無責任遊侠伝 / Musekinin yuukyoden / It's A Bet (aka A Tale of Irresponsible Justice) (1964)

Release date: July 11, 1964

Director: Toshio Sugie

Studio: Toho

Cast: Hitoshi Ueki, Hajime Hana, Kei Tani, Hiroshi Inuzuka, Eitaro Ishibashi, Senri Sakurai, Shin Yasuda, Mie Hama, Keiko Awaji, Ichirō Arashima, Akihiko Hirata, George Ruiker, Bokuzen Hidari, Ikio Sawamura, Hideyo Amamoto et al.

Availability: Available on Amazon Prime Japan and on DVD; no release outside of Japan.

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Today we're going to look at the earliest Crazy Cats film that Hirata had a role in. With this, I've now covered all five of his entries in the series. He certainly did get a range of roles to play over these five films: same yakuza twice, nefarious guy, nefarious guy with goatee, and different nefarious guy with goatee.

This movie was shot on location in Macau, along with the previous film Crazy Cats Go To Hong Kong, released in December of 1963. According to audio commentary from Keiko Awaji, both films were shot simultaneously. The film was Toshio Sugie's last time directing a Crazy Cats production, and he also has a little cameo - I didn't spot him, but he was one of the spectators during a horse betting scene.

As per Stuart Galbraith, the film was released stateside with subtitles. Galbraith doesn't have specifics about the release, but I've found a newspaper ad that indicates the film was playing on a double bill at the Toho La Brea as of September 30, 1966.

Alright, let's roll. No subtitles for this one so I will be trying my level best.

Hitoshi Ueki plays a gambler, as he often does, and the film as a whole is about gambling, as it often is. There is a running gag in some Crazy Cats films where the characters have names that incorporate kanji from the actors' actual names, and this is maybe the baldest example of that: Ueki's character is named Hitoshi Ueda. The film opens with a montage of him cleaning up at various games and giving a cheeky "sorry!" to all bystanders.

The groom is played by Haruya Katō, one of my favorite "hey it's that guy"s.

Ueda works at a hotel where a wedding is taking place and when he overhears two guests - one of whom is Hanaki, a managing director of a company called Awa Shoji, played by Hajime Hana - idly taking bets for fun, he can't help but join in. They bet on the bride's shoe size, so Ueda makes some excuse to steal one of her heels. They bet on her waist and hip size, and Ueda tries to measure her, but this doesn't go as smoothly as stealing her shoe and he is thrown out. An argument ensues with Hanaki, and Kei Tani's character Xiuming Chen enters the scene, watching them from behind a nearby parked car. 

Hanaki and Ueda start betting on more random stuff: which car will move first when the light turns green, whether the passenger of a cab is a man or a woman, whether the number of sweet potatoes a street vendor has in his cart is odd or even, et cetera. After a while of this, Chen confronts Ueda and tries to get him to come to Macau, "the Monaco of the East", for reasons I'm not entirely clear on. Ueda has at this point made the acquaintance of Mie Hama's character Kaneko Izumi, who likes him and takes him in, although she wants him to get a real job. If not for her, Ueda seems like he'd be on the next flight to Macau as soon as he heard the word "gambling" in whichever language Chen chose to say it. (He uses three.)

Oh no, they got Ichirō Arashima in the old-age makeup again. He is the president of Awa Shoji. Kaneko is trying to get Ueda to work for the company as well (she is a secretary of some kind) but that life just isn't for him. But Kaneko is determined to get him to straighten out. Along with Hanaki and the president, she schemes to somehow use Ueda's #1 weakness against him: he is horribly allergic to dogs. (This seems like a lot of information for Kaneko to know about Ueda considering they've only been together for about two minutes of screen time, but that's movies for you.)

I don't know why that worked, but it worked, and now Ueda is working for Awa Shoji and bothering the office ladies.

Bin Furuya sighting.

Here Ueda is handing out bra fillers to all the women in the office.

Here we also see Toru Yuri who is a "triple crown" winner: he has been in movies with Akihiko Hirata, and was in the Comedy Trio TV series with Yoshiko Otowa as well as the theatrical Comedy Trio movie directed by Yoshiki Onoda. So he worked with all three Onoda siblings at some point or another. (This is rarer than you might think due to the five-studio agreement.)

