70 Years of Inagaki's Samurai Trilogy: Musashi In America

...but we can't let Godzilla '54 have ALL the fun. 

This year, Inagaki's Samurai trilogy also turned 70. The first film, Samurai I: Musashi Miyamoto, is the only film Hirata was in that won an (American) Academy Award¹. Let's talk a little bit about the reception of these films in the United States.

In the early-to-mid-1950s, cinema from Japan was slowly starting to seep into Western theaters, and with the increased visibility came increased recognition - Gate of Hell won the grand prize at Cannes in 1954, as well as an Academy Honorary Award and the Golden Leopard at Locarno. Three years prior, in 1951, Rashōmon also won an AHA; as per Wikipedia it was "voted by the Board of Governors as the most outstanding foreign language film released in the United States during 1951." This was the first time a Japanese film had been recognized by the Academy Awards.

Samurai I was released theatrically in the United States as Samurai: The Legend of Musashi on November 19th, 1955. It was only the fourth Japanese film to have a theatrical release in the United States. American actor William Holden had a lot to do with propelling the Samurai trilogy towards its stateside release and eventual Academy win - he even contributed VA work when it was finally shown in American theaters. 

On March 21st, 1956, Samurai I received an Academy Honorary Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Incredibly, footage exists of this.

Despite its recognition by the Academy, in the eyes of critics, Japanese film was - and would remain - something of a novelty. This is a New York Times article² about Samurai II from October of 1967 that I feel encapsulates the way Japanese film - particularly jidaigeki - was still "other" in the eyes of U.S. critics. I've chopped down some highlights that show the flippant tone that was pretty standard for American film critics confronting Japanese cinema:

"IF you like grunting and slashing sword-fighting by a heavily costumed Japanese, determined to demonstrate his chivalry to his ponderous rivals in a feudalistic and ritualistic society, then you might want to see what is billed as Part II of Hiroshi Inagaki's "Samurai," which is actually the second part of a trilogy called "Musashi Miyamoto." [...] For this and a lot more of the same sort of elaborately attitudinized pining and swooning by pretty females over the glowering hero that goes on in Part I is all you will see in this segment. It simply carries on for another couple of hours the series of bristling confrontations of the heroic title character of "Samurai," which was first shown here in 1956 and has been offered in a revival at the 55th Street for the last three weeks. I suppose it is as a favor to the Japanese audience in New York and to aficionados of Nippon and students of Japanese films that Toho International is now presenting in sequential engagements the three sections of Mr. Inagaki's trilogy, which was made in 1956 with the then magnificently vital and immensely popular Toshiro Mifune as its star.

   Films about samurai are now old hat—as commonplace as old Hollywood Westerns. And, anyhow, there have been several better than this—Akira Kurosawa's "The Magnificent Seven," for instance, and Mr. Inagaki's own "Chushingura," which we saw here in 1963 and which had qualities of decor and color much superior to those in "Samurai." This is not said with any critical prejudice against this old favorite of the Japanese, but simply to advise the general public that it is a conspicuously fustian and monotonous period piece."

Let's go a little further back in time, though; to a NYT article from when Samurai I first opened in 1956. It is similarly unkind.

"THE clearest description we can give you of the new Japanese film, "Samurai," which came yesterday to the Little Carnegie, is that it is an Oriental western, dressed in sixteenth-century get-ups and costumes, but as violently melodramatic as any horse opera out of Hollywood. The hero of this elaborate pastiche is a village gent who wants to be a samurai, a first-class warrior in the Japanese feudal system—or a big shot in a glorified bandit gang. And, in the pursuit of his ambition, he goes off with a somewhat reluctant friend to join the army of a local war lord and win everlasting fame. But the war is lost and our snorting sword-swinger, put to rout with the rest of the army and forced to flee, goes wandering about the country, making muscles and generally shunning amorous dames—all of which is entirely consistent with the behavior of heroes in western films.[...]

   It is futile to try to compare this lurid picture with such previous, exciting Japanese films as the intellectually absorbing "Rashomon" or the sensitive and esthetic "Gate of Hell." This one has no dramatic cohesion, no refinement of taste, no point of view. The most it says, in the way of social comment, is that martial ambition is the bunk. It is best to marry a loving woman and be peaceful, wise and virtuous. The only area of comparison is in performance and in the quality of color and camera-work. Toshiro Mifune is striking as the hero (He was the bandit in "Rashomon.") In the standard style of Japanese acting, he leans to the exaggerated gesture and flamboyant air.

