Fighting Elegy (Seijun Suzuki, 1966)

Hideki Takahashi and Junko Asana in Fighting Elegy

Kiroku Nanbu: Hideki Takahashi
Michiko: Junko Asana
Turtle: Yusuke Kawazu
Takuan: Mitsuo Kataoka
Principal: Isao Tamagawa
Kaneda: Keisuke Noro
Ikki Kita: Hiroshi Midorigawa
Kiroku's Father: Seijiro Onda
Yoshino Nanbu: Chikaku Miyagi

Director: Seijun Suzuki
Screenplay: Kaneto Shindo
Based on a novel by Takashi Suzuki
Cinematography: Kenji Hagiwara
Production design: Takeo Kimura
Film editing: Mutsuo Tanji
Music: Naozumi Yamamoto

Seijun Suzuki's Fighting Elegy is a coming-of-age story, ostensibly about a hormone-crazed teenager who tries to sublimate his lust for the pretty Michiko and to expiate his Catholic guilt for that lust by joining one of the warring gangs in his town. But what's really coming of age, as we find out at the film's end, is the militaristic imperialism of prewar Japan. So much of the film depends on Suzuki's mastery of tone as he shifts from the mostly comic story of young Kiroku's plight to the wholly tragic outcome. Kiroku becomes increasingly adept as a fighter, and his rebellious antics at school are not punished so much as increasingly tolerated -- even his father refuses to punish him, taking a boys-will-be-boys attitude. When he's forced to go live with his uncle and transfer to another school, he only gets more bellicose, but although the school has a motto that stresses the necessity of "seemly" behavior, at the end of his stay there the principal is so impressed by Kiroku's fighting skills that he removes his coat and challenges Kiroku to a duel. The scene ends with the two squaring off, suggesting that part of the reason for the military's takeover lies in the older Japanese generation's admiration for the violence of the young. The film ends with Michiko going into a convent, but not before she is forced off of the path she is traveling by a troop of jogging soldiers and her crucifix is trodden into the snow, and with Kiroku on the train to Tokyo, where he plans to join the fight for control of the government. It's not clear from the film which side Kiroku will fight on this time, although the novel on which it's based has him joining the army and dying in China. Suzuki scripted this part of the novel and planned to film it as a sequel before he was forced out of his job at the Nikkatsu studios. Fighting Elegy is an exhibition of Suzuki's original and innovative technique, which audiences loved but studio management thought was out of control.

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.

Farewell to Spring (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1959)

Yusuke Kawazu and Mashiko Tsugawa in Farewell to Spring

Eitaro Makita: Keiji Sada
Midori: Ineko Arima
Yasuo Makita: Masahiko Tsugawa
Kozo Teshirogi: Akira Ishihama
Akira Masugi: Toyozo Yamamoto
Takya Minimura: Kazuya Kosaka
Naoji Iwagaki: Yusuke Kawazu
Yoko Momozawa: Yukiko Toake

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

The homoerotic edge of Farewell to Spring is obvious from the outset as five old friends reunite to discover the ways in which life has changed them: The young men seem more touch-feely than is usual in movies, especially Japanese ones. But director-writer Keisuke Kinoshita, who was himself as openly gay as possible in the Japan of his day, doesn't develop or exploit this bit of queerness. Instead, he's intent on exploring moral questions and social relationships: arranged marriages, the weight of Japanese history, political and economic change, and the choice whether to rat upon an old friend when it turns out that the friend has gone bad. Like many of Kinoshita's films, it ladles on emotion in the form of music -- some of it composed by his brother, Chuji -- rather than letting the story carry the emotional freight.

Spring Dreams (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1960)

Chieko Higashiyama and Chishu Ryu in Spring Dreams

Chizuko Okudaira: Mariko Okada
Miss Yasugi: Yoshiko Kuga
Shobei Okudaira: Eitaro Ozawa
Shinichiro Atsumi: Chishu Ryu
Grandma: Chieko Higashiyama
Miss Yae: Michiko Araki
Tamiko Okudaira: Yatsuko Tan'ami
Mamoru Okudaira: Yusuke Kawazu
Dr. Hanamura: Shuji Sano
Eiichi Kato: Shinlji Tanaka
Ema: Miki Mori
Haruko: Mie Fuji
Kimiko: Meiko Nakamura
Umeko: Yukio Toake

