I Will Buy You (Masaki Kobayashi, 1956)

Yunosuke Ito and Keiji Sada in I Will Buy You

Daisuke Kishimoto: Keiji Sada
Ippei Tamaki: Yunosuke Ito
Fudeko Tanaguchi: Keiko Kishi
Goro Kurita: Minoru Oki
Ryoko Taniguchi: Mitsuko Mito

Director: Masaki Kobayashi
Screenplay: Zenzo Matsuyama
Based on a novel by Minoru Ono
Cinematography: Yuharu Atsuta
Art direction: Kazue Hirataka
Film editing: Yoshiyasu Hamamura
Music: Chuji Kinoshita

We have come to accept that professional sports is a big and sometimes corrupt business, so that movies about that business, like Jerry Maguire (Cameron Crowe, 1996) and Moneyball (Bennett Miller, 2011), are designed more to show how things work than to serve as exposés. In fact, I think we have to go back to Japan in 1956 and Masaki Kobayashi's I Will Buy You to see a film that really purports to be shocked about the venality behind a supposedly innocent and much-loved game like baseball. In Kobayashi's view, the bidding war over a star college player becomes a nastily cynical exhibition of greed, corrupting everyone, including the player and his family. The central figure in the film is Kishimoto, played by Keiji Sada as an essentially nice guy who is dismayed by what his job, persuading a player named Kurita to sign with the Toyo Flowers, forces him to do. Sada has some of the look and manner of a Gregory Peck (without Peck's ineradicable blandness), making it possible for us to sympathize with the character and also to understand how he can persuade Kurita's wary mentor-trainer, Tamaki, that he has the player's best interests at heart -- unlike the more ostensibly greedy rivals from other teams. Tamaki is something of a shadowy figure: He may have been a spy during the war, and for most of the film we're not entirely sure that his occasional attacks of pain from gallstones aren't faked, an attempt to win sympathy. He also has a wife and child, but spends most of his time with his mistress, Ryoko, whose younger sister, Fudeko, is Kurita's girlfriend. Fudeko professes to hate baseball, and she is ashamed of her illegitimate birth. Every character in the film, it seems, has a complex backstory. That includes the members of Kurita's family, who live in the country and are mistakenly treated as naive yokels by some of the agents attempting to sign the young player. In the end, the greed of the family even produces brother-on-brother violence. The film ends in irony loaded on irony, capping a well-told and sardonic story.

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.

Black River (Masaki Kobayashi, 1957)

Tatsuya Nakadai and Ineko Arima in Black River

Shizuko: Ineko Arima
Nishida: Fumio Watanabe
Killer Joe: Tatsuya Nakadai
Landlady: Isuzu Yamada
Okada: Tomo'o Nagai
Okada's Wife: Keiko Awaji
Kurihara: Eijiro Tono
Kin: Seiji Miyaguchi
Sakazaki: Asao Sano

Director: Masaki Kobayashi
Screenplay: Zenzo Matsuyama
Based on a story by Takeo Tomishima
Cinematography: Yuharu Atsuta
Production design: Ninjin Kurabu
Film editing: Yoshiyasu Hamamura
Music: Chuji Kinoshita

Masaki Kobayashi's remarkable slice-of-life drama Black River takes place in a slum near an American army base. It's a festering dump, inhabited by a variety of people, from lowlifes attempting to make a living by exploiting the soldiers to dead-enders with no place else to go. Into this morass wanders a naïve university student, Nishida, in search of cheap lodgings, who tries to make a little money as a used-book seller. He falls for a pretty waitress, Shizuko, who longs to escape from the slum, but their attachment puts him in the line of fire of a swaggering young gangster called Killer Joe, who has his own designs on Shizuko. Presiding over everything is the landlady, who has plans for the property that don't include its tenants. She's played to a fare-thee-well by the great Isuzu Yamada, perhaps best known as the Lady Macbeth equivalent in Akira Kurosawa's Throne of Blood (1957). Here she's outfitted with a snaggly golden-toothed grill, a fitting correlative for the concealment of the moral rot within. But the real scene-stealer of the film is Tatsuya Nakadai as Killer Joe, in one of his first major film appearances, perfectly blending the charisma that would make him a star with the menace that would allow him to play memorable villains as well as heroes.

Our Marriage (Masahiro Shinoda, 1961)

Noriko Maki and Chieko Baisho in Our Marriage

Keiko: Noriko Maki
Saeko: Chieko Baisho
Komakura: Shin'ichiro Mikami
Matsumoto: Isao Kimura
Father: Eijiro Tono
Mother: Sadako Sawamura

Director: Masahiro Shinoda
Screenplay: Zenzo Matsuyama, Masahiro Shinoda
Cinematography: Masao Kosugi
Art direction: Chiyoo Umeda
Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara
Music: Naozumi Yamamoto