Ueda doesn't take easily to the office life. He starts betting with himself on whether the next number on the sheets he's looking over will be even or odd. Ueda, my guy, I think you might need to see somebody about that. Hanaki takes him back to his own place and shows him that he has many fancy things, all in twos because he wants to marry the president's daughter Keiko (Keiko Awaji). Ueda convinces Hanaki to shave off his mustache but it turns out Keiko hates that.

He might be allergic to dogs, but he can share the screen with Wan-san just fine.

Masaya Nihei sighting. We almost have a whole episode of Ultraman in here.

It's around this time that the plot device which will ultimately lead Ueda to Macau comes in. Awa Shoji is trying to close a deal with a wealthy client named Mr. Heckel (George Ruiker, who we previously saw in Harikiri Shachō). A lot of rival companies are also competing for Heckel's business, so Awa Shoji enlists Ueda to help. He and Shin Yasuda's character Suzuki go to the airport to wait for Heckel, and Chen shows up as well to pick up his younger sister Xiuyu (Bai Bing). While the line of guys from rival companies is turned away at the door, Ueda and Suzuki use one of those window-washing hoist things to crank their way up to Heckel's window. In his hotel room, Heckel is doing business with Hirata's character, Tenyu Zhang, who is speaking the hell out of some English. He asks Heckel if he's found "any suckers" - this is our first inkling that Heckel is a fraud. 

I kind of want to post a clip of him saying "have you found any suckers?" because it's just a really weird thing to hear him say in English.

Ueda was brought in precisely because Heckel dai suki gambling. They get to betting matchsticks for card games. Things get too heated for the hotel room and they go to a restaurant to continue the game. Heckel tries to get Ueda to go to Texas, but this isn't Texas Free-For-All, so that won't happen. Drunk and hopped up on gambling, Heckel agrees to conduct business in Japan through Awa Shoji.

It's taken 40+ minutes, but we now get our first musical number. It's good fun.

His shirt says "musekinin" ("irresponsible").

The fun doesn't last, though. Awa Shoji finds out Heckel is a fake and that he turned tail back to Macau as soon as he received the money that his contract with the company promised. Ueda kinda gets fired, but hey, he didn't like the job in the first place. He meets back up with Chen and Xiuyu and it turns out there's some people in the Hong Kong mafia who are enemies of Chen's. Zhang had apparently tried to take over the gambling house where Xiuyu worked. Ueda gambled his way into this situation, now he's going to gamble his way out: almost an hour into the movie, we're going to Macau.

The way Ueki just doesn't react whatsoever to getting whacked in the head got a laugh out of me.

The gang is now all here: Senri Sakurai and Eitaro Ishibashi play Sakura and Ando, two dorks who meet the Awa Shoji contingent on the ground in Macau. Hanaki tries to keep everyone focused while Chen shows them all into a gambling house where every Toho White Guy is hanging out in the background.

Ueda eventually runs into Heckel looking not so great at a bar where he's trying to order either a really stiff drink or a Coca-Cola from Ikio Sawamura who isn't wearing a shirt. They tie him up back at their hotel room and Zhang enters the scene with a small retinue of goons. I'm really loving this role and it seems like Hirata was having fun with it too. Love to see him be the smarmy cool-guy villain. 

Hideyo Amamoto is here too but doesn't have any lines.

Zhang has been the mastermind behind whatever Heckel was doing; Heckel was just a pawn to get money into Zhang's syndicate. I don't know if I should be making a note of this or not but, uh, we also get to see Zhang in the shower. The shot comes out of nowhere, is not contextually necessary, lasts for a decent amount of time and feels like nothing if not fanservice.

I run a classy establishment here at guzareshirei dot blogspot dot com.

...Anyway, Keiko and Kaneko fly to Macau to make sure the boys aren't getting into trouble (they are). I'm having a little trouble comprehending Japanese or even English at this point, but fortunately the plot is almost through. Zhang and his guys challenge Ueda and his guys to a final dice game. It's good old cho-han, nothing complicated, but a good movie can make cho-han one of the most nerve-wracking games you'll ever see. 

Zhang plays dirty, of course, and brings in a dog to make Ueda freak out. Some business goes on here that I was having trouble following but as best I can figure it out, one of the guys discovers that Zhang is actually Japanese, his real name is Yamada, and he seems to have had dealings with Hiroshi Inuzuka's character (unnamed but referred to as "kaicho") at some point. Despite the attempted sabotage with the dog, Ueda of course wins the game, and the money taken from Heckel's bogus contract and the deed to the gambling house are returned to their rightful owners.

