Obscure Japanese Film #254Shinjiro Ebara Kimura (Shinjiro Ebara) is a young stoker on the railway saving up to marry Yukiko (Satomi Oka), His best friend, Maeda (Tatsuya Nakadai), also works for the railway but is an unhappy man with a reputation for skiving, drinking and gambling. When a colleague’s money goes missing, Maeda is the main suspect and the workers give him a beating until Kimura intervenes and stops it. Later, Maeda asks Kimura to lend him some money, but won’t say what for – Kimura at first refuses, then relents and hands all his savings over to Maeda. Yukiko is furious when she finds out and persuades Kimura that Maeda must have lost it all betting on the bicycle races… Tatsuya Nakadai Set in the fictional town of Haginomiya but shot in Utsunomiya, north of Tokyo, this Toei production is the only film to have been based on a novel by the obscure Kazutoshi Himuro. Adapted for the screen by the ubiquitous Kaneto Shindo, it was directed by Miyoji Ieki. Unlike many of Ieki’s better-known films, none of the main characters are children, but otherwise this is fairly typical of his oeuvre in being a work of leftist social realism shot on real locations. Something I don’t remember seeing before in an Ieki film, however, is an accomplished action scene like the one we get here when there’s a fault with the train and Kimura has to climb outside while it’s still moving in order to fix it. Hitomi Nakahara and Satomi Oka Toei contract player Shinjiro Ebara had played his first lead in Tadashi Imai’s Rice the year before and went on to marry his co-star, Hitomi Nakahara (aptly nicknamed ‘Bambi’), in 1960. She also appears here as Yukiko’s younger sister. In his hands, Kimura seems quite dull at first and perhaps the filmmakers realised that he was failing to make much of an impression – around 50 minutes in, there’s a scene in which, completely out of the blue, he bursts into a quite extraordinary solo a capella song and dance to which he adds frenzied percussion by slapping himself and anything else near at hand. This is followed by a scene in which he does something weird with his shirt and gives an impassioned speech at a meeting, none of which seemed thinkable from the Kimura featured in the film’s first half. Well, I guess at least nobody was going to accuse him of giving a boring performance after all that... Less than a year away from stardom, Tatsuya Nakadai’s screen time is quite limited and he’s not yet the assured actor he would soon become as a result of working on The Human Condition. There’s a mystery about his character which is quite intriguing, but ultimately his role feels underwritten, although this may well be the only film in which you’ll see him break down and sob uncontrollably. The Naked Sun was entered into the 1959 Berlin International Film Festival, where it won the Youth Film Award for Best Feature Film Suitable for Young People. This is perhaps a little surprising considering that it was a West Berlin festival in those days and Naked Sun seems like a film that would have been more popular with the Communists in the Eastern sector. However, in this case the workers only grumble a bit about their pay and conditions and are generally shown as quite a cheerful and hard-working bunch. Toshio Takahara The film was ranked 5th best of the year by Kinema Jumpo magazine, the top four being, respectively, Kinoshita’s The Ballad of Narayama, Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress, Ozu’s Equinox Flower and Ichikawa’s Conflagration (also featuring Nakadai). I’m a little surprised to see it ranked so highly myself but, while I wouldn’t call the film a masterpiece, it’s certainly an interesting and likeable picture and not just for train buffs. Thanks to A.K. DVD at Amazon Japan (no English subtitles) If you enjoy this blog, feel free to Buy Me a Coffee
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