Release date: July 27, 1958
Director: Yoshiki Onoda
Studio: Shintoho
Cast: Ken Utsui, Yōko Mihara, Utako Mitsuya, Masayo Banri¹, Kyôko Yashiro, Namiji Namiura, Akihiko Hirata, Tetsurō Tamba et al
Availability: No online streaming, no known recent screenings. At least one television broadcast, possibly in 2017-18. A DVD can be purchased on amazon.co.jp if it is not out of stock. (If it is out of stock, you might try getting in touch with the folks at Shintoho Cinema Nostalgia, who put out the DVD.)
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I had plans to write about this film at some point, but I didn't think I would be writing about it after having actually seen it. I assumed that, with no physical media release, I had no chance. Even its Wikipedia page says “the film has never been released on home video, but is not lost as some sources claim.²" But then I found out that it did get a physical release - in the form of (almost) the entire movie included as a bonus feature on a DVD of another ama film. I say "almost" the entire movie because apparently the DVD release contains only 71 out of the film's total runtime of 74 minutes. I of course bought a copy immediately. I'm not sure if the missing footage was the reason why this wasn't given its own solo release or if it was something else, but I wouldn't imagine I'm the only person who would pay good money for a DVD with just Hitokui Ama alone.
Believe me when I say this is the most excited I've been about a movie in a very, very long time.
I've done as much research into this film as I could, but I still don't know anything about its production history, which is something I'm really curious about. If anybody has issues of Kinema Jumpo from August or October of 1958, hit me up, they might contain more information about this. It also had some kind of theatrical release in Belgium, which is... a little weird.
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| If you look in the top right corner of this poster you can very faintly see "Yoshiki Onoda" written in pencil - this means somebody had to have been told specifically how to read his given name, because it's very hard to get it right if you're just going off the kanji and don't know how to pronounce it. (Machine translations vacillate between "Yoshimoto" and "Yoshimiki", among others.) |
Also, unlike some of the other DVDs I've obtained, this one did not have subtitles of any kind, so I'm relying entirely on my own garbage Japanese skills and online plot summaries.³
Let's gooooooo.
We start the film off with a catfight between two women on the beach, because Shintoho. The fight is stopped in its tracks when one of the women notices a dead body washing onto the shore. There's a short scene at a police station afterwards, and it's revealed that the decedent had a vial of some kind of drug in his pocket. The cops rule it a suicide, but a single detective, Maruyama, believes otherwise.
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| Hirata's in this movie so briefly it's like he's trying to get out of there before Toho realizes he's gone. |
The two main leads in the film are women divers named Sada and Kazue. They might be biological sisters; I can't really tell for sure, you know how it is. Sada had a checkered past in Tokyo that she lied about when she came back to become a diver, and while she wasn't directly responsible for the murder, she did hire an old boyfriend, Yoshizaki, to do it for her. Yoshizaki promised he'd leave after the murder, but he becomes an alcoholic and starts following Sada around, threatening her secret. Sada's new boyfriend Goro (played by Starman himself, Ken Utsui) doesn't know anything about her past, and he wants her to stop diving out of fear for her safety after the murder. We also get a fight scene between Yoshizaki and Goro that perfectly mirrors the catfight from the beginning, which I thought was interesting. This does have nice cinematography.
There's some fun underwater filming here that's surprisingly good for its time, if a bit stiff and the picture a bit cloudy. Also, Tetsurō Tamba is here. He plays a character named Miyata, who wants Goro's fishing grounds. He initially doesn't know about Sada, but Yoshizaki eventually tells him, and he becomes another party who is manipulating Sada by using her secret as leverage.
We get yet another addition to the cast when Kazue saves a man named Kimizuka, a visiting reporter from Tokyo, from cliff-diving in a dangerous spot. He and Maruyama go to a bar in Tokyo to question the proprietress about the dead man's identity.
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| Kazue is played by Utako Mitsuya, Yoshiki Onoda's future wife. She would later say she fell in love with him while filming this movie, when she didn't want to do a nude scene and he told her she could wear a swimsuit and strategically-placed towel instead. |
Sada eventually ends up killing Yoshizaki out of self-defense. She stashes the body in the same rough patch of ocean Kazue stopped Kimizuka from diving into, but Kazue eventually finds it. There's a brief moment when we think Kazue is going to tell on Sada to Kimizuka... aaaand then we have a "Miss Ama" beauty pageant, because Shintoho. The pageant scene is actually surprisingly tense, with a group of women being looked over by a crowd of men and nearly atonal music building up to the moment when Sada comes out onstage, visibly distraught, not knowing who in the audience knows her secret.
Sada finally gives up and goes back to Miyata to let him do to her what he will. Goro knows about her secrets at this point, and was going to leave her to the cops and reporters, but Kazue convinces him to follow her to the island where she and Miyata are. We get another scuffle between Utsui and Tamba at the end, and there's a great moment where Tamba loses the fishing spear he'd been holding, pulls out another knife, then throws that knife away and grabs the fishing spear again, like, dude, just pick a knife. This seemed silly until it became apparent that he had to throw aside the second knife so Sada could conveniently find it and escape her ties.
Sada stabs Miyata, but dies from... something? Exhaustion? It's not very clear what actually happened to her. I was a bit disappointed by this because it felt like the narrative chose to take the easy way out by killing her instead of allowing her character any further growth.
Depending on how you look at it, this movie is either a murder mystery interrupted by a bunch of lengthy scenes of attractive people swimming, or a bunch of lengthy scenes of attractive people swimming interrupted by a murder mystery. I expected there to be, y'know, some cop stuff, the usual kind of thing you get in a murder mystery, but there's really not. And I kind of love it! It has this vibe like a darker, more grown-up version of a teenage beach movie, like something you'd sneak into with some friends who are not old enough to get into the theater legitimately. It's never super explicit, but there's definitely some stuff I can't post on here. It's not the best movie, but it's a relic of the past; I can't judge it by today's standards. This kind of thing made Shintoho money and gave people jobs, so I respect that.
As for the print, it's... certainly what you would expect from a film whose existence was uncertain for much of the last 65 years. The sound is pretty good, and it's visually crisp (i.e. not blurry or pixelated at all), but it's so dim at times that I couldn't tell if they were doing day-for-night shots or if it was the film itself. No frame is without grain and vertical lines running through it, although it's not enough to be distracting. As I said at the beginning, there's three minutes missing, and you can definitely tell that there's points where a scene cuts off prematurely or skips oddly. All in all it's a very old, very rare movie that we're extremely lucky has survived and is now (kind of) back in print.
If nothing else, I highly recommend this if you've got it bad for Tetsurō Tamba.
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¹ Banri and Toyoko Takechi are currently the only two people I'm aware of who worked with all three Onoda siblings.
² The source referred to here is Jasper Sharp's 2008 book Behind the Pink Curtain: The Complete History of Japanese Sex Cinema. Sharp dedicates pages 33-43 to a very astute survey of the phenomenon of ama films, and of Hitokui Ama, he says: "Shintoho would find a suitably buxom replacement for [Michiko] Maeda in the form of Yôko Mihara, first appearing in Yoshiki Onoda's intriguingly-titled Cannibal Ama in 1958, a movie which unfortunately appears to be no longer with us."
³ I'm very thankful to this person's blog post for providing me with a lot of information about the plot, as well as the knowledge that this was broadcast at some point in the past.
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