People were not taking this stuff seriously. Inagaki was quoted as saying "It was completely unexpected that Samurai won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film, which filmmakers all over the world have dreamed of. I never expected that my work, which has never won a Japanese film award, would win an American award." Given the harsh critical reception seen above, its win does feel pretty surprising.

But not every Western critic was so harsh on Inagaki. Donald Richie in his expanded edition of The Japanese Film: Art and Industry (originally published in 1959) spares some kind words for the Samurai trilogy and in doing so points out that non-Japanese film critics simply did not see much of the imagery the way that it was intended to be seen.

"Foreigners who were puzzled at Hiroshi Inagaki's intercutting his love scenes with shots of running water in Musashi Miyamoto (better known abroad as Samurai) failed to make the connection which Inagaki expected of his audience: earthly passion was being contrasted with the standard poetic image for the impermanence of life on this earth."

To be fair, the version that American audiences were seeing was heavily edited, so critics of the film were not being given it in its entirety. But, knowing them, if they had been, they'd probably just gripe about the runtime and excess of swordfighting.

Godzilla, King of the Monsters! was released in March of 1956. I have mentioned this on here before, but aside from Takashi Shimura, the only Japanese cast member who American audiences might have recognized when watching the Americanized Godzilla for the first time would have been Akihiko Hirata. And it's possible that they'd seen him in something even before Samurai I, since Itsuko and Her Mother received a small theatrical run a few months beforehand. This is, of course, all theoretical; I highly doubt American audiences cared much, if at all, about Japanese bit-part actors at this point.

The Criterion Collection has included the Samurai trilogy since the early 1990s when it was still releasing films on laserdisc. In 2012 the Criterion Collection re-released Inagaki's entire trilogy on DVD, updating the picture quality and sound and including interviews that supplied some historical background on the events of the film. Your local library may have a copy of one or all of these. As for (legal) streaming, all three films are on the Criterion Channel, and you can sign up for a free trial to watch them if you aren't already subscribed. These films are well worth watching if you have a passing interest in Japanese film, and they are important to its wider history, as well as its place in the international eye.

____

1 The Academy Honorary Award was established in 1950 to cover films that were not included in pre-existing Academy Award categories.

2 I have also found an NYT article referring to Story of Osaka Castle as an "inscrutable horse opera".

The Serizawa Post (Godzilla 70th Anniversary Special): Part Two

In this half of the post, we're going to be covering trivia and other random information and images garnered from various sources. Some of these sources are in my own personal Godzilla collection, some I've found through online research; see my "works cited" section at the bottom of parts 1 and 2 for more detail.

Prepare yourself.

1.) Those diving suits were orange

This doesn't seem to be common knowledge, considering that I've never seen any figures or official (or non-official) art that has Serizawa's diving suit as anything other than either a drab grey or a dull yellowy color. You'll hear it tossed around often that we don't know what color the first Godzilla suit was, since it was filmed in black-and-white and no color photos exist, but in the case of the suits, we do have surviving props that give an idea of the actual color.

photo cribbed from reddit user /u/TVTriangle - sorry, hope you don't mind me and my 0 follower blog stealing your stuff

Additionally, both Hirata and Takarada said that being inside the suits was like "being in a blast furnace". The entirety of Godzilla was shot in late summer and that scene was filmed outside in an actual boat. The underwater scenes were filmed indoors, however, by placing a fish tank between the camera and Hirata, in the diving suit.

BTS photo with fish tank

2.) There's a weird non-canon Godzilla manga where Serizawa has a nephew

There's a lot of weird non-canon Godzilla manga, I know. Check out a fan translation by LSD Jellyfish - it's actually pretty good. And yes! This is indeed very, very pre-MonsterVerse.

yeah i don't know why they drew him with curly hair either

This comes from The Godzilla Comic, a completely bonkers collection of Godzilla short manga released in 1990 with contributions from some big names. There's also whatever is going on in Minoru Kawasaki's contribution:

Kawasaki's part is a short story about pop star Yuki Saito being recruited into the Earth Defense Force to use her singing skills to placate Godzilla. I have no idea if it's meant to be implied that all of this is taking place within a Toho movie (so all the actors are playing roles) or if it's some kind of alternate universe where everybody actually is part of the Earth Defense Force. This is far, and I mean far from the strangest thing in The Godzilla Comic. Let's see some much more normal manga now...

