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FILM COMMENT
September/October 2002
AMONG THE MISSING: 10 KEY MASUMURA FEATURES
(APART FROM SEX CHECK)
by Jonathan Rosenbaum
above: Yasuzu Masumuru's Giants and Toys
Kisses (1957, b & w): Masumura's debut feature - a touching teenage romance between a baker's delivery boy and an artist's model, mainly set over a one-day outing to the beach and races, has some of the flavor of Nicholas Ray's youthful love stories. Later on, in features like Sex Check, the director would suggest much nuttier Ray pictures like Bigger Than Life, though this one, a commercial flop, reportedly seemed strange to Japanese audiences due to the speed and intonation of the dialogue delivery.
The Blue Sky Maiden (1957, color): Masumura's second feature is his most Sirkian. An illegitimate country girl (Ayako Wakao) comes to Tokyo to find her mother, a cleaning lady, and encounters mainly her spoiled step-siblings and her businessman father - whom she winds up denouncing in his sickbed and getting him to admit his errors, in a scene that must have shocked Japanese audiences at the time.
A False Student (1960, b & w 'Scope): A well-made melodrama about radical Marxist college students kidnapping a mentally challenged boy on campus who's pretending to be a student. This has one of Wakao's most luminous performances, beautiful noirish cinematography, taut direction, and a critique of student paranoia that provides a fascinating cross-reference with Godard's La Chinoise.
A Wife Confesses (1961, b & w, 'Scope): Probably Masumura's greatest film - a beautifully filmed courtroom drama told in flashbacks with a striking existential theme: fastened by rope to both her husband and her lover during a mountain-climbing accident, the heroine (Wakao) had to cut one loose to prevent all three from falling to their deaths, and opted for her abusive husband. Does that make her a murderer? Clearly influenced by Hiroshima, mon amour, which was partly made at the same studio, this is a no less serious tale about serious passion, and its story powerfully addresses the fatally interactive nature of Japanese society.
Yakuza Soldier (1965, b & w ): All the violence in this raucous satire about army life during World War 2 is directed by Japanese soldiers against one another, so that when the two goofy heroes desert at the end, they're treated as figures of exemplary sanity. This was a big enough hit to launch a sequel, and, as in Red Angel, there are some intriguing parallels with Altman's M*A*S*H.
Tattoo (1966, color, 'Scope) The second of Masumura's three Tanizaki adaptations-preceded by Manji and followed by Love of an Idiot (see below)-this is based on two of his stories, "Tattoo" and "The Murder of Otsuya," neither of which I've been able to find in translation. Wakao plays Otsuya, the daughter of a wealthy pawnbroker in the late Tokugawa period who runs off with his foreman, gets kidnapped and tattooed (with a female spider on her back), and is turned into a geisha who tempts men towards their doom. Masumura perversely objected to Kazuo Miyagawa's striking cinematography with its beautiful diptych compositions by claiming that they detracted from the story.
Nakano Spy School (1966,b & w, 'Scope): As in Masumura's industrial espionage pictures, everyone winds up betraying everyone else because the system itself is intrinsically rotten. The narrator-hero graduates from officer training school during the China-Japan war of 1937, tells his fiancée to wait a couple of years until his discharge, and then never sees her again until he learns that she's spying for the British and gets orders to kill her. Needless to say, they make love first.
Love of an Idiot (1967, color, 'Scope): An updated adaptation of Tanizaki's 1924 novel Naomi about a middle-aged factory engineer who trains, marries, and ultimately loses a teenage bride after she turns him into a slave to her whims. The intensity of his desire makes him a prototypical Masumura lunatic, and the creepy, quasi-abstract industrial landscapes evoke those of Antonioni - though similar shots are found in Masumura's 1959 Overflow, so any direct influence from Red Desert seems unlikely.
The Wife of Seishu Hanaoka (1967, b & w): An intriguing contrast to Preston Sturges' The Great Moment by virtue of offering more challenges to the squeamish, this is an Edo-period biopic about Seishu Hanaoka, the first Japanese doctor to operate with general anaesthesia, with Wakao as his wife and Hideko Takamine as his mother - both of them so devoted as rivals for his affection that they volunteer as guinea pigs for his experiments.
Lullaby of the Earth (1976, color): Choosing a late-period Masumura isn't easy; for me it's a toss-up between this ambitious tale of a fierce teenage girl from a mountain village in the Thirties who becomes a prostitute and Double Suicide in Sonezaki two years later. In both cases, it's a return to origins, i.e. Mizoguchi. If the latter film uses the same writer as The Crucified Lovers, this one comprises Masumura's own version of Life of Oharu. - Jonathan Rosenbaum
© 2002 by Jonathan Rosenbaum
