there, Mikako is dead. Meanwhile, Rentaro has witnessed Nakanuma's cruelty to his longtime mistress, Suzue, whom he dismisses coldly now that he has reunited with his old love, Itsuko. Angered by his boss's treatment of Suzue, Rentaro sends Nakanuma away, then marries the dead Mikako. No, really. The thing is, this incredible nonsense seems to have been plausible to director and cast, all of whom do their best to make it work. At least the glimpses inside a Japanese newspaper office are interesting, but there are no fairies to be seen in the film, good or otherwise, unless it's Chishu Ryu's gentle, infinitely understanding ex-priest.

*Rentaro Mikuni is both the character and the screen name of the actor, born Masao Sato, who, like the American actors Gig Young and Anne Shirley, took his screen name from a role, in his case the first of a long career.

Somewhere Beneath the Wide Sky (Masaki Kobayashi, 1954)

Masami Taura and Akira Ishihama in Somewhere Beneath the Wide Sky

Ryochi Morita: Keiji Sada
Hiroko: Yoshiko Kuga
Yasuko: Hideko Takamine
Noboru: Akira Ishihama
Shun-don: Minoru Oki
Hisako: Toshiko Kobayashi
Mitsui: Masami Taura
Shige: Kumeko Urabe
Natsuko: Chieko Nakakita
Imai: Shin'ichi Himori
Shinkichi: Ryohei Uchida

Director: Masaki Kobayashi
Screenplay: Yoshiko Kusuda
Cinematography: Toshiyasu Morita
Art direction: Kazue Hirataka
Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara
Music: Chuji Kinoshita

Somewhere Beneath the Wide Sky* is a reminder that Masaki Kobayashi began his career as an assistant to Keisuke Kinoshita. It not only employed Kinoshita's brother Chuji as composer of the score, along with the director's usual film editor, Yoshi Sugihara, it also displays one of Kinoshita's usual domestic drama themes: the conflict of tradition and modernity as several generations of a family try to work out a way of living together in postwar Japan. And it shares some of Kinoshita's sentimentality in the developments of its plot. In tone and theme, Somewhere Beneath the Wide Sky could not be more different from the film Kobayashi made just before it: the harsh, fierce The Thick-Walled Room, which was made in 1953 but which the studio withheld from release until 1956. For that matter, it's not much like Kobayashi's bleak slum drama Black River (1956) or his unsparing three-part antiwar epic The Human Condition (1959-1961). Kobayashi would find his way out of the genteel trap that Somewhere etc. represents. Which is not to say that he didn't make a pleasant, thoroughly enjoyable film in which everyone seems to find themselves on the right path by the time the plot works itself out. Ryochi and Hiroko, who run the family liquor store, have married for love, which alienates his stepmother, who would have preferred an arranged marriage. Abetted by Ryochi's depressed, self-loathing sister, Yasuko  the stepmother constantly finds fault with Hiroko. Eventually, however, everyone makes peace, thanks in large part to Ryochi's steadfast good nature in defense of his wife and to Yasuko's unexpectedly finding love and a new purpose in life. The feel-good elements of the film are not quite so convincing as the harsher parts, but the performances -- especially that of Hideko Takamine in a cast-against-type role -- are persuasive.

*The Criterion Channel title is a translation of the Japanese title Kono hiroi sora no dokoka ni. IMDb gives it as Somewhere Under the Broad Sky, and I've also seen it referred to as Somewhere Beneath the Vast Heavens.

The Garden of Women (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1954)

Mieko Takamine and Chieko Higashiyama in The Garden of Women

Mayumi Gojo: Mieko Takamine
Yoshie Izushi: Hideko Takamine
Tomiko Takioka: Keiko Kishi
Akiko Hayashino: Yoshiko Kuga
Sankichi Shimoda: Takahiro Tamura
Yoshikazu Sagara: Masami Taura
Masao Izushi: Takashi Miki
Masao's Wife: Kuniko Igawa
Landlady: Yoko Mochizuki
Schoolmaster: Chieko Higashiyama
President: Kikue Mori

Director: Keisuke Kinoshita
Screenplay: Keisuke Kinoshita
Based on a story by Tomoji Abe
Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda
Art direction: Kimihiko Nakamura
Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara
Music: Chuji Kinoshita