In fairness I'm not even sure that's a dog; it looks like a feather duster, maybe

Great movie! This was pretty early on in the Crazy Cats series, and this particular film lacks a lot of the character that would come to define their later movies, but it's really fun as just a regular comedy. I was expecting a lot more out of the on-location filming, but every Macau scene is confined to roughly the last half-hour of the film, so it feels very scaled-down. The whole thing feels much more like an Ueki solo vehicle than an ensemble Crazy Cats film. But in any case I had a good time with this one and may or may not be rewatching it at some point.

As one last point of interest, I read a review on Kinenote that claims the trailer for this movie put "(The man who killed Godzilla)" in subtitles when it introduced Hirata's character, but the trailer that I can find on YouTube doesn't seem to say that, so either I'm misinterpreting something or there's another trailer I haven't seen.

Crazy Big Explosion II: 2 Crazy 2 Explosion

A friend of mine is hosting a screening of Crazy Big Explosion that will be, as far as I can tell, its first screening on U.S. soil! (Boogie on down to Flicker Bar on May 14th if you're local.) I wrote about this movie a year and change ago, but I want to revisit it so that I can talk about its background some more. I also just found out that Ayumi Ishida passed away in March of this year, so this is a good time to write about this film again.

I spent several hours searching newspapers from areas with theaters that showed Japanese films to determine if the film got a U.S. release at all. I looked through several months of theater ads in the Hawaii Times and can say with fair certainty that the film did not play at the Toyo, Kokusai or Nippon theaters. I tend to pay special attention to Hawaii Times because the archives are not searchable and do not have OCR, meaning they will contain things that you can't find with a text search. In any case, no dice. However, the Honolulu Star-Bulletin briefly mentions the film in July of 1969 in a column about news in the Japanese film industry.

As far as I can tell, that is the singular mention of the film in print anywhere in the U.S. during its initial Japanese theater run. I am honestly very surprised; a good many Crazy Cats movies did get U.S. showings.

Continuing on the topic of English-language publications, this film got a brief mention in Stuart Galbraith's article on Crazy Cats. Galbraith doesn't seem to have been aware that Hirata was in the film but does mention him elsewhere, again, very briefly, referring to him as "the tormented scientist in Godzilla, King of the Monsters!" which is about as much as you could expect any American in 1998 to know about him.

Some very wacky English translations of film titles going on in this article

The film was also mentioned under yet another weird English title in the academic publication Persistently Postwar: Media and the Politics of Memory in Japan, in the chapter entitled Collective Remorse for the Past: Japanese Film and TV Representations of the 1960s Student Movement by Katsuyuki Hidaka.

I have no earthly idea where the author got the title "A Romp by Crazy Cats" from and this is the only time I've ever seen it referred to as such

We in America might not readily recognize this movie, but in Japan it's not obscure at all: I've found multiple instances of people on Twitter retweeting news stories about explosions caused by someone lighting a cigarette near a gas leak with clips from this movie.

Double-billed with Shachō enmachō

As I said in my original post, you can get a physical copy of this with English subtitles if you know where to look. I own the Japanese DVD release, which, like all Toho's Crazy Cats DVDs, comes with a nice booklet. Here are scans of the booklet, along with a translation of the introduction, which was written by one Hiroyuki Suzuki. There are a few things in the introduction that require more explanation and context so I've included some footnotes at the bottom of the post.

I didn't edit these scans, it's just in black and white

"On July 21st, 1969, Apollo 11 successfully landed, and Commander Armstrong and his crew became the first humans to set foot on the moon. Everyone was glued to their TVs hoping to catch a glimpse of this historic moment. This film, which was released three months earlier during Golden Week in the spring, was billed as an "Ultra Apollo Comedy" in the trailer, where the Crazy gang finally went into space.