It goes without saying (though I've said it often enough) that cultural differences are a hindrance to our understanding or enjoyment of films made in other countries, but Masahiro Shinoda's Our Marriage brought the point home for me in an unusual way. It's a simple, elegantly made film, scarcely over an hour long, about two sisters and the pressures on women to get married. That's nothing we haven't seen in films by Naruse and Ozu and others, but Shinoda is particularly focused on social and economic change -- not just in the role of women in Japan but also on a society in which upward mobility is becoming possible and desirable. Keiko and Saeko are office workers in a factory, the daughters of a man struggling to make ends meet by harvesting seaweed. His job has become more difficult because of industrial pollution, and his wife sometimes has to borrow money from the daughters to pay bills. So the parents begin looking for a husband for 22-year-old Keiko. The father wants her to marry the son of the union chief at the factory, a widower nearing 30, but another man, Matsumoto, who works for a dry goods company, also shows interest in her. The parents disapprove of Matsumoto because he traded in the black market in the postwar years, but he has since cleaned up his act. The complication is that Keiko has met a handsome young factory worker, Komakura. Saeko, who has a secret crush on Komakura, wants Keiko to marry him, and Keiko is certainly not averse to the idea except that Komakura doesn't make much money. Things work themselves out after some family drama, of course. But the cultural difference that mars the film for me is not the tension between arranged marriages and marrying for love -- that's familiar enough even in the Western tradition. The problem is that the music arranger has chosen the tune of the old spiritual "Michael, Row Your Boat Ashore" as the film's main theme. Anyone who grew up singing it around a campfire, or knows the recorded versions by Pete Seeger and Harry Belafonte, is going to have a hard time reconciling the music with the story.

The Human Condition III: A Soldier's Prayer (Masaki Kobayashi, 1961)

Tatsuya Nakadai in The Human Condition III: A Soldier's Prayer

Kaji: Tatsuya Nakadai
Michiko: Michiyo Aratama
Shojo: Tamao Nakamura
Terada: Yusuke Kawazu
Choro: Chishu Ryu
Tange: Taketoshi Naito
Refugee Woman: Hideko Takamine
Ryuko: Kyoko Kishida
Russian Officer: Ed Keene
Chapayev: Ronald Self

Director: Masaki Kobayashi
Screenplay: Zenzo Matsuyama, Koichi Inagaki, Masaki Kobayashi
Based on a novel by Junpei Gomikawa
Cinematography: Yoshio Miyajima
Art direction: Kazue Hirataka
Film editing: Keiichi Uraoka
Music: Chuji Kinoshita

Homer's Odysseus made it home to Ithaka and Penelope, but Masaki Kobayashi's Odysseus, Kaji, doesn't make it home to his Penelope, Michiko, and he's not certain that his Ithaka in southern Manchuria still exists. Kaji struggles toward her against all odds, but dies in a snowstorm, without even a moment of transcendence or a heavenly choir on the soundtrack to ennoble his death. It's a downer ending to a nine-hour epic, but if it feels right it's thanks to the enormous conviction of Tatsuya Nakadai as the stubborn idealist Kaji. The Human Condition is an immersive experience rather than a dramatic one: Drama would demand catharsis, and there is really none to be had from the film. The human condition depicted in the film is Hobbesian: solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short -- though the length of the film works against the last adjective. It is a statement film: War is a stupid way for people to behave to one another. And as such it never quite transcends its message-making, leaving the film somewhere short of greatness. Still, it has to be seen by anyone who seeks to understand Japan in the twentieth century and after, and by anyone who wants to know the limits of film as an art form.

The Human Condition II: Road to Eternity (Masaki Kobayashi, 1959)

Tatsuya Nakadai in The Human Condition II: Road to Eternity

Kaji: Tatsuya Nakadai
Michiko: Michiyo Aratama
Shinjo: Kei Sato
Obara: Kunie Tanaka
Yoshida: Michiro Minami
Kageyama: Keiji Sada
Sasa Nitohei: Kokinji Katsura
Hino Jun'i: Jun Tatara

Director: Masaki Kobayashi
Screenplay: Zenzo Matsuyama, Masaki Kobayashi
Based on a novel by Junpei Gomikawa
Cinematography: Yoshio Miyajima
Art direction: Kazue Hirataka
Film editing: Keiichi Uraoka
Music: Chuji Kinoshita

If, as I said yesterday, the first part of Masaki Kobayashi's The Human Condition makes me think of the earnest "serious pictures" that came out of Hollywood in the 1940s -- I have in mind such movies as The Razor's Edge (Edmund Goulding, 1946), in which Tyrone Power searches for the meaning of life, or Gentleman's Agreement (Elia Kazan, 1947), in which Gregory Peck crusades against antisemitism -- then the second part, Road to Eternity, suggests, even in its subtitle, the influence of  From Here to Eternity (Fred Zinnemann, 1953), that near-scathing* look at brutality in Army basic training. Kaji, our idealistic protagonist, has been sent to war, and has to endure all manner of abuse even though he's an excellent marksman and a sturdy trooper. His objections to Japanese militarism and his belief that the war is wrong mark him out as a "Red," and for a time he contemplates escaping into his idealized version of the Soviet Union. But his sympathy for his fellow recruits keeps him plugging away, occasionally taking heat for his defense of them, especially from the military veterans who have been called up to serve. They object to his treating the recruits he is put in charge of training with respect and human decency -- they went through hell in basic training, so why shouldn't everyone? The film ends with a cataclysmic battle sequence, during which Kaji has to kill one of his fellow soldiers, who has gone stark raving mad and with his antics threatens the lives of other soldiers. It's not the first time Kaji has resorted to killing a fellow soldier: Earlier, he has been mired in quicksand with a brutal man who has caused the suicide of a recruit, and Kaji lets him drown. The intensity of the battle scenes takes some of the focus away from Kaji's intellectualizing, which is all to the good.