Youth rebellion films became a prominent genre in Japan, but Keisuke Kinoshita's The Garden of Women is distinctive in that the rebels are all women. They have a lot to rebel against: They are students in a hidebound women's college more determined to turn them into proper young ladies than into educated women. This causes difficulties for Yoshie Izushi, who is a few years older than her fellow students. Most of them come from wealthy families, but Yoshie had to work for several years to earn enough money for the tuition. She wants an education that would make her a fitting partner for her upwardly mobile boyfriend, Sankichi. But she struggles with some subjects, especially math, and when she tries to study after hours she comes up against school rules that forbid her from studying anywhere except in her room -- which is usually filled with her roommates' friends, who are plotting against the stern headmistress, Mayumi Gojo, aka "The Shrew." Yoshie wants no part of the rebellion: She wants to graduate and marry Sankichi before her family forces her into marriage with a wealthy man of their choosing. Eventually, the student rebellion succeeds, but Yoshie gets caught in the crossfire. The Garden of Women is one of Kinoshita's more successful films, mostly because it gives us an unexplored angle on Japanese society and its tumultuous postwar society. But it's somewhat overplotted, with a few too many characters whose backstories take away from the central narrative.

You Were Like a Wild Chrysanthemum (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1955)

Masao: Chishu Ryu
Tamiko: Noriko Arita
Young Masao: Shinji Tanaka
Masao's Mother: Haruko Sugimura
Tamiko's Mother: Kazuo Motohashi
Tamiko's Father: Nobuo Tagaki
Tamiko's Sister: Keiko Yukishiro

Director: Keisuke Kinoshita
Screenplay: Keisuke Kinoshita
Based on a novel by Sachio Ito
Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda
Art direction: Kisaku Ito
Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara
Music: Chuji Kinoshita

Keisuke Kinoshita loved trying things out, and was so prolific and popular a filmmaker that his studio, Shochiku, let him get away with his innovations. For You Were Like a Wild Chrysanthemum* Kinoshita and cinematographer Hiroshi Kusuda decided to put all of the film's flashback scenes inside an oval mask, giving them the effect of vignetted images in a photo album. It's an interesting choice, but to my mind a mistake: More than half of the film consists of flashbacks, and given that almost all of the drama is contained in them, there's a loss of clarity and intimacy in the film's most important scenes. The unmasked frame story consists of the return of Masao, now a man in his 70s, to the village where he grew up. His closest friend, we learn, was his cousin Tamiko, a girl two years his senior. And this age difference -- not the blood relationship -- was considered a barrier to their engagement and marriage. As the aging Masao recalls the past, we see how Tamiko's family stymied their budding romance, sending him off to school and pressuring her into an arranged marriage. It's an affecting story, well performed by not only veterans Chishu Ryu as the old Masao and Haruko Sugimura as his mother in the flashbacks, but also the younger actors who play the young Masao and Tamiko. The cinematography is lovely, and it won awards, but I still think the masking gimmick is a distraction.

*The title the Criterion Channel on FilmStruck gives it. IMDb and other sources call it She Was Like a Wild Chrysanthemum.

The Tattered Wings (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1955)

Hideko Takamine and Keiji Sada in The Tattered Wings

Fuyuko Terada: Hideko Takamine
Shunsuke: Keiji Sada
Keizo Ishizu: Takahiro Tamura
Kojiro: Teiji Takahashi
Ryo: Akira Ishihama
Tokiko: Toshiko Kobayashi
Kimiko: Kuniko Igawa
Shunsuke's Father: Eijiro Yanaki
Fuyuko's Father: Takeshi Sakamoto

Director: Keisuke Kinoshita
Screenplay: Keisuke Kinoshita, Zenzo Matsuyama
Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda
Art direction: Kazue Hirataka
Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara
Music: Chuji Kinoshita

Keisuke Kinoshita's explorations of postwar domestic dilemmas continue with The Tattered Wings, in which Fuyuko, a war widow, is torn between -- what else? -- love and duty. Before the war she was in love with Keizo Ishizu, but she was forced into a marriage with the older son of a wealthy distiller. Her husband was cruel and unfaithful, and he left her with a daughter when he was killed in the war. Meanwhile, her husband's younger brother, Shunsuke, has fallen in love with her. He's a nicer guy than his brother, but things get complicated when Keizo suddenly returns to town, paying a visit before he moves to a new job in far-off Hokkaido. Their meetings stir gossip in the town, some of it fed by Fuyuko's sister, a telephone operator with a direct line, as it were, to the latest news. Meanwhile, Shunsuke is there to remind her that her daughter needs a steady, reliable father. Will Fuyuko choose stability or an unknown, romantic future? Kinoshita works all of this out with finesse and his usual attention to environment -- the sometimes claustrophobic small town -- but lays on a bit too much of his brother Chuji Kinoshita's musical emotion-tugging.