4.) Toho's own promotional manga

I actually can't find out much information about this one. It was reprinted in issue six of Godzilla Magazine alongside Monster Picture Story Godzilla, a more well-known manga. It appears to have been produced by Toho themselves (the Kansai branch, anyway) and ran in a newspaper or magazine. The machine translation of the text at the beginning says it's a "storyboard", but this is definitely not the original Godzilla storyboard; there are ample enough pictures of that out there, and it looks completely different. We can also tell from Godzilla's appearance - closer to the maquette, when he's drawn accurately at all - that this manga was clearly produced prior to the film's release.

The text accompanying the images is a simple description of a handful of scenes from the film, and wake up, babes, new German Friend™ lore just dropped.

This is the first time I have ever heard anything of the sort, and it is so severely non-canon that breaking it down is almost not even worth it, but the whole scenario doesn't make sense. It's unclear in the above sentence who "he" refers to - whether it was Serizawa or the German who was a POW, or if they were prisoners together - but no matter what, Serizawa is canonically 27 as of 1954 and therefore could not possibly have gotten his university-level education as a chemist until after the war. I believe that things like this (of which I've seen a few) are the remnants of earlier script drafts where Serizawa was much older that were not changed after he was aged down in the final version.

4.) More strange, plot-irrelevant Godzilla promo stills

You thought I was done talking about weird stills and deleted scenes? Never.

You have probably seen a poster or two for Godzilla (like this one, also featuring Ogata and Emiko looking cool in their Cabton) which included an image of Serizawa carrying Emiko that never appeared anywhere in the film. Here's a clearer image of that and another still from the same shoot:

And here is what the description says:

"Image still directed by Ishirō Honda. [As in] the still on page 51 of this book, Serizawa is wearing makeup based on the description in scene 41 of the script, 'Half of his face is wounded[...]'. According to Honda, he was conscious of German Expressionism in the style of [The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari]."

The "still on page 51" is this, another promo still:

Almost every single advance poster for Godzilla had Serizawa's facial scarring much more prominent than it was in the film, and so did the multitude of script drafts. I'm not sure if there was a specific reason why it was downplayed a bit more in the final film. And I don't know about you all, but I'm positively riveted by the thought of a more German Expressionism-influenced Godzilla. 

5.) Serizawa's entry in the 2014 Godzilla dictionary

"A beloved student of Dr. Kyohei Yamane, he is a doctor who runs the Serizawa Scientific Research Institute. He has been engaged to Dr. Yamane's daughter, Emiko, since childhood, but he felt inferior after he was scarred on his face during the war, and he has kept his feelings for her to himself. From then on, he shut himself away in his laboratory and studied oxygen from every angle. In the process, he invented the Oxygen Destroyer, which destroys oxygen in water in an instant. However, because it could become a weapon worse than an atomic bomb depending on how it is used, he refrains from making it public, and is prepared to die if he is forced to use it as a weapon. At first, he continues to refuse to use it as a weapon against Godzilla, but [...] moved by [the Prayer for Peace], he decides to use it just once. He successfully destroys Godzilla, but then takes his own life. He dies at the age of 27."

6.) Bonus photos

Photos taken at Ise-shima, which was used for the Odo Island filming locations. The location of the photo on the left is given as "a deserted beach beyond the Ishigami Cape [in Toba]". The photo on the right was taken at an inn where the cast and crew stayed.

_____

Works cited:

Godzilla and Toho Tokusatsu Official Mook, vol 1. Godzilla. Kodansha, 2023.

Kohei Nomura, editor. Godzilla Encyclopedia [New Edition]. Kasakura Publishing, 2014.

Koichi Kawakita, supervisor. Japan Special Effects Movie Encyclopedia Toho Edition BEST54. Seibido Publishing, 1999.

The Serizawa Post (Godzilla 70th Anniversary Special): Part One

Kinema Junpo issue from September 15, 1954

Since this year is the 70th anniversary of the first Godzilla movie and arguably Akihiko Hirata's most iconic role, I wanted to make a big post about it to celebrate. My initial idea was to begin the post by charting up a timeline that followed the development of Serizawa as a character through various drafts and revisions and then move on to random trivia, but after a while, my timeline became so huge that I decided to split the post into two parts. The second part will go up on Godzilla Day.

