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.
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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".