This film made full use of special effects for the first time since Crazy Big Adventure (1965). Screenwriter Yasuo Tanami also took on the role of producer from this film onwards. This was because Watanabe Productions was making great strides at the moment, and president Shin Watanabe was no longer able to directly participate in film production. In Crazy Big Adventure, the "god of special effects", Eiji Tsuburaya, served as special effects director, but this time, the special effects director is Teruyoshi Nakano, who was an assistant director at Tsuburaya Productions. After this film, Nakano served as special effects director on many films, including the Godzilla series in the 1970s and Japan Sinks (1973). Nakano played an active role as the leading figure in Toho special effects after the death of Eiji Tsuburaya. Nakano himself talks about interesting anecdotes, such as his interactions with director Kengo Furusawa, in the audio commentary. 

This was Furusawa's 12th Crazy Cats film. The previous two year's Crazy Cats films, which were released during Golden Week, were single-feature films shot overseas, but from this year onwards, they were reverted to the usual double-feature format. This film was shown alongside The Drifters! All Assault, starring Watanabe Productions' band The Drifters, which seemed to be a work symbolizing the changing of generations, but the popularity of Crazy Cats had not yet waned. During filming, it was not possible to coordinate the schedules of all the band members, so some scenes that had been in the script were cut. The only Crazy movie Furusawa made after this was Japan's #1 Yakuza Man (1970), starring Hitoshi Ueki, meaning that Crazy Big Explosion was the last Furusawa film to feature all the members of Crazy Cats. Furusawa left the rest to director Takashi Tsuboshima.

Looking at the cast, the supporting cast includes eccentric actor Arihiro Fujimura as the Chief Cabinet Secretary and Mikky Yasukawa as the university professor, and while the unique characters leave a strong impression, it's especially nice to see Toru Yuri in good health. His role as the building manager, who appears singing the then-popular "365 Steps March", is superb. Furusawa especially liked to use Yuri, and he is one of the most indispensable supporting actors in Crazy Cats movies next to Akira Hitomi. He appeared as early as the first Toho Crazy Cats movie, Irresponsible Age of Japan (1962), and was then a semi-regular. From the president of a client company to a security guard, he plays a wide variety of roles in each film.

Akihiko Hirata, Andrew Hughes, and Nadao Kirino, who play the executives of the secret society GIB, are familiar faces from Toho's special effects films. It is interesting to see the fusion of Crazy Cats movies and special effects films, not only in terms of technique but also in terms of casting. Andrew Hughes is a Turkish[-born Australian] actor who has appeared in many Crazy Cats films, playing roles that include Hitler in Crazy Big Adventure, Kid Gold in Mexican Free-For-All (1967), Monsieur Zivaco (1967) and I'll Be Fooled (1971).

Ayumi Ishida, who sang "Love is a Gentle Breeze" in the Hibiya Cinema District, was at the height of her popularity when her "Blue Light Yokohama", released at the end of 1968, became a big hit just after the New Year. This was the B-side for the next song, "Walking in the Tears", and it is truly a masterpiece. Her performances in the Toho films Where Are You Going? starring Yuzo Kayama and Typhoon and Pomegranate starring Yuriko Hoshi (both 1967) are memorable. Both films were youth stories based on original novels by Yōjirō Ishizaka.

Perhaps due to the director's preference, Kiyoko Mizuzenji's songs stand out, but at the time, other female singers were also prominent: Carmen Maki's "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child", Kahoru Senga's "Midnight Guitar", Keiko Fuji's "Shinjuku Woman", and so on. When you look at the hit songs lined up together like this, you can see the social climate of the time. The Record Award was also given to Naomi Sara's decadent "If You're Happy, That's All That Matters".

The somewhat broken worldview of this film seems to reflect the atmosphere of the era as the '60s changed to the '70s. Popular phrases such as "Happa fumifumi"¹ and "Oh! Moretsu"² that were born from commercials were also prominent but full of emptiness. It was also symbolic that Hajime Hana, dressed as a hippie, delivered the line "Ah, Tamegoro! What a surprise!"³ on Geba Geba 90 Minutes!! on Nippon Television, which began in the fall of that year. Meanwhile, in 1970, the year after the Osaka Expo, the Crazy Cats celebrated the 15th anniversary of their formation."

credit to @1955_crazycats on twitter

I'm going to cut off this infodump here, but I've saved one of my favorite finds for last: an artist on pixiv has basically cornered the market on awesome Crazy Cats fanart, including a drawing of one of the song-and-dance scenes from this film. Take a look at this fanart of Senri Sakurai and Kei Tani and Hitoshi Ueki if he was in Pokemon.