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

Keisuke Kinoshita's attempt at something like screwball comedy, Spring Dreams, has been likened to Jean Renoir's Boudu Saved From Drowning (1932) because of its premise: a member of the lower classes throws a self-centered middle class household into chaos. In this case, it's a sweet potato vendor who has a stroke in the living room of the Okudaira household and is forced to recuperate there. Because most of the action takes place in a few rooms in the Okudaira house, I'm more reminded of the stage comedies of George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, The Man Who Came to Dinner and You Can't Take It With You, especially since Kinoshita films with long "theatrical" takes. The head of the household, Shobei Okudaira, is an irascible would-be tyrant, bullying and mocking not only his family but also his secretary, Miss Yasugi, taunting her as an old maid. The workers of his pharmaceutical company are threatening to strike as the film begins, so he has a lot to bluster about. In true comic fashion, there are romantic problems to solve -- Shobei's daughter Chizuko wants to marry an artist, while he wants her to marry the son of one of his executives, if only to provide a suitable heir for his business. His own son, Mamoru, is a nerdy would-be philosopher who goes about inquiring into the meaning of life and has no interest in the business or much of anything else. (He's played by Yusuke Kawazu, unrecognizable as the same actor who played the rebellious Kiyoshi in Nagisa Oshima's Cruel Story of Youth, made the same year.) In the course of the film, the spinster Miss Yasugi will also find love, and even the matriarch of the household, Okudaira's mother-in-law, will recognize the sweet potato vendor as the lost love of her youth -- they're played, incidentally, by Chieko Higashiyama and Chishu Ryu, the elderly couple of Yasujiro Ozu's Tokyo Story (1953). Chuji Kinoshita's harpsichord score lends a delicacy to a film with a good deal of charm.

Cruel Story of Youth (Nagisa Oshima, 1960)

Yusuke Kawazu and Miyuki Kuwano in Cruel Story of Youth

Makoto: Miyuki Kuwano
Kiyoshi: Yusuke Kawazu
Yuki: Yoshiko Kuga
Dr. Akimoto: Fumio Watanabe
Horio: Hiroshi Nihon'yanagi

Director: Nagisa Oshima
Screenplay: Nagisa Oshima
Cinematography: Takashi Kawamata
Music: Riichiro Manabe

In addition to the shamelessly exploitative title Naked Youth, Cruel Story of Youth has also been released as A Story of the Cruelties of Youth. So is it the story that's cruel or the youth in it? Those who know Japanese can probably tell me which is closer to the original title, Seishun Zankoku Monogotari, but I suspect the ambiguity is intentional. It's a cruel story about cruel young people, with the usual implication that society -- postwar, consumerist, America-influenced Japan -- is to blame for the cruelties inflicted upon and by them. With its hot pops of color and unsparing widescreen closeups, the film puts us uncomfortably close to its young protagonists, Makoto and Kiyoshi. Makoto is just barely out of adolescence -- Miyuki Kuwano was 18 when the film was made -- but carelessly determined to grow up fast. She hangs out in bars and cadges rides with middle-aged salarymen until the night when one of them decides to take her to a hotel instead of her home. When she refuses, he tries to rape her. But a young passerby intervenes and beats the man, threatening to take him to the police until the man hands over a walletful of money. The next day, Makoto and her rescuer, Kiyoshi, meet up to spend the money together. He's just a bit older -- Yusuke Kawazu was 25, three years younger than the film's director, Nagisa Oshima -- and over the course of their day together on a river he slaps her around, pushes her into the water and taunts her when she can't swim, and seduces her with his mockery of her inquisitiveness about sex. When he doesn't call her again, she seeks him out and they become lovers. They also become criminals: She goes back to her game of hooking rides with salarymen and he follows them, choosing a moment when the men start to get handsy with Makoto -- sometimes she provokes them to do so -- to beat and rob them. Naturally, things don't get better from here on out, especially after Makoto gets pregnant. We can object to the film's sentimental attempt to redeem Kiyoshi, who starts out as an abusive young thug but is transformed by love, and there's some awkward coincidence plotting, like an abortionist who turns out to be Makoto's sister's old boyfriend. But Oshima's portrait of a lost generation has some of the power of the American films that inspired it, Rebel Without a Cause (Nicholas Ray, 1955) and Gun Crazy (Joseph H. Lewis, 1950), as well as the French New Wave films about the anomie of the young by Claude Chabrol and Jean-Luc Godard. It was only Oshima's second feature, but it signaled the start of a major career.

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