• February 10, 1954: Ishirō Honda's Farewell Rabaul is released to theaters. I argue that this is important, as Hirata's role in this film led to him being cast in Godzilla.
• May 1954: Shigeru Kayama submits a first draft of his screenplay for Godzilla. Serizawa is described as a pharmaceutical chemist, a friend of Yamane's who lost his eye in a wolf attack(!) while on a fossil dig in China. He is older than in the film (around 40), and had a wife who died of an illness some years prior. He also isn't engaged to Emiko but is "secretly in love with her". I get the sense that Kayama intended Serizawa to be a physically imposing, maybe even slightly creepy presence; in this draft his facial scars are more prominent and he's described as having a "large build".
• July 5, 1954: Production on Godzilla is officially announced.
• May-August 1954: Kayama's screenplay is revised and developed into a final version by Honda and co-writer Takeo Murata. Serizawa has more of a role here than in the Kayama version, and not too much is different from the film except for his age (32) and the fact that he has a housemaid (Honda intended to imply that Serizawa was or had been upper-class).
• July 17-September 25: Nippon Broadcasting System airs Kaiju Gojira, a radio drama adaptation of Honda and Murata's screenplay scripted by Shiro Horie, with extra scenes added for padding. Serizawa is voiced by Masahiko Naruse.
• July 1954: Akihiko Hirata screen-tests for the role of Hideto Ogata but does not get the part. At some point between now and when filming begins, he switches roles with Akira Takarada to play Dr. Serizawa instead. I talk about this at considerable length here.
• August 1, 1954: Rehearsal meeting.
• August 7, 1954: Crank-in at the Toba filming location.
• September 29, 1954: Filming concludes.
• October 23, 1954: Toho in-house preview screening.
• October 25, 1954: Iwaya Shoten publishes Kaiju Gojira, a novel adaptation of the NBS radio drama written by Sango Nagase and finalized by Shigeru Kayama. (NB: This is different from Kayama's novelizations of Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again.) As this has not been translated into English, I'm unaware of how, if at all, Serizawa's character differs from other versions.
• October 27, 1954: First screening of Godzilla in Nagoya.
• October-November 1954: Science Adventure Picture Story Godzilla, written and drawn by Wasuke Abe, is published in Omoshiro Book. I'm not exactly clear on this, but it seems like in this version of events Serizawa does not commit suicide at the end. (Yamane's the one with the German friend here.)
• Nov 3, 1954: Gojira is released to Japanese theaters across the country.
• March 1955: Kodansha publishes Monster Picture Story: Godzilla, written by Koichi Yoshida and illustrated by Shunichi Iwaigawa, in Bokura magazine. In it, the other characters learn about Serizawa and his weapon (name changed to "Oxygent") through a random unnamed soldier. Serizawa wears glasses instead of an eyepatch. (I believe this page shows meganekko Serizawa.)
• July 20, 1955: Shimamura Publishing co. releases Godzilla: Tokyo and Osaka Editions, Shigeru Kayama's novelizations of the first two Godzilla films. This was not based on the radio play and is Kayama's original work. Serizawa is largely the same as he is in the film but is described as having long hair that covers his missing eye instead of an eyepatch.

I will cut the list off here as anything further doesn't really count as "character development".

Despite the fluctuating prominence of Serizawa's role in Godzilla's storyline throughout preliminary materials, there are some things that have remained constant in pre-final drafts:

1. Dr. Serizawa is always described as missing an eye, although how he lost it varies, if any explanation is given at all. I don't believe there are any sources pre-dating the finished film that specify which eye; however I do think the choice to make it his right eye was deliberate as there is historical and literary precedence (Tange Sazen, Ishimatsu, Masamune Date, Oiwa, etc). You probably shouldn't be listening to my crackpot theories about this.
2. Serizawa always has the Oxygen Destroyer and is always the one to use it to kill Godzilla; as far as I'm aware he also dies at the end of every preliminary screenplay. How and why he's convinced to use the Oxygen Destroyer varies.
3. Some specific dialogue is consistent throughout versions, for example there is always a line where someone tells Serizawa that spending so much time in his lab is bad for his health.

Almost every character in Godzilla went through several changes before the final film (for example, Dr. Yamane was originally going to be a much more mysterious, antagonistic character, who wore dark clothing and glasses). Shinkichi has had more of a role at times, mostly in post-Godzilla serializations, to appeal to a younger audience; some versions have Emiko aged down as well.

On to some less technical stuff in part two...

____

Works cited:

^{Kayama, Shigeru. Toho SF Special Effects Film Series, vol. 3. Toho, 1985.}

^{Godziszewski, Ed. "The Making of Godzilla." G-Fan, #12. Nov/Dec 1994, pp. 34-39.}

^{Shodai Godzilla Research Reader. Yoizensha, 2014.} 

^{Japanese Giants, #10. 2004. p. 10.}

Galbraith IV, Stuart. Monsters Are Attacking Tokyo!. Feral House, 1998.

