あぶない年頃 / Abunai toshigoro / A Dangerous Age (1953)

Release date: April 29, 1953

Director: Iseo Hirukawa

Studio: Produced by Shin-Ei co., released by Toho

Cast: Chiaki Tsukioka, Reiko Ishii, Kazuko Ran, Jun Mihara, Akihiko Hirata et al.

Availability: No home media or streaming, no known screenings. Possibly broadcast via Satellite Theater's on-demand service in January 2016.

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The recent release of Pu-san to DVD for the very first time got me thinking about this, so today we're going to look at a very obscure film. You can ostensibly see every film from Akihiko Hirata's first year of screen acting (although you would have to be very, very lucky to catch a screening of The Last Embrace), but the sole evidence for any screenings of this film whatsoever is one person claiming they watched it on pay-per-view TV in 2016. I do believe that, because don't know why anybody would lie about it, but I also don't have any evidence for it. (And I did try to find evidence - accessing Satellite Theater's VOD listings from early January 2016 on Wayback Machine, I don't see this film on there.)

Spicy tagline: "The pride of a virgin is about to be mercilessly assaulted!"

The film was directed by Iseo Hirukawa, who does not have a Wikipedia page. From his JMDb page, it would appear that his career lasted from the early 1930s to the late 1950s, with his first credited role having been as assistant director on Heinosuke Gosho's The Neighbor's Wife and Mine, a Shochiku film. The script was written by leftist screenwriter Tatsuo Asano, a far more prolific figure who worked primarily as a director in the 1940s before switching to screenwriting and co-screenwriting in the 1950s, and then returning to directing in the '60s and '70s. Asano's last work was released in 1995.

Toho did not produce this movie; it was produced by Shin-Ei Co. and released by Toho. If we can speak of film studios in taxonomic terms, Shin-Ei is of the Toei clade rather than Toho, but really, the small studio retained a surprising level of independence in an era when large studios were beginning to dominate the industry. When Toyoko, Taisei, and Tokyo Film Distribution merged to form Toei in 1951, Shin-Ei branched off and formed a distribution partnership with Daiei. In 1952 the studio entered into a partnership with the Mingei Theater Company. After that - which would include the period during which A Dangerous Age was produced - records of the studio fall into obscurity. After the release of Edogawa Ranpo adaptation Spider Man in 1958, there is no further evidence of the studio's existence. 

The film was featured in Kinema Junpo twice: once to introduce the film prior to its release and once in a review after it had premiered. The synopsis can be easily found on kinenote.com, I'll paste a quick translation below. Hirata's character is named Noda. (Ahem.)

"Female medical students Megumi, Mitsuko, and Fumie roomed together in a dormitory. Megumi had feelings for her childhood friend Noda, a horticulturist, but one day Mitsuko took her to a dance party, where she met a professional photographer named Murayama, for whom she had a faint liking. When Fumie's family went bankrupt and she could no longer support her school expenses, the delinquent Mitsuko told her that it would be easier if she sold her body, but Megumi went to Murayama for Fumie and borrowed money. That night, however, Murayama got her drunk and took her virginity. Megumi began to live with Murayama and continued her nightmarish life as a model for nude photos, but when she became pregnant, he abandoned her. In despair, Megumi attempted to commit railroad suicide, but Noda saved her and she returned to her hometown. Meanwhile, Mitsuko's promiscuity had finally brought her down to a woman of the night, and Fumie was the only one left in her room at the boarding house. Megumi, who gave birth in the countryside, seems to find hope in Noda's warm hand."

As for the review - written by one Kota Shindo, apparently - the only way I could read it was if I obtained a copy of the Kinejun issue it was published in, which I was lucky enough to be able to do. (Tariffs are going to hurt me, but I will do what I must.) I feel like I mention this a lot, but Kinejun's opinion of Tetsuwan namida ari was that it was really very bad, so I was interested to know how this movie was received. As soon as I started translating the review, though, I thought to myself "oh... oh no..."

"This is one of the popular teen films these days, but it is a poor product made as a "side dish" from the beginning. It is rushed to pursue filthy sexual interest, and the producers did not seem to have any intention of making a decent film. Therefore, no matter how much we criticize it, it will be like pushing against a wall, but I would like them to stop with their lack of insight in producing, distributing, and screening such a thing.

The main characters are three female medical students. In so many words, it is a common technique to use medicine as an excuse to arouse sexual interest, but in this film, the actions of these female medical students are so random that they seem to have no intelligence at all. For example, the main character Megumi (Chiaki Tsukioka) goes to borrow a large sum of money from a suspicious nude photographer (Jun Mihara) whom she has only met once, and even drinks alcohol at his urging, then loses her virginity. Stupidity takes precedence, and not even vulgar interest can be felt.

The opening scene of a Caesarean section and the pink dance party scene clearly show the writer's lack of wisdom, which makes you feel pity. This work also stars many newcomers, including Akihiko Hirata and Kazuko Ran, but it is surprising how few of them can deliver their lines satisfactorily. I would like them to study elocution."

I wonder if all these critics were eating crow after Godzilla came out.

Anyway, the sum of visual evidence for this movie consists of some posters and a press sheet, which does at least have a picture of Hirata (under the い on the right) and a nice illustration as well, although it's kind of hard to see them. That review was pretty scathing, but it's valuable because it gives us our only description of actual specific scenes from the film. To be honest, I feel like this movie has worse odds of ever seeing the light of day - as in getting put online or at least screened in a theater or on TV - than almost anything else I've written about.

I suppose this film is of some minor note for being the first to get its own Toho Studio Mail. Unfortunately this photo is not good enough for me to capture and translate the text, but it's probably just a plot summary similar to the one above

A Dangerous Age was very short, at only 47 minutes. A 16mm print of a 30-minute section of the film is held at the Ichinomiya City Audiovisual Library. However, given that the library lists their date of acquisition of the print as sometime in 1988, I have serious doubts that their print is still watchable at all. But if the film really was broadcast on Satellite Theater, someone did digitize a print at some point. It's possible that the digitized version was this 30-minute chunk; the person who mentioned that they saw the film on Satellite Theater did not specify how long it was, and I have corroboration from other sources that Satellite Theater will sometimes not specify whether or not the film they're showing is the full version.

As an aside, I even have confirmation of one theater that the film was screened in during its debut run: the news theater Prince in Obihiro City, which was operating as the Cine Tokachi Prince as of its closing in 2012. Check out this blog post about it. Adorable little theater.