Release date: August 1, 1964
Director: Hiroshi Inagaki
Studio: Toho
Cast: Somegoro Ichikawa (fifth generation), Yuriko Hoshi, Mayumi Ozora, Ichirō Arashima, Tadao Nakamaru, Chieko Nakakita, Akihiko Hirata, Nakajiro Tomita, Yutaka Sada, Sachio Sakai, Ren Yamamoto, Haruo Tanaka, Bokuzen Hidari, Hideyo Amamoto, Jun Tazaki et al.
Availability: No home media or streaming release. Infrequent television broadcasts and theater screenings.
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No, no, no. I didn't say this movie was bad. I said it was Junk.
Billed as Hiroshi Inagaki's 100th film, Junk was written by a three-person team that included Inagaki, Shintaro Mimura, and Masato Ide. Mimura had been working as a screenwriter since the late 1920s and was close with Inagaki (I recommend not looking at his Japanese Wikipedia page, you may not want to know how close), but this was his last credit as screenwriter; meanwhile Ide began work in the early 1950s and continued up until the early 1990s. The film was, as expected, produced by Tomoyuki Tanaka, with music by Ikuma Dan.
As is typical for Inagaki, this is a jidaigeki film. From what I can gather, the story centers around Kanzaburo (Somegoro Ichikawa), a drifter who rebelled against tyrannical authority in his youth, but was betrayed by his comrades and now wanders around the country. Kanzaburo ends up as a servant to a wealthy merchant with two daughters: a vain elder sister named Makie (Mayumi Ozora) and a kind younger sister named Midori (Yuriko Hoshi). After a disaster at sea, the boat that Kanzaburo and the sisters are on, along with a group of people of mixed social classes, wrecks on a deserted island. Kanzaburo fights (physically) with the high-class officials and takes leadership of the stranded group. He and Midori begin to fall in love, but her sister becomes jealous and incites a riot against Kanzaburo. Ultimately, Kanzaburo and Midori have a "happily ever after" ending, and journey together across the sea.
@packy1954 has a two-minute clip from the film that is very fun and makes me want to see the whole thing even more.
Akihiko Hirata ended up on at least one poster. He plays a character named Miyachiyo, who is a kyogen performer. Seeing him actually do a kyogen performance would be an absolute hoot - seriously, I want to see that so much - but I have no way of knowing whether or not that actually happens at any point in the film. Miyachiyo apparently goes mad at some point between when the ship is set adrift and when it runs aground on the island, and dies after being attacked by birds (other reviews mention this scene as being unintentionally comedic because it is such an obvious ripoff of Hitchcock's The Birds).
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| Much of the promotional material for this movie is basically Somegoro Ichikawa beefcake |
Reviews give the impression that the film is as lushly outfitted as most of Inagaki's pictures. One refers to it as "Edo-period Lord of the Flies". Overall, the whole thing sounds very typical of Inagaki; there is a lot of swordfighting but not much death or bloodshed, and an attitude of defiance against corrupt authority figures without a lot of real change to the status quo. packy1954 also says that Eiji Tsuburaya worked on the film uncredited, which is pretty easy to believe. Some stock footage from previous jidaigeki films was used.
The interesting thing about this is that it received a wider release outside of Japan. Stuart Galbraith's Toho Studios Story gives us some tantalizing information: "U.S. version [...] released by Frank Lee International. English subtitles. Possibly also released in English-dubbed format in some markets. 'International soundtrack' version produced". Let's fact-check some of that.
On a Toho Kingdom forum thread, one poster is skeptical about other films claimed by Galbraith to have been released by Frank Lee International, with the reasoning being that Frank Lee operated primarily Chinese theaters that mostly showed Shaw Bros. films. We'll shelve that connection for a moment, and come back to it later. What we do know is that the film's earliest U.S. screening was at the Toho La Brea.
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| callout post for me: spent $140 on yahoo! auctions this month but is too cheap to pay for a newspapers.com subscription |
Junk, released as The Rabble, was playing at the Toho La Brea from roughly mid-January 1965 to mid-March of the same year. Other sources (including Galbraith) say that March was the premiere, but it seems like ads were running as early as January. The film was also included in 1965's Reminder List of Eligible Releases, which is a publication given to members of the Academy that contains a list of all films eligible for that year's Academy Awards. This does NOT mean Junk was considered for an Academy Award; it was simply eligible that year.
So about the Chinese connection. I believed at first that the film having been released by Frank Lee International was not very likely, until I ran across an issue of Pacific Citizen that mentions the film having been dubbed into Chinese.
More research into the 55th Street Playhouse reveals that it had a history, particularly around the time period that this film was released, of showing Chinese films and other films dubbed into Mandarin. And I have confirmed that the theater was owned by Frank Lee. So, indeed, Junk was initially distributed by Toho, but also distributed by Frank Lee. The showing mentioned in the clipping above took place around April of 1968. The review of this dubbed screening is... unkind.
Unfortunately, that's about as deep as the rabbit hole (or Rabble-hole... my deepest apologies) goes. This movie was circulating within the U.S. at some point several years ago, and I did some digging to try to see if I could still get my hands on a copy, but to no avail. I won't rule out the possibility of ever seeing it the way I would for some other movies, though.