Legend of the Cat Monster Appreciation Post (Halloween Special) [麗猫伝説]

I wrote about this film at length on my film review blog here back when it was first fansubbed. It is - at the risk of sounding pretentious - cinema looking at itself, and it's one of my favorite movies of all time.

Like I said in my review, the plot involves a film studio that had been successful during Japan's golden age of film but was now struggling to keep itself afloat, and many of the actors Ōbayashi cast - Makoto Satō, Akihiko Hirata, Akira Ōizumi, just to name a few - were people who the audience would have recognized as having been at the height of their fame during that bygone era. Takako Irie and her daughter Wakaba play the same character at different ages; the elder Irie was a famous silent film actress who went on to star in bakeneko (cat horror) films. The film uses a lot of bakeneko tropes as a recurring motif and this is what qualifies it as a Halloween-appropriate film in my eyes - possibly the closest thing to an actual horror movie that I will talk about on this blog.

The fact that Hirata would die less than a year after the release of the film gives a real-world layer to that feeling that Legend of the Cat Monster is looking at an era of cinema - and an era, period - that was moving further and further into the past. Hirata plays a producer who was implied to have been a new member of the fictional film studio's production crew in the flashbacks that take place 40 years prior; I'm not sure if this was an intentional nod to how Hirata himself got his start in the film industry behind the camera (as an assistant director at Shintoho), but it could have been.

The film is the 100th installment of Tuesday Suspense Theater, and in 1998 a theatrical version was released - this is the reason why you'll sometimes see the release year given as 1983 and sometimes as 1998. In November 2020 it was released to DVD for the first time. In December 2022 it was given unofficial English fansubs, and an unofficial DVD can now be bought through Far East Flix. (#notsponsored, but wouldn't it be nice if I was.)

Here is a Google-translated review from a user named "Mucho" on kinenote.com who watched it when it first aired on television:

"I haven't seen the movie version, but here are my impressions of the 1983 TV version from my movie notes.

What is the secret of the eternal youth and beauty of the great actress who was once the star of a monster cat movie? A new screenwriter meets her and the mystery is solved.

This is a revolution in TV dramas! My head went crazy and exploded. Every time there was a commercial break, I was dancing around the room. If someone else saw that, they would think I was crazy. Yes, just like the main character's screenwriter... This masterpiece was not talked about at all in the streets because of the disposable and forgetful medium of TV. What a shame!

The pain of the screenwriter who can't write is deeply felt, the director's position is clearly explained, and the sadness of the old actress is conveyed.

You will need a lot of knowledge to enjoy this drama. The main part is reminiscent of actual anecdotes, and movie fans will praise it as a movie that talks about movies, or rather a TV drama. But how do ordinary viewers feel about it? The punch line is that it's a slightly unusual drama and people immediately change the channel. It's a special production that is not aimed at everyone, but at a select few. Why was such a drama allowed to be aired on TV?"

Here also is a very detailed analysis of the sets and how they reference prior films, with citations at the bottom. I've linked a Google-translated version, which seems minimally garbled.

I can't give you much besides some posters that you maybe haven't seen before, since this is not a terribly well-known movie (although neither is it very obscure) and there's not much in the way of merch tie-ins. But trust me, this movie is so good. It is so, so good. If you watch any movie based off of a recommendation from some random person on the internet this Halloween, I hope it might be this one.

Saturday Wide Theater Spookiness (Halloween Special) [土曜ワイド劇場]

I wasn't sure I was going to include this in my roster of Halloween-appropriate posts because there's so little information on most of this Saturday Wide Theater stuff that I didn't know if it would be worth it. But, as there's no English-language info about these TV movies out there, anything I write about them would technically be fulfilling the purpose of this blog.

So, what exactly is Saturday Wide Theater?

Starting in 1977 a variety of original TV movies were broadcast on TV Asahi every Saturday night as part of this series (although it's more of a timeslot than a "series", since all the films were unrelated). It pioneered the format of a consistent, recurring broadcast of 90-minute original movies (later some of the films would run for 2 hours or more) and continued running films until 2017. Other similar programs began doing the same thing, including Tuesday Suspense Theater, but I believe Saturday Wide Theater was the first. Nothing mentioned in this post has a physical media release and I can't find any records of it ever being re-aired; whether or not TV Asahi still has the tapes is doubtful and they may in fact have been destroyed due to copyright laws.

