The Thick-Walled Room (1956), directed by Masaki Kobayashi. Filmed in 1953, this movie was not released until 1956 because the studio considered it too provocative and critical of postwar American occupation of Japan and of Japan’s higher military establishment for heaping blame on lower-ranking soldiers for war crimes. On the surface, this is a war prison film with similarities to such films as Wilder’s Stalag 17 (1953), and Renoir’s La grande illusion (1937), although The Thick-Walled Room is more raw, even ragged. It contains touches of the surreal in a dream sequence, and it has flashbacks. Mostly it focuses on the broken lives of the inmates of a prison for soldiers, a prison guarded by American MPs. We follow the lives of a small group as they try to overcome the trauma the war has visited on them. The narrative, like the lives of the soldiers, is fragmented, in pieces as it were. One soldier grows a beard and when called upon to shave it, he remarks that he is growing it long, long enough so he can hang himself with it. Another solider actually tries to hang himself. These are lives broken. These men bear the burden of a war they did not start, did not want, and did not control. Although this film has little in common with Kubrik’s Paths of Glory, that film kept coming back to me as I watched The Thick-Walled Room. Both are powerful anti-war films. The Thick-Walled Room works as a prelude to Kobayashi’s masterpiece, the nine hour The Human Condition (1959-1961).

 

I Will Buy You (1956), directed by Masaki Kobayashi. It is World Series time now and so it seems appropriate to view a baseball story, or what is ostensibly a baseball story. This one tells of an array of baseball scouts  who chase a rising baseball star playing in what amount to the college ranks. We focus most closely on one of these scouts, Kishimoto (Keiji Sada), who provides intermittent voice over. What matters is simply money, nothing else. We see that people are commodities, loyalties are self-serving, money corrupts, and greed tops everything. Families are torn apart. Relationships sour. The player who has the attention of so many scouts is Goro Kurita (Minoru Oki), and he has been cared for by a fellow named Kyuki (Yunosuke Ito). Kyuki has trained and looked after Goro for the past four years. He seems to have nothing but Goro’s best interests at heart. He also has a gall stone that causes acute pain at times, often at convenient times to illicit the sympathy of others. Kyuki’s “disease” proves to be a metaphor for the state of the sport. It is a disease. Money is a disease. The film also touches on gambling. All in all, this is a dark vision of sport in which sport itself is a metaphor for the larger society. It is corrupt and fraught with duplicity. The film is, perhaps, a bit longer than it need be, but the acting is fine and for the most part the staging is excellent. For much of the film, our moral centre appears to be Goro’s girlfriend, Fudeko (Keiko Kishi), who sees how the quest for fame and money can change a person and not for the better.

 

Black River (1956), directed by Masaki Kobayashi. Taking a page from the noir script, Kobayashi gives us a tour of a slum dwelling near a U.S. Naval Air base. We get to know the inhabitants of this ramshackle dwelling, its landlady, and the nearby louts and gangsters who want to benefit financially from the demolition of this place so a new brothel can be erected! Pimps, prostitutes, gamblers, and dealers live here in the shadow of the U.S. military base. Indeed, the U.S. base influences the lives of these people, and not for the better. The group of people in the run-down building include layabouts, a young couple who ostensibly live off the young wife’s earnings as a hairdresser, although she is actually a prostitute, a communist who tries to organize the people and fight against the exploitation of the Americans who use their electricity but do not pay for it, and Nishida (Fumio Watanabe) a young engineering student who wants to be left alone to study. Nishida meets a young waitress, Shizuko (Ineko Arima) and the two clearly are attracted to each other. Unfortunately, local thug in sunglasses, Joe (Tatsuya Nakadai) also has eyes for Shizuko. Joe arranges for Shizuko to be set upon by a gang of hoodlums so he can “rescue” her. He does and then proceeds to rape her. She is devastated and asks Joe to do the honourable thing and marry her. He simply keeps her dangling, while knocking her about when the mood strikes him. So we have a love triangle of sorts amid all the goings on in this squalid place. Joe, by the way, has another young woman whom he mistreats. As you can see, this film is as noir as noir can be. The on-location shooting is effective. All the actors are excellent. And the climax is devastating. The end may not come as a complete surprise, but it does come with a punch.

 

The Inheritance (1962), directed by Masaki Kobayashi. This morality play begins with a well-dressed woman walking city streets, shopping. This is Yasuko (Keiko Kishi), former secretary of wealthy businessman Senzo Kawara (So Yamamura). As she walks the streets, she meets the late Kawara’s lawyer, and despite not liking the man, she goes for coffee with hum. Yasuko’s voice over leads us into the flashback that will tell us how Yasuko became the wealthy woman she is. The story turns on businessman Kawara who learns that he is dying of cancer. Once he dies, one third of his wealth is guaranteed by law to go to his widow, Satoe (Misako Watanabe). But what of the other two thirds? It turns out that Kawara has three children, none of them with Satoe, and none of them acknowledged, until now, by Kawara. He wants these children found to see if any or all of them are worthy of an inheritance. Those assigned the task of finding two of these children begin machinations to see the children do not inherit or if they do, then what they inherit will be shared with the one who has found them. In short, everyone around Kawara begins to try and get money for themselves, including Satoe who wants more than just one third of the estate. Meanwhile, Kawara turns his attention to his secretary, Yasuko. He tasks her with finding his third chid, a son. The son is a lout. His Dad, Kawara, is also a lout and he rapes Yasuko. You can, I suspect, see where this is going. Anyway, the film has a noir sensibility: voice over, a character trapped by circumstances, greed, city streets. Perhaps unlike noir with its claustrophobic placing of people in dark spaces, here we have lots of wide-angle shots that position people at a distance from each other. These shots nicely belie the false intimacy of the characters. This is a world rife with duplicity and self interest.

 

Samurai Rebellion (1967), directed by Masaki Kobayashi. Director of the 9-hour masterpiece, The Human Condition (1959-61), Kobayashi here gives us a samurai film that focuses on the human condition under authoritarian rule. The protagonist is Isaburo Sasahara (Toshiro Mifune), is a dutiful samurai working for a feudal lord in 18^th-century Japan. He has a wife and two sons and he lives a quiet, peaceful life carrying out his duties. Then a change comes when the lord dismisses the mother of his child and heir because she dared to lash out when she found the lord dallying with another woman. The lord orders Isaburo to arrange for the marriage of this woman to his eldest son. This order causes a ripple in the Sasahara household, but the marriage takes place according to the lord’s wishes. Lo and behold, the bride Ichi (Yoko Tsukasa) proves to be gentle and efficient, and her groom Yogoro (Go Kato) finds himself in love. Things seem to have worked out well. Then, at the lord’s place, the new mother of the heir dies, and the lord cannot have the mother of his heir be the bride of a vassal. Consequently, he demands that Ichi return to the lord’s place to live. In short, Yogoro and his father refuse to send Ichi back. The lord then demands that both father and son commit suicide (seppuku). They refuse thus setting up a final confrontation. What strikes me about this film is its sensitivity to human emotions and its examination of power and its misuses. The desire on the part of the Sasahara family just to live peacefully comes up against the corrupt use of power and the forced adherence to a set of conventions that ignore human desire. The film gives us the architecture (literally) of restraint and control and confinement by rules. The acting is superb and the pace of the action measured. This is a graceful and powerful film.