Release date: November 1st, 1955
Studio: Toho
Director: Nobuo Aoyagi
Cast: Koji Tsuruta, Yoko Tsukasa, Kingoro Yanagiya, Nijiko Kiyokawa, Machiko Kitagawa, Murasaki Fujima, Minoru Chiaki, Shoichi Hirose, Akihiko Hirata et al.
Availability: Infrequent theater screenings and at least one television broadcast, otherwise unavailable for viewing.
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| get a load of this guy |
Koji Tsuruta is the star of the show here, and from what I can tell this movie seems to be one in a loosely-connected series of other films he had starred in that all shared the word "Wakadanna" in their title. All of them are equally obscure and I can't say much about them for certain, but Tsuruta appears to play a different character in each film, so they're probably not a "series" in terms of narrative continuity.
I'm interested in this one because of how obscure it is and because Hirata's role in it seems to be best described as "nefarious bakery financier". The plot: the head of Nanban-do, a candy shop that has been in operation since the Edo period, hopes that his son Shuichi (Tsuruta) will continue the business, but Shuichi is abroad, studying art in the US. Sakurako (Nijiko Kiyokawa), the owner of Sakura Bakery, wants to take over Nanban-do in his absence. Her financier Mochizuki (Hirata), who wants to marry her daughter Kyoko (Yoko Tsukasa), uses a spurious IOU belonging to Nanban-do as grounds to claim ownership of the candy shop. Mochizuki also intends to embezzle from both Sakura Bakery and Nanban-do. Shuichi, meanwhile, returns from America and is told that the date of his arranged marriage to Harue (Machiko Kitagawa), a woman he doesn't actually want to marry, is approaching. Harue has another lover as well, a man named Igarashi (Minoru Chiaki), and Shuichi manages to get Harue's father to agree to let her marry Igarashi instead. After Kyoko rejects Mochizuki, her and Shuichi end up together.
This comes to us from Nobuo Aoyagi, who directed my pet movie Rakugo Nagaya wa hana zakari. It shares some of the cast with that film as well. Aoyagi is more famous for the Sazae-san series, which we will be looking into at some point in the future. The film was based on an idea by Seiji Kaede, who I can't really find any information about, and adapted by Tokuhei Wakao, a fairly prolific screenwriter and banker. Among other things, Wakao co-wrote the script for Samurai II: Duel at Ichijoji Temple with Hiroshi Inagaki and adapted Structure of Hate to the screen. The soundtrack was done by Masaru Satō which means it was probably very good.
Aside from the poster above, we have two stills of Hirata's no-good two-timing bakery financier, and things aren't looking so great for him.
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| This is such an odd angle on him and my artist brain loves it. Drawing this would make an excellent study in perspective/foreshortening/lighting. |
That first, clearer still comes courtesy of the Japanese Movie Channel (more stills here), who aired the film as part of an ongoing celebration of Koji Tsuruta's work in November of 2019. As I've said before: if it was aired on television, that means a digitized print exists, and that means this could be released on DVD at any time, but it hasn't been. That still was apparently so good they colorized it and used it on another poster as well:
The funniest thing about this movie is that all of the reviews I've read say the same thing: "It's called 'Young Master Comes Back' but he doesn't come back until the middle of the film." (Some append that by saying "and he isn't even young", as Tsuruta was about 30 at the time, but as somebody rapidly entering their late 20s I'm not sure how I feel about that one.) Aside from reviews around the time of the 2019 broadcast, there are reviews from 2010 and 2011, so there must have been more screenings, but I can't determine where or exactly when.
Apparently, there is a competition among theaters in Japan that show classic movies called the "Kanpe Grand Prix" ("Kanpe" is short for "cunning paper", a term which basically means something like "cheat sheet"), where people can vote on their favorites out of several categories (best director, best actor, best actress, etc) as pertains to all the old movies shown at those theaters that year. In 2017 Murasaki Fujima received one vote for the Best Actress category from someone called "Ando-san". So there was a screening at some point around 2016-17 as well. (Shoutout to Ando-san.)
That's about all I can give you for this one. A last interesting thing to note is that this does have an official English title ("Tactics of Love") but no apparent distribution to English-speaking markets.
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