From what I can gather, a lot of the films shown during this timeslot were mysteries. I'm going to be taking a look at a few of them that Hirata was in - as I've mentioned, after he left Toho he worked extensively in TV but unfortunately the majority of that work is most likely lost - but be warned that none of these are really horror; they're mostly just murder mysteries with unusually spooky-sounding titles.

None of this stuff has official English titles, so these translations are done by machine.

1. The Devil's Mask: Full Moon Murder Case [魔性の仮面] February 24, 1979 - directed by Katsumune Ishida

Very few details about this can be found anywhere, but it sounds like a psychological thriller-type thing that apparently entails a lawyer and a reporter exploring a horrific incident from a woman's childhood after she's accused of murder.

The script for this (pictured below) is held in the National Diet Library.

2. House of Evil Spirits [悪霊の住む家] June 7, 1980 - directed by Hideo Suzuki

I mean, that sounds pretty scary, doesn't it? What's interesting about this one is that the plot sounds quite similar to Chitei no Satsui, a Tuesday Suspense Theater film that I looked at here due to Yoshiko Otowa having a small role in it. The plot concerns a woman who kills her boss (played by Hirata; sounds like he kind of had it coming) and buries him under her floorboards, but is then tormented by guilt over what she's done.

We do actually have an image from this one! See a bigger version of this image (with watermark) over here.

3. The Mystery of the Ghost Ship [幽霊船の謎] October 18, 1980 - directed by Yoshiyuki Kuroda

This sounds like it was the second installment in a series of detective mysteries starring Tatsuya Mihashi. It involves an inspector solving the mystery of some murders on a yacht. No information available, but the script is, again, held in the National Diet Library.

That is pretty much that for suspense/horror-adjacent TV stuff. I would really love for someone to get in the National Diet Library and scan or just summarize those scripts so we could have some idea of what these movies are about beyond the few sentences that tvdrama-db.com provides. It is nice to know somebody is taking care of the scripts, at least.

The H-Man Appreciation Post (Halloween Special) [美女と液体人間]

What do I do for the Halloween season as a horror movie lover running a fansite about somebody who wasn't really in any horror movies? I talk about some horror-adjacent movies, I guess.

I'm going to structure this the same way I structured my Sanjuro post: since most of you have probably already seen The H-Man, I'll focus less on the film itself and more on things like merch, international releases, and other stuff that will hopefully be new to at least some readers. I would argue that The H-Man is the strongest contender for a horror label in the Transforming Human series, as the transformed humans in this film bear very little resemblance to humans anymore, whereas the antagonists of Secret of the Telegian and The Human Vapor do retain their human form.

This will be the first in a series. Throughout the month - in addition to regular, non-themed posts - I'm also going to cover Legend of the Cat Monster and maybe some Saturday Wide Theater stuff if I can find enough information about it. (I personally consider Godzilla a horror movie, but that's fairly controversial.) There's also episode 20 of Operation: Mystery, which is arguably a horror show more often than not, but I am currently unable to talk about that for secret reasons.

The H-Man was released to Japanese theaters on June 24th, 1958. It shares a lot of its DNA with Godzilla, having also been directed by Ishirō Honda and including explicit references to the Lucky Dragon no. 5 incident, but whereas Godzilla presents nuclear testing and weaponry giving rise to an external threat, The H-Man looks at the possibility of humanity itself becoming infected by the aftereffects of nuclear power. Honda visited Japan's first nuclear reactor (the now-defunct JRR-1) and interviewed a scientist from the University of Tokyo's nuclear science department as research for the film.

It's one of my personal favorite tokusatsu movies. It's entertaining, fast-paced, and genuinely scary at times, but it also has that Honda introspection that makes it stick in your brain long after watching it. I talk about it on my film review blog here.

The film was actually based on a story by a contracted Toho actor, Hideo Unagami, but Unagami passed away the year prior to filming. Unagami would write scripts on the side and bring them to Toho's planning department, and got the idea for a story about a new human born from the radiation of a hydrogen bomb during filming of The Mysterians. Takeshi Kimura took Unagami's manuscript and finalized it into a script for The H-Man.

As per Kenji Sahara, the climax of the movie was filmed in an actual sewer and apparently smelled as bad as one would expect. (I always get a kick out of seeing Akihiko Hirata hanging around down there in a plastic jumpsuit with a full suit and tie under it.)

American lobby cards for this film fetch semi-ridiculous prices, for some reason.

