Release date: March 17, 1954
Director: Nobuo Aoyagi
Studio: Toho
Cast: Kenichi Enomoto, Roppa Furukawa, Kingoro Yanagiya, Aiko Mimasu, Hisaya Morishige, Asami Kuji, Akihiko Hirata, Yūnosuke Itō et al
Availability: No home media or streaming release. Four confirmed theater screenings of the shortened re-release version between 2000 and 2016; the full film is most probably lost.
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So this post turned out to be longer and more involved than I initially planned for it to be. It's one of many things I've written about on here that I've done so much research into, I almost feel like I've seen it, even though I haven't. I think I ended up writing so much about this film because, despite his extensive and diverse filmography, Hirata wasn't in anything else with Enoken (although it's plausible they could have met when Hirata was working as AD at Shintoho), let alone any movies having to do with rakugo in general. I won't be covering the plot, but if you're looking for that sort of thing, there is a page where someone has written it out in detail, although they're referencing a shortened re-release of the film and not the 91-minute original. Also, this film was part of a trilogy - I'm not sure if any of the others survive either.
While you can't watch the film itself, you can check out "Rakugo Mambo" and "Chinchirorin" on YouTube. They are both absolute bops. I like to listen to them while I'm working night shift.
I don't know that audiences would have been going to see this because they were interested in it as a film - they would see it for Enoken, Roppa Furukawa, and the soundtrack composed by Toriro Miki. None of these names are that well-known outside of Japan unless you're interested in a very specific time period of Japanese pop culture history, so I'll give some brief context.
Kenichi "Enoken" Enomoto was a comedian who got his start as an assistant in Asakusa Opera plays during the late 1910s and eventually moved from stage comedy to film with PCL, the precursor to Toho. I find the late 1940s and early 1950s to be a fascinating era in Japanese cinema because it is filled with actors like Enoken, who had been acting since before Japan had a motion picture industry to speak of, alongside a generation or two of younger actors for whom film was the only way they had ever experienced acting. (Even so, it was common for actors at this time to perform in small-time stage plays - such as Toho New Face festivals and the like - before they made their debut in front of the camera.) You went to see movies for Enoken: a good deal of his films have "エノケンの" ("Enoken's") preceding the title.
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| Yes this is the picture of Enoken we're going with. (Enoken doing the kissing, promoter and yakuza Kazuo Taoka being kissed) |
Enoken was massively famous throughout much of his life but suffered the loss of a son and some health problems that left him despondent and hospitalized. However, Harold Lloyd would visit him and encourage him to work with some of his disabilities - including a prosthetic leg - and he would return to acting, mostly in television, incorporating his prosthetic leg into his comedy routine. He ultimately died of liver failure at age 70.
Furukawa, also an editor and essayist, came from former nobility, and seemed to be headed towards a career in writing until a turn to stage acting in his early 30s. He started a production company that mostly put out acharaka ("nonsense" comedy plays) which were apparently not that great. Furukawa joined Takarazuka within a few years of its founding and then joined PCL. With PCL he had a comedy troupe that attained a high degree of popularity and put on a multitude of variety plays and musicals with large attendance. He was at the height of his fame just before the war, and while he was patriotic, he also seemed to find certain nationalistic wartime trends ridiculous - he was asked to change his name so that it would be written in kanji (he spelled "Roppa" in katakana) and was quite angry about it. After the war his fame waned; although there was a brief revival in the mid-1950s (and he would dub a small role in the Japanese version of Dumbo), his health issues, including diabetes and tuberculosis, led to him dying early at 57.
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| ca. 1935, from left: manzai comedian Entatsu Yokoyama, manzai writer Minoru Akita, and Roppa |
Toriro Miki was multi-talented: he wrote lyrics, composed music, directed for the stage, and wrote for television and film. Here he is being given a whole roasted chicken by a fan.
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| That's about how I'd look if somebody gave me a whole roasted chicken. That's also about how I'd look if I gave somebody a whole roasted chicken. |
Miki was a scholar at first and then, after being drafted, began composing music while in the military. After the war he decided to pursue music full-time. Miki was associated with jōdan ongaku, which directly translates to "joke music". As I understand it, this is jazzy music that is performed with a light, joking attitude; Hajime Hana and Crazy Cats as well as Frankie Sakai and City Slickers are two very popular bands who performed in this style. Miki worked extensively in commercial jingles and TV themes, and is the only one of these three who seems to have lived a long and possibly not depressing life. He died at age 80 while his four-part memoir was being published.
So, where does A Long, Comic Story fit in the timeline of these three entertainers? After having explored their respective back catalogues, this movie is barely a blip in the shadow of their much more famous works. Enoken and Miki were doing pretty well at this point, and Furukawa was on the decline, but, more importantly for our purposes, the cast also includes a young up-and-comer who had only been acting for about a year and was, before the end of 1954, going to play a pivotal role in arguably the most famous movie to ever come out of Japan.
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| sixth from far right on the row of portraits and also the still on the far left |
This isn't Akihiko Hirata's best-known movie (it's not really anybody's best-known movie), but I think everything he was in before Godzilla is interesting just by virtue of it being before Godzilla. A Long, Comic Story was released about a month after his very strong performance in Farewell Rabaul, which got him noticed by Ishirō Honda and eventually cast in Godzilla, and he had also had his first (and only) leading role the year before - in a film that at least one critic basically described as a dumpster fire. (I disagree, but what do I know.)
From what I can gather, the full movie may actually not exist anymore - I'm reading a blog post from somebody who said they contacted Toho about getting a print to screen as part of a comedy festival at the Jimbocho Theater and they were only given the 38-minute re-release version mentioned above. Helpfully, the post also specifies that Hirata's role is cut entirely from the shortened version. Given that the only screenings I can confirm - which go as far back as the year 2000 - also use the shortened version, I think it's pretty safe to say that's all that remains of this movie, which would make the posters and the pamphlet the only pictorial evidence we have of Hirata's role.
Ah, that's depressing.