The Ballad of Narayama (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1958)

Kinuyo Tanaka in The Ballad of Narayama

Orin: Kinuyo Tanaka
Tatsuhei: Teiji Takahashi
Tama: Yuko Mochizuki
Kesakichi: Danko Ichikawa
Matsu: Keiko Ogasawara
Mata: Seiji Miyaguchi
Mata's Son: Yunosuke Ito
Teru: Ken Mitsuda

Director: Keisuke Kinoshita
Screenplay: Keisuke Kinoshita
Based on a novel by Shichiro Fukazawa
Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda
Art direction: Chiyoo Umeda
Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara
Music: Chuji Kinoshita, Matsunosuke Nozawa

Keisuke Kinoshita was so prolific a filmmaker, so freewheeling in his choice of subject, so willing to try something different with each film, that it's tempting to dismiss him as a kind of dilettante. And too often, his attempts at pathos come off as sentimental, even banal. But if he has a masterwork in his oeuvre, it's The Ballad of Narayama, a highly stylized account of life in a medieval Japanese village in which old people, when they reach the age of 70, are taken up the mountain and left there to die. I know nothing of kabuki, but the style of the film is often likened to that traditional Japanese theater. What I do know is that Kinoshita is one of the few directors who have managed to make film feel theatrical, to give us the intimacy of theater with the flexibility of film. The Ballad of Narayama is carefully, deliberately staged, using sets that are obviously on soundstages with trees and plants that emulate nature but are clearly artificial. I kept being reminded, oddly, of the MGM musical Brigadoon (Vincente Minnelli, 1954), which was originally planned to be filmed in Scotland, and later on the Monterey Peninsula in California, but was moved into a Culver City soundstage thanks to budget cuts. Kinoshita, who had often made spectacular use of actual Japanese locations, wasn't forced by the budget to give his film such an artificial look but rather chose it. And it works: There's a formal quality to the film that suits its story, a distancing that makes the harshness of its fable so effective. The film also benefits from the performance of the great actress Kinuyo Tanaka as Orin, whose dignified acceptance of her fate becomes heartbreaking. Her own grandson, Kesakichi, scorns her as just another mouth to feed, and mocks her with a song about a woman with demon teeth, whereupon Orin takes a rock and smashes her own teeth to demonstrate her good intentions. Tanaka makes this horrifying scene plausible, as she does the final submission to the abandonment at Narayama. She's well supported by Teiji Takahashi as her grieving, dutiful son.

The Rose on His Arm (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1956)

Yoshiko Kuga in The Rose on His Arm

Kiyoshi Akiyama: Katsuo Nakamura
Keiko Hase: Yoshiko Kuga
Kiyoshi's Mother: Sadako Sawamura
Masahiro Hase: Akira Ishihama
Kaoro Akiyama: Noriko Arita
Yoko: Hiroko Sugita
Choshichi Tsuji: Shinji Tanaka
Masahiro's Mother: Kuniyo Miyake
Masahiro's Father: Ryuji Kita

Director: Keisuke Kinoshita '
Screenplay: Keisuke Kinoshita
Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda
Art direction: Chiyoo Umeda
Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara
Music: Chuji Kinoshita

The only real distinction accruing to The Rose on His Arm is that it was cited as one of the best foreign films by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association in its Golden Globe Awards for 1956. Otherwise, it's a rather plodding entry in the "troubled youth" genre, very much outshone even in the year of its release by Ko Nakahira's Crazed Fruit, which exploited with greater finesse the audience's fascination with the postwar generation. Kiyoshi is a sullen, rather spoiled young man who resists his mother's attempts to find him gainful employment in a factory, and instead falls into the clutches of would-be yakuza Masahiro, not to mention the arms of Masahiro's pretty sister, Keiko. Keisuke Kinoshita and his usual behind-the-camera collaborators never quite lift this one out of predictability.

Farewell to Dream (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1956)

Noriko Kikuoki, Shinji Tanaka, and Yoshiko Kuga in Farewell to Dream

Yoichi Akimoto: Shinji Tanaka
Oshin, Yoichi's Mother: Yuko Mochizuki
Toyoko, Yoichi's Older Sister: Yoshiko Kuga
Genkichi, Yoichi's Father: Eijiro Tono
Kazue, Yoichi's Younger Sister: Noriko Kikuoki
Sudo: Takahiro Tamura
Seiji Harada: Ryohei Ono

Director: Keisuke Kinoshita
Screenplay: Yoshiko Kusuda
Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda
Art direction: Kazue Hirataka
Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara
Music: Chuji Kinoshita

