10,000 Miles of Stormy Seas / The Mad Atlantic [怒涛一万浬]: A Very, Very, Very, Very Special Post

Release date: July 13, 1966
Director: Jun Fukuda
Studio: Mifune Productions, released by Toho
Cast: Toshirō Mifune, Tatsuya Mihashi, Makoto Satō, Mie Hama, Sachio Sakai, Ryo Tamura, Akihiko Hirata, Tadao Nakamaru, Ikio Sawamura, Akira Hitomi, Yasuzo Ogawa, Kazuo Suzuki, Ben Hiura, Akiyoshi Kasuga, Shintaro Nakaoka et al.
Availability: A Japanese DVD release from Toho and an English-subtitled Blu-Ray are available. English-subtitled print also held in BAMFA film library.

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Today I'm going to talk about something that I'm extremely excited about because I actually had a hand in ushering it into existence. For the first time, this long-out-of-print movie is available to buy with English subtitles, and I helped with those subtitles.¹ Unfortunately I'm going to have to be a bit reticent with details on exactly how you can obtain the disc (you know how such things go when Toho is involved), but if you do know what I'm talking about, I highly encourage you to buy the Blu-Ray, as it includes not only the film but a host of extras such as news clips, interviews with Palmense film buffs, and more. 

The first thing to note about 10,000 Miles of Stormy Seas is that it was shot partially on location in Las Palmas, Gran Canaria. This made headlines at the time, since Toshirō Mifune was and is one of the most (if not the most) internationally-recognized Japanese actors, and as producer of the film, he brought with him an entourage of cast and crew, including director Jun Fukuda. Prince Tyler has archived full-page scans of some Spanish-language newspapers detailing the production of the film and Mifune's arrival in Las Palmas over here. Believe it or not, this movie also has Godzilla connections: Yoshimitsu Banno served as chief assistant director, and in one brief scene Sachio Sakai (himself a Godzilla series veteran) hits the "shie" pose, originally from Osomatsu-kun but known to us Western fans as Godzilla's victory dance in Destroy All Monsters.

Despite having been filmed there, 10,000 Miles of Stormy Seas never received a screening in the Canary Islands or in Spain more broadly until its screening at the Las Palmas de Gran Canaria International Film Festival last year. Some of the extras on the Blu-Ray go into detail about the process of getting that screening off the ground, which was of course hindered by Toho being Toho. Film nerds in and with connections to Las Palmas had been searching for the film after discovering its ties to the islands, and from what the organizer of the film festival describes, he was basically sent a file of it by an anonymous benefactor who had ripped it from an HD TV broadcast. Ultimately, though, the source of the version shown at the festival was a scan of the print held at BAMFA. More about the film through the Las Palmas lens can be read here with some mildly distracting random bolding, provided you read Spanish or have a translator extension on your browser.

Unfortunately, outside of a few witty one-liners on the film's Letterboxd page, I haven't found as many Palmense reviews of the film from after the festival as I'd like. I do, however, have evidence of what the Americans thought, and what the Americans thought was what Americans thought in the '60s about basically every Japanese movie not directed by Akira Kurosawa: "this kind of sucks". When the movie premiered at Toho's La Brea theater in November of 1967, LA Times critics were not enthused:

"None of the pictures Japan's top star Mifune has made for his own company has been very good- to put it mildly.

The latest, The Mad Atlantic (at the Toho La Brea), is no exception. But at least its extravagant melodramatics and unrestrained sentimentality make it lots more fun than its predecessors. Because its trawler off the west coast of Africa has had a bad year, a Japanese tuna company sends out Mifune to take charge. Stuck behind a desk for two years, he's eager determined[sic] for the challenge and in no time at all after arriving in Las Palmas in the Canary Islands he finds the odds piling up against him. A 20-hour ordeal with the nets brings in a nice catch but not without a top hand being harpooned.

Then, an accidental tangling of lines with some Spaniards leads to Mifune squaring off on the docks with their captain. To top it off, that injured man has been found to be permanently handicapped, and Mifune's young intern has hit the bottle in remorse. (He'd really rather slug Mifune.) Back at sea Mifune begins to bring in big hauls. Just as it looks like he's going to make that quota after all a hurricane strikes naturally and he gets an SOS from a yacht. Will Mifune answer the call or sacrifice his nets? Will it work out that he's able to do both? Will his injured man face up to his handicap? Will that intern shape up? (It seems safe to say that no Toshiro Mifune fan will even have to see the movie to answer these questions.)"