The film was first screened in American theaters a little less than a year after its original release, on May 28th, 1959. Columbia Pictures handled the release and surprisingly they still retain distribution rights to the film to this day, after having renewed the license in 1987. I haven't seen the Columbia dub, but as I mentioned in my review, it apparently removes all mention of the "H-Men" retaining their human memories after they've been transformed, which, to me, ruins a lot of the film's impact. From what I understand the American cut also guts the special effects to a large extent. You can read more on the differences between the two cuts of the film here.

Other theatrical releases of the film extended to twelve more countries over the next four years.

West German poster - Google Translate says the title is "The Terror Creeps Through Tokyo"

French poster included with the leaflet inside a Japanese laserdisc release of the film

Speaking of fetching insane prices, there is a sequel manga that was released shortly after the film itself. This has been translated in full over on Toho Kingdom. It isn't fully scanned, but the translation does include a selection of images from the manga, and you can check out some more on this Mandarake listing. The protagonist is a youngish boy as per shounen manga tradition, but Chief Inspector Tominaga actually does have a decent role in it. There's also baseball, and a white guy with a fearsome mustache.

Nicholas Driscoll from Toho Kingdom apparently bought this for $800. I feel solidarity with him as I myself have done some questionable spending lately.

There is technically another manga, but I don't think you're ready for it. It appeared in the January 1971 issue of Saturday Manga. The best I can figure, a man drinks some kind of whiskey that H-Man-itizes him, a woman kisses him and somehow... swallows him... and then coughs him out... but it all turns out to be a dream sequence in the imagination of a woman who is being given CPR after nearly drowning?

Let's move on to merchandise... if you really, really need your own liquid human, you have some options. CAST has, of course, produced an ornament of one of them, which comes packaged with the poor frog who gets liquified in the film:

That's the deluxe version, though. If the frog weirds you out, there is a version with just the human.

Hang him on your Christmas tree. You must.

There are also more H-Man sofubi than I expected. There exists a possibly unlicensed garage kit that comes not only with a humanoid H-Man but also one of the dancers in mid-H-Man-ification:

This picture really gives off a vibe, doesn't it

 

Or you can get a more normal-looking, run-of-the-mill (and licensed) sofubi that you don't have to assemble and paint yourself.

We're going to end our H-Man journey here, since there's not a lot out there in the way of merch and fun stuff. I think it would be cool if somebody like Super7 did Transforming Human figures, but that feels like it's probably never going to happen.

You can watch The H-Man right this instant on various streaming services (Tubi, Amazon Prime, etc), but unfortunately all legal online streaming platforms have the shortened English dub. However, Columbia Pictures' "Icons of Sci-Fi Toho Collection" DVD, which packages this film with Mothra and Battle in Outer Space, appears to include both the original and the dub, and is pretty cheap and easy to find secondhand. (Interestingly, the back of the box covers all its bases by referring to Ishirō Honda using both his real name AND "Inoshiro".) Mill Creek and Eureka have released it on DVD with subtitles as well and both times it is packaged with Battle in Outer Space.

Tune in next time for more vaguely spooky films...

力道山・男の魂 / Rikidozan: Otoko no tamashii / Rikidozan: A Man's Spirit

Release date: August 29, 1956
Director: Seiichiro Uchikawa
Studio: Distributed by Toho, produced jointly by Wakatsuki Pro, Takimura Pro, and Rikidozan Pro.
Cast: Rikidozan, Keiko Kishi, Ichirō Arashima, Hisaya Morishige, Mike Mazurki, Mariko Miyagi, Yasuko Nakata, Helen Higgins, Akihiko Hirata, Chiemi Eri et al.
Availability: VHS release, no other home media. Now available on archive.org.
----

I am so, so utterly delighted to bring you this post today.

Rikidozan: A Man's Spirit is a docudrama about Rikidozan, the "Father of Puroresu", who was quite famous in the Showa era and did a lot to popularize pro wrestling in Japan after the war, but died very young after a street fight. (You'll have to forgive me because I don't know much more about him than that.) More importantly for our purposes, Akihiko Hirata is in it. This is in fact one of the most obscure titles in his filmography that has a home media release.

That home media release comes in the form of a run of VHS tapes that Toho Video put out in the late 1980s. This film has never been released to DVD or streaming, and I've heard that as of a 2014 theater screening, the original film stock had degraded so badly that it was almost entirely pink. So, this movie runs the risk of being lost to time as the materials it's stored on continue to degrade, unless somebody were to obtain one of those (fairly rare) VHS tapes and digitize it.

So I did that.