The English title, Farewell to Dream, seems to be grammatically or idiomatically off: We would expect Farewell to a Dream or ... Dreams instead. (The Japanese title is Yûyake-gumo, which Google Translate renders as "Sunset Cloud.") But then there's something a little off about this entire short film -- only 78 minutes long. Its young narrator, Yoichi, tells us his story about how circumstances made him bid farewell to his dreams, except that he doesn't seem to have had any substantial dream other than not following in his father's footsteps as a fishmonger, a job he hates because it makes him smell of fish, causing other boys to taunt him. We can't really blame him, but the film never suggests that Yoichi had a clear plan of escape from that life. He spends a good deal of his time looking out over the rooftops of Tokyo through his binoculars, sighting a pretty young woman whom he dreams of meeting. Eventually, he and his friend Seiji make their way across the city to where they think the young woman lives, only to arrive in her neighborhood as she's getting into an automobile with the man she's engaged to marry. Yoichi's story is also mixed with that of his sisters: The elder one, Toyoko, is pretty and vain, and has a handsome boyfriend, Sudo. But when Sudo's family goes broke, she marries an older man -- and then carries on an affair with Sudo. When his father falls ill, Yoichi's parents allow a rich uncle to adopt his younger sister, Kazue, in exchange for some financial support, and we see Yoichi bid a sad farewell to the girl. I think we're meant to sympathize with Yoichi in the collapse of his family, but the irony is that after his father dies, Yoichi turns out to be a very good fishmonger, building a thriving business from his own talent as a cook by developing a sideline as a caterer and seller of prepared meals. Like it or not, Yoichi has become what many families would see as a blessing: the son who successfully keeps the family business alive. The effect is that Yoichi's lament for his lost future feels like self-pity rather than legitimate dismay at unfulfilled potential.

Danger Stalks Near (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1957)

Hideko Takamine in Danger Stalks Near

Yuriko Sato: Hideko Takamine
Kaneshige Sato: Keiji Sada
Tetsu Sato: Akiko Tamura
Bunichi Akama: Koji Nanbara
Sakura: Toshiko Kobayashi
Miyoko: Hiroko Ito
Ayame: Masako Arisawa
Shintaro: Ryo Ono
Kazuo: Kotohisa Saotome
Mr. Suzuki: Yoshihide Sato
Mr. Kitamura: Koji Satomi
Tatami repairman: Saburo Sato
First thief: Akira Oze
Second thief: Shoji Sayama
Kohei: Shinji Tanaka

Director: Keisuke Kinoshita
Screenplay: Keisuke Kinoshita
Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda
Art direction: Chiyoo Umeda
Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara
Music: Chuji Kinoshita

A rather pleasant surprise. Nothing about the English title suggests that you're going to get the comedy of errors that Danger Stalks Near turns out to be, or that its star, Hideko Takamine, usually seen in serious, often glamorous roles, will play a mousy, bespectacled housewife under the domination of her tyrannical mother-in-law. The film starts out with two young thugs bullying Kohei, a man from the country who needs money to return home, into robbing a suburban house. But as they case the joint from a nearby hillside, things constantly happen to keep them from their goal. The house is the property of Tetsu Sato, a war widow, who lets her son, Kaneshige, and his wife, Yuriko, and their son, Kazuo, live there. She also rents a room to Miyoko, a flighty young woman who starts the day's madness off by burning a hole in the tatami mat in her room. Tetsu immediately evicts her. Things snowball from there, with the tatami repairman coming and going, movers arriving, Yuriko's sisters showing up with various problems of their own, Yuriko returning with her boyfriend to demand the remaining day she had paid for in rent, an old friend of Kaneshige's arriving and revealing his own larcenous aims, and various other unexpected incidents. The three would-be thieves watch in dismay as their opportunity to bust in and steal what they -- and others -- believe to be a considerable amount of money belonging to Tetsu disappears. Kinoshita piles on the complications, and in the process unveils some of the hidden motives and simmering resentments of the members of the household. For once, Kinoshita lets his cynical side dominate, diluting some of the syrup that often makes his films a little sticky.

The Eternal Rainbow (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1958)

Yoshiko Kuga and Yusuke Kawazu in The Eternal Rainbow 

Osamu Sagara: Teiji Takahashi
Chie Obita: Yoshiko Kuga
Shiro Machimura: Takahiro Tamura
Kikuo Suda: Yusuke Kawazu
Fumi Kageyama: Kinuyo Tanaka
Naoji Kageyama: Chishu Ryu
Minoru Kageyama: Kazuya Kosaka
Kyoichiro Obita: Minoru Oki
Hiroko Sonobe: Hizuru Takachiho

Director: Keisuke Kinoshita
Screenplay: Keisuke Kinoshita
Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda
Art direction: Chiyoo Umeda
Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara
Music: Chuji Kinoshita