Everyone is allowed their opinion, of course, but - and perhaps this is just because I have a personal investment in it - I think this movie is fantastic. The fishing scenes are unbelievably realistic (do not watch this if you have an aversion to seeing a lot of dead fish) and look like they must have been a nightmare to film, especially during the film's impressive climax, a risky rescue mission involving sailing directly into a storm, and especially since this was a wintertime shoot. I have to say I think I ultimately enjoyed the fishing scenes more than the rest of it because I appreciated the hard work that must have gone into them, but the location filming does give the movie a more expansive scale than it otherwise would have had. I really can't overstate the "realism" element when it comes to the fishing scenes; Toho made their boys fish for real. You WILL believe Sachio Sakai has been on the sea all his life.

Anyhow, Autumn and winter of 1967 was rife with Mifune features at Toho La Brea; in quick succession, they showed Masaaki Kobayashi's Samurai Rebellion, one half of Yagyu Secret Scrolls, and 10,000 Miles of Stormy Seas under its English-language title The Mad Atlantic. Hawaiians got the film much earlier; it was kicking around from January of 1967 to August of that same year.

Our man has his requisite small role, but he manages to pack a lot of being a jerk into his limited screentime. Hirata plays Nozaki, the branch manager of the fishing company who Mifune and Mihashi's characters work for. His greatest hits include firing a guy and then telling him not to get so emotional about it, and essentially saying "sorry, but we gotta put the numbers before the people" after one of the fishermen is permanently disabled by a fishhook to the arm.

Boo, hiss, we're calling OSHA on him.

I promise the subtitles are far, far less crusty on the Blu-Ray. This is just me chucking my files into VLC to take some quick screenshots.

Since I had to watch every millisecond of this movie a thousand times in the process of subbing it, I have special secret knowledge: Nozaki has a given name and it's Koichi. You can see it written above the door to his office in a few scenes, and it's literally the only place his given name is mentioned.² In all media related to this film, he's just credited as "Nozaki".

Riveting, I know.

What actually is kind of riveting is that Hirata does seem to have been among the actors shipped out to Las Palmas for filming. This is all but confirmed by one of the Spanish newspaper articles, which specifies that the scenes at the airport were filmed on location - not just for B-roll but, to quote, "exterior scenes in which the Japanese actors took part". Since Hirata was in those scenes, he must have actually been there. Mifune states in an interview that along with the film crew "five actors and one actress"³ were brought over - that could possibly be Mie Hama, Mifune himself, Makoto Satō, Tatsuya Mihashi, and perhaps Ryo Tamura and Akihiko Hirata. Toho sent him to Guam for Son of Godzilla around this time as well; I guess he was down to go to Las Palmas too.

Now that I've shown screenshots, I can bring up the weird thing about this movie, which is that it's shot in black-and-white. I have nothing against black-and-white filming on principle, but for this specific movie, which includes such beautiful outdoor shots of Las Palmas, it would stand to reason that you'd want the film to be as colorful and vibrant as possible. And what's even stranger is that the original Toho DVD is formatted oddly for no apparent reason. It's in an unusual frame rate: 29.97 whereas, as per my contact who I worked for, "Most of the time the films from Toho will be frame-rate 23.976 'progressive' (AKA 24fps)." The 29.97 frame rate is "usually reserved for TV shows, or the made for TV movies and so on when it goes into the DVD, not actual films..." The likely conclusion we can draw from this is that the movie was in obscurity by the time Toho decided to release it on DVD in 2023, and they had to just kind of work with whatever they could get because an ideal-quality print was not available.

As for the black-and-white, since this was produced by Mifune Productions, I'm going to blame him for that. Mifune appears to double down on this decision in one of the Spanish interviews:

"Who is the movie being made here for?" We asked him.  

"For Taiyo Fishery," he said, "and it will be distributed by Toho worldwide."

"In color?" 

"No, black and white." 

The black-and-white works quite well for the scenes on the fishing boat, especially the dramatic rescue scene, but something about depicting Las Palmas without color just feels downright wrong. Well, Mifune had a vision, I suppose, and who are we to dispute it?

So, now you can watch this movie with English subtitles and you don't even have to go reserve a space in the viewing carrel with my good buddies at BAMFA (they do not know they are my good buddies, but a member of faculty did me a kindness once and I love them for it) or attend a film festival to see it.

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1 I say "helped" because I handled the Japanese-to-English translation while Prince Tyler took care of the Spanish-to-English parts. I was also working off of a transcript, but said transcript was incredibly rough, so the majority of this was done by me, a dictionary, kotobank.jp, and the Japanese Wikipedia page for "Long-line fishing", all working together as one big happy family at 2 in the morning while I was sick with something that might have been covid.

2 To be as unbiased as possible (this is sarcasm, I will always be biased), I should also mention that Tsuda, the young intern mentioned in the American review, also has a given name - Kohji -  that you would not know unless you watched the film and caught the split-second scene where Mihashi's character shows Tsuda's ID around while he's searching for him in Las Palmas.

3 I actually doubt this, because it seems like there's a hell of a lot more than five Japanese actors in scenes that look likely to have been shot on location.