*I have to quality: From Here to Eternity is not as scathing as the James Jones novel on which it's based, thanks to the Production Code and the residual good feeling of having won the war. In some ways, The Human Condition II is more properly an anticipation of Stanley Kubrick's no-holds-barred
Full Metal Jacket (1987).

The Human Condition I: No Greater Love (Masaki Kobayashi. 1959)

Tatsuya Nakadai and So Yamamura in The Human Condition I: No Greater Love

Kaji: Tatsuya Nakadai
Michiko: Michiyo Aratama
Tofuko Kin: Chikage Awashima
Shunran Yo: Ineko Arima
Kageyama: Keiji Sada
Okishima: So Yamamura
Chin: Akira Ishihama

Director: Masaki Kobayashi
Screenplay: Zenzo Matsuyama, Masaki Kobayashi
Based on a novel by Junpei Gomikawa
Cinematography: Yoshio Miyajima
Art direction: Kazue Hirataka
Film editing: Keiichi Uraoka
Music: Chuji Kinoshita

The first three and a half hours of Masaki Kobayashi's nine-hour, 47-minute epic The Human Condition are themselves divided into two parts, though the break seems more a courtesy to the Sitzfleisch of the viewer than to any inherent division in the story. I have a friend who says he's never read a bad novel over 600 pages long, because once he's done with it he has to justify the time spent reading. I think something like that may apply to The Human Condition once I've finished it. Which is not to say that there isn't a greatness that adheres to Kobayashi's unsparing, audacious film, even though at times I found myself feeling that The Human Condition I: No Greater Love derived as much from the more earnest black-and-white Hollywood films of the 1940s, the ones that starred Tyrone Power or Gregory Peck, than from the high artistry of Ozu or Mizoguchi. It is often unabashed melodrama: We worry that Kobayashi hasn't burdened his protagonist, Kaji, with more than is really credible. An idealist, he not only finds himself supervising slave Chinese labor in Manchuria during World War II, he also has to manage a brothel staffed with Chinese "comfort women." And the more he does to better the lot of the workers, the more he elicits the ire of the kenpeitai, the Japanese military police. On the other hand, if he compromises with the authorities, the Chinese prisoners and prostitutes make his life miserable. And not to mention that, his wife is incapable of comprehending the stresses that make him so distant at home. But Tatsuya Nakadai is such an accomplished actor that he gives Kaji credibility, even when we're beginning to think he's too virtuous, too idealistic, for his own good.

Yearning (Mikio Naruse, 1964)

Yuzo Kayama and Hideko Takamine in Yearning

Reiko Morita: Hideko Takamine
Koji Morita: Yuzo Kayama
Hisako Morizono: Mitsuko Kusabue
Takako Morita: Yumi Shirakawa
Ruriko: Mie Hama
Shizu Morita: Aiko Mimasu

Director: Mikio Naruse
Screenplay: Zenzo Matsuyama
Based on a story by Mikio Naruse
Cinematography: Jun Yasumoto
Music: Ichiro Saito

Mikio Naruse's Yearning could almost have been a Douglas Sirk romantic melodrama, with Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson in the roles played by Hideko Takamine and Yuzo Kayama, except that Hollywood would never have allowed the Japanese film's bleak downer ending. (Sirk argued for an ending to the 1955 All That Heaven Allows in which Hudson's character died, but was overruled by producer Ross Hunter.) Like Sirk, Naruse takes the woman's side and uses the film for sharp commentary on the changing role of women. Reiko Morita's husband died in the war, after a brief marriage, but she stayed on to help the Morita family rebuild its business after the war ended, and in the subsequent years has run the family grocery and liquor store with great skill. But now a new threat has emerged to their business: the supermarket, which can afford to cut prices below what the Morita's store is able to charge. Reiko runs the store almost single-handedly, with no help from her brother-in-law, Koji, a college-educated layabout. And then her sister-in-law, Hisako, acting on a suggestion from her husband, proposes that the family convert the store into a supermarket because of its prime location. Koji, as the surviving male in the family, would become president -- if he can clean up his act. The problem with the plan is that there's no room in the scheme for Reiko, who is not actually a member of the family, even though she has kept it going for years. Meanwhile, Koji also discloses to Reiko that he's in love with her, which causes problems because she's his brother's widow as well as because she's 11 years older than he is -- the kinship and the age gap being huge challenges to tradition. When the situation reaches a crisis point, Reiko decides to go home to her own family, which lives far away. Koji follows her onto the train and in a long ride they try to work things out. Naruse and his lead actors give this concluding section a great poignancy, though it ends abruptly and painfully, leaving the audience to work out the consequences of the ending for themselves.