An unstable mixture of documentary and domestic melodrama, The Eternal Rainbow begins with shots of the Yawata steel mill complex and a voiceover narration telling us how steel is made and then wandering out into the surrounding industrial community, where the company has built recreation and cultural facilities for the workers as well as what the narrator calls "beautiful apartment buildings." (They're rather bleakly landscaped multistory boxes with stairwells open to the elements.) We're also told that the smoke that rises above the mill appears in five distinct colors, although I couldn't discern much beyond various shades of gray and yellow. Despite the idyllic tone of the documentary, the lives of the workers don't seem particularly blissful: There's some resentment and discrimination between the factory workers and the office workers, which extends to the romantic entanglements that form the plot of the "fictional" side of  Keisuke Kinsoshita's film. The hazards of factory work are not overlooked, either. Twice we learn of accidents that send the steelworkers to the company hospital, though Kinoshita doesn't show either accident taking place. The second accident involves one of the principal characters, Suda, a handsome young worker whose job it is to ride on the front of the engine through the factory's railyards and leap off to run ahead and pull the switch. Suda rents a room from the Kageyamas, who have a son, Minoru, who never made the grade in strength or ability to work in the mill, and continually searches for a job. Naoji Kageyama is nearing retirement, and he and his wife will be forced to move out of the apartment they rent from the company. Suda also gets involved in pleading the case for his older friend Sagara, who is in love with the pretty Chie, who's not sure she wants to marry a steelworker; her parents want her to marry the engineer Machimura, who has just accepted a job with the company's Brazilian branch. These rather paltry domestic matters are not enough to carry the film by themselves, which may be why Kinoshita chose to insert them into the documentary. What interest the film has lies mainly in some impressive scenes inside the mill and in its environs, but it gets bogged down in scenes of the "Water Carnival" staged for the entertainment of the workers, consisting mainly of young women dancing to pop and light classical music in front of a band shell in the middle of a pond. There are too many characters to sort out for the fictional story to have much impact.

The Snow Flurry (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1959)

Yusuke Kawazu and Keiko Kishi in The Snow Flurry

Haruko: Keiko Kishi
Sakura: Yoshiko Kuga
Suteo: Yusuke Kawazu
Sachiko: Ineko Arima
Tomi: Chieko Higashiyama
Nagura: Yasushi Nagata
Hideo: Masanao Kawakane

Director: Keisuke Kinoshita
Screenplay: Keisuke Kinoshita
Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda
Art direction: Chiyoo Umeda
Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara
Music: Chuji Kinoshita

Like so many of Keisuke Kinoshita's films, The Snow Flurry tells a conventional, melodramatic story while using innovative, even audacious film techniques. It's a family drama spanning about 18 years, from 1940 to the year the film was made. At the beginning we are watching a wedding procession in one of the long shots that are characteristic of the film, which seems to want to isolate its figures in its mountainous landscape. Suddenly, a young man breaks away from the onlookers and runs away, pursued by a woman. We will learn that they are Suteo and his mother, Haruko, and that the bride is Suteo's cousin, Sakura, but Kinoshita leaves it to us to piece together this information, first by flashing back to 1940, when Haruko, pregnant with Suteo, survived an attempted double suicide with her lover, Hideo. Hideo's father, patriarch of the Nagura family, reluctantly takes Haruko into the household, but on a decidedly subordinate status: Once the child is born, the tyrannical old man, a wealthy landowner, goes behind Haruko's back and officially registers the boy's name as Suteo, which means "outcast" or "abandoned." Mother and child live in an outbuilding, take their meals in a separate room from the rest of the family, and are expected to do menial chores. As a boy, Suteo is teased and bullied by other children, but he grows close to his cousin, Sakura, who is the only member of the "legitimate" Nagura clan who shows him kindness. When we return to the scene that opened the film, we understand why he is so distraught at her marriage, and why Haruko runs after him, afraid that he may do himself harm. What distinguishes this rather thin story is Kinoshita's almost experimental technique in telling it, relying on frequent jump cuts back and forth in time that are initially confusing but have a certain payoff in keeping the story from bogging down in sentimentality, Kinoshita's usual failing. It also helps that there are some fine performances, especially by the great character actress Chieko Higashiyama as the matriarch, who survives the death of her cruel, apoplectic husband to rule the family with an iron will. She has a great scene in which, learning of Sakura's engagement, she breaks down in a mixture of laughter and tears -- joy that the family lineage will continue, sorrow that it has taken so long to ensure and that it will continue through the female line and not the male. Only 78 minutes long, it's not a great film but an impressive display of filmmaking skill.