It was, all things considered, a pretty risky endeavor. I had no guarantee that the tape would play or, if it played, that the image and sound quality wouldn't be abysmal. But it was worth the risk. After waiting a solid two months, I had a 40-year-old ex-rental VHS tape on my hands that had survived both Japan's typhoon season and the tropical storm that hit my area on the day it was delivered. And did the risk pay off?

It sure did. And I have the archive.org link to prove it.

Let's take a look at it with screenshots. This person wrote a much nicer and more detailed summary that Google translates pretty decently; read it for more plot information.

The film opens with a bunch of kids doing chanbara stuff on a beach when one of them notices a pair of sandals that turn out to belong to Rikidozan. We get some cute scenes of him flipping the kids around, letting them bury him in the sand, general antics. It's nice, I like it. I don't know that there's much of a plot to this thing, honestly. It's mostly just a movie made for people who want to see Rikidozan. (And me.)

big dude isn't he

Ichirō Arashima's here too. He plays Riki's manager. He gets fired after a noodle dispute, gets drunk at a bar, tries to weaponize his manager status for clout, and they threaten to call the police on him.

Bartender played by Hisaya Morishige, of Shachō fame

me watching this movie

A driving point of conflict throughout the film is that a teacher named Shirai thinks Rikidozan is a bad influence on children because he's too violent. After a lot of wrestling and a lot of miscellaneous scenes of huge sweaty men in the shower and the gym and whatnot, Shirai comes directly to Rikidozan's office. She lets him know that a kid injured his classmate bad enough to put him in the hospital by using one of Riki's signature karate chops. Her and Riki visit the injured party and the fact that a child was hurt in a way that had anything to do with him does seem to upset him.

Rikidozan's main rival in this is an American wrestler named Max, played by Mike Mazurki, another person I don't know anything about, and... is... is that the big guy with the hammer from Yojimbo?

Max promises Rikidozan a match - framed as a kind of "East vs. West" thing - as they're both some of the top wrestlers from their respective countries. Max apparently killed somebody (maybe) during a match, and this earned him a reputation, as well as the nickname "Murderer". 

Max responds to questions about his opponent's death with "I guess he was a bit unlucky." [cracks knuckles ominously for a solid 15 seconds] "But that RARELY happens."

Riki and his fanmail

At this point in the plot some shady characters enter the picture who are trying to secure a deal with the yakuza(?) whereby they would gain rights to a bunch of properties in Tokyo if their side wins at gambling. Various ideas are floated until the idea comes up that they could bet on pro wrestlers... the Rikidozan vs. Max match, specifically. The thing is: Max is apparently going blind.

Thiiiiiiis is where Hirata's character finally comes into play. He plays Max's doctor and the only person who knows anything about what's wrong with him. The side who wants Rikidozan to lose kidnaps him and tortures him for information on anything that could be used to blackmail Max (who has been told he'll be fine for long enough to have the match). After they learn his secret, they go to Max and use it as leverage, along with a huge amount of cash, gold, and jewelry, to try to convince him to kill Riki, promising they'll take care of him after he goes blind if he can win the match for them. We don't see Hirata's character (named Fujimura, same as in Varan) again after this; he was really just a plot device.

I guess the point of this is to contrast people who fight dirty against Rikidozan who supposedly does not; he stays cool even in the face of Max swearing he'll kill him the next day. We get a scene where he tells a bunch of kids not to get too violent because that's not what pro wrestling is about. He tells them he won't use karate chops anymore now either.

I won't post screenshots of the final fight. You can go watch it for yourself now if that kind of thing interests you, I really don't care one way or another about wrestling so I don't even know what parts I should be screenshotting or not. Hisaya Morishige gets in the ring, though, absolutely ready to throw down.

Riki wins his fight fair and square, but that means Max is useless now, so the goons in the audience, who have smuggled in a gun, shoot him. He survives long enough to give some final words to his wife and to reconcile with Riki, thanking him for giving him an honorable final match.

So. I can now add "wrestling propaganda movie" to my list of things I've sat through for Akihiko Hirata. Okay, maybe "propaganda" is a little harsh. But this is a movie about how good and noble puroresu is supposed to be, and it props up Rikidozan as an exemplar of that, and it will not hear any contrary opinions. It is, as I said, a movie for people who want to see Rikidozan. I can imagine a lot of young boys probably watched this and thought it was cool. I have no problem with that. It's just a little silly. And I liked it. I hope this was as fun for you as it was for me, because for me it was very, very fun.

My apologies that the title card is cut off in the recording, by the way; I didn't realize I had to press "start".