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1 "Happa fumifumi" was a phrase from a commercial for a Pilot brand fountain pen that featured the poet Kyosen Ōhashi using the pen to compose tanka. "Happa fumifumi" is a shortened version of the full phrase used by Ōhashi, the meaning of which is unknown since Ōhashi apparently ad-libbed it on set. One commentator speculated that the author's intended meaning was - I'm pasting this directly from a machine translation, so it sounds awkward - "If you take off the short cap, you can write sentences quickly and smoothly." Tanka don't translate well.

2 "Oh! Moretsu" is a phrase from a commercial for Maruzen motor oil. The commercial became very famous for featuring a model named Rosa Ogawa having her miniskirt blown up a la Marilyn Monroe by the wind from a passing car as she says the catchphrase "Oh! Moretsu!". ("Moretsu" was a slang term at the time that meant something like "fierce/furious/too much/radical".) There was uproar at the time about how "raunchy" the commercial was, but it certainly garnered brand recognition.

3 "Ah, Tamegoro! What a surprise!" is a gag that Hajime Hana performed on the long (very long)-running variety show Geba Geba 90 Minutes!! The name "Tamegoro" refers to a character from a traditional folk song about Jirocho of Shimizu. The gag involved Hana, dressed as a hippie, being surprised to see the newest modern TV set; it was intended to create a contrast between the old (the hippie) and the new (the TV). I do not know exactly what this phrase means but considering it comes from a folk song I would guess it serves to further reinforce Hana's character as being stuck in the past in contrast with the hot new TV.

Rakugo Nagaya wa Hana Zakari Pamphlet: Promo Images and a Lot of Text

My most recent Buyee order just came in, so I can now share high-quality scans of this pamphlet, which features some of the only images from the film that I'm aware of. Pictures first:

The "hype text" on the middle two pages reads (next to the photo of Mokuichi and the women): "Did it fall from the sky? Did it rise from the ground? [this is an idiom meaning roughly "something incredible has cropped up that has never been seen before"] A gale of laughter erupts in the tenement house! Absolutely the best, most outrageous and extravagant comedy! Laugh out loud! Everyone will laugh!" (next to the photo of Enoken and Asami Kuji) "A fire-lover, elopement, rubberneckers, Enoken giving it his all, and the greatest comedians of Japanese cinema appear in this unprecedented, extravagant comedic masterpiece!" Yowza.

Here are clearer images of the promo photos by themselves for your delectation - again, this movie is almost entirely lost, we have maybe a dozen pictures from it.

Ehehehehehe.

I'll put the synopsis under a jump cut, since it's going to run pretty long, but I want to keep one thing up here in the main post: the back of the pamphlet has a section titled kaisetsu (explanation/commentary), which is a short introduction to sell you on the film. Synopses are easy enough to find (relatively speaking), but this is unique to this pamphlet. It reads:

Kenichi Enomoto, who reigned as the king of comedy in both film and theater and was extremely popular, fell ill with a strange, rare unknown disease, and suffered a painful illness for about a year, but he has recently made a full recovery and this is his first appearance in a film. The film is written by Tsuruo Ando and the screenplay is by the sharp Toshiro Ide, who put together [several rakugo stories]. To celebrate Enoken's full recovery, this is a luxurious blockbuster that features all the comedic heroes of the Japanese film and theater world, and the director Nobuo Aoyagi has made full use of his unprecedentedly large cast in all its forms.

The story is a compilation of the rakugo stories "Nedoko", "Kaji musuko", "Dekikogoro", "Umaya kaji", "Niramugaeshi", "Shingan", and "Tarachine", all compiled into one story. The cast includes a gorgeous and diverse variety of actors such as Kenichi Enomoto, Roppa Furukawa, Kingoro Yanagiya, Shizuko Kasagi, Tony Tani, Aiko Mimasu, Akihiko Hirata, Mayuri Mokusho, Hisaya Morishige, Yuriko Hamada, Yunosuke Ito, Atsushi Watanabe, Koreyoshi Nakamura, Kanta Kisaragi, Norihei Miki, and Asami Kuji. It was produced by Ichiro Sato and Yoshie Kishii, who worked on "Botchan" and "Onna gokoro wa hitosuji ni", and this is Toho's first luxurious comedy masterpiece of the year.