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Cronenberg’s take on the American way
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Plus, an ONLINE EXCLUSIVE: An interview with Grant
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The studio that gave us both Ozu and Oshima
Plus, an ONLINE EXCLUSIVE SIDEBAR
The iconclast’s iconclast
Hollywood’s summer slump explained
A remarriage at gunpoint
The Japanese master rediscovered
Plus, an ONLINE EXCLUSIVE: The uncut article
Vietnam flashback
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There are a 1,001 ways to sing the praises of—or place the blame on—the
house that Shiro Kido built; indeed, one might even be forgiven for doing both
at once, and imaging a 110th-birthday anthem entitled “To Shochiku With
Love,” to be warbled (with apologies to Lulu), “How do I thank
someone who has taken me from Mizoguchi to Miike?” Sadly, there are no
Miike movies at Lincoln Center’s Shochiku centennial-plus-10 celebration
this fall, nor any sign of Ship of Bloodsucking Skulls or Goke,
Body Snatcher from Hell. But among the must-see Shimizus, the rarely screened
Kozaburo Yoshimura melodramas and Minoru Shibuya satires, Oshima’s tear-gas
classics and an inevitable taste of Tora-san, there are still plenty
of jet-black candles atop this mostly bright white retrospective birthday cake.
Masaki Kobayashi’s flight of fury against the corrupting
co-operations between Japan and the U.S. occupation forces foreshadows
the darker waters of the Shochiku “Nouvelle Vague” soon to
come. Though he shared Mizoguchi’s pre-Antonioni obsession with architectural
detail, the staunchly Kobayashi—who’d suffered greatly as a
soldier during the war—wasn’t afraid of tearing down any master’s
house, and he readily admitted that his samurai classics like Hara-kiri shared
with his lesser-known contemporary films a single foundation-testing theme: “resisting
entrenched power.”
Shinoda rose with the tide of the Oshima wave, making
movies that viewed the angst of yakuza hitmen, the
absurdity of giant rubber monsters (Demon Pond),
and the centuries-old puppet-theater standards of
Chikamatsu (Double Suicide) with an equally
alienated and hugely entertaining pop-artificial
regard. Slowed down to the point of being smacked
out, the exquisitely photographed Pale Flower is
based on a story by taiyozoku creator and
current Governor of Tokyo, Shintaro Ishihara, who
could scarcely have envisioned that Shinoda would
score the film’s climatic retribution killing
to the astringent operatic strains of Henry Purcell.
Famous mainly for his adaptations of the mysteries of Seicho
Matsumoto, Japan’s Ellery Queen, Nomura made movies that combined the
old-school craft of Stanley Donen’s Charade with forward-thinking
notions about mortality, the abuse of children, and seaside soul-searching
along coastal Japan that haunt Hirokazu Kore-eda to this day. In this study
of the fine line between artistic mediocrity and outright insanity, a rising
composer hides from his secret past (his father was a leper) by writing a
psuedo-symphony, “Destiny for Piano and Orchestra,” so saccharine
it would have given Liberace gas. One-time 007 sidekick Tetsuro Tamba, the
George Kennedy of Japanese cinema, is the poetry-scribbling top cop on the
case.
Two modern-day variations on that Fifties Shochiku staple,
the “women’s film,” Sakamoto’s Face—a
startlingly emotional murder-melodrama about a truck-sized seamstress who
strangles her kid sister and discovers her will to live—and Ishii’s Black
Angel—about a female assassin and the child she once saved from
gangland slaughter, but has since grown up branded to kill—are two
of Shochiku’s best late-model pulp fictions. While Hou Hsiao-hsien’s
masterful Café Lumière keeps the Ozu gaslight glowing,
Ishii and Sakamoto tend to the smoky, killer-hooker-as-Shimizu-heroine lantern
that long ago burned with Shochiku’s midnight oil.
© 2005 by Chuck Stephens
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