Studio: Toho
Director: Toshio Sugie
Cast: Tadao Takashima, Junko Ikeuchi, Mie Hama, Mitsuko Kusabue, Ichirō Arashima, Tatsuyoshi Ehara, Akihiko Hirata et al
Availability: No known theater screenings. No home media release, but digitized copies of the film possibly exist.
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| "Akihiko Hirata only ever got typecast in very serious scientist-type roles." |
Choosing what to write about on here is more or less arbitrary, with some exceptions: I try to avoid very popular subjects unless I have something interesting to say about them (I was originally going to have a "no Godzilla" rule, look how that turned out) and I try not to write about war movies because I don't want to get canceled. But for this, the decision to write about it was very simple and arose from circumstances outside of my control:
I had a dream about it.
My subconscious mind picked a bit of a tough one. There's not too much information about this movie out there, and the difficulty of looking it up on the internet is compounded by the fact that "Jajauma narashi" also happens to be the Japanese title of The Taming of the Shrew, so a simple Google search brings you all information related to any time The Taming of the Shrew has ever been mentioned in a Japanese-language context. ("Jajauma" is an expression that literally means "restless horse" and is used figuratively to refer to a person who's restless or unmanageable, especially a woman.)
That being said, though... in the process of doing research on this one, I began to draw the conclusion that it was solidly within the "prints of this probably do not exist anymore" category. But then I found something incredible: footage. Someone out there is hanging onto a copy of this movie. Whether it'll ever see the light of day or not remains up to the person who has it, but we can hope. (That Twitter handle sounds very familiar to me, I think we've seen them on the blog before - they may be somebody like @packy1954 who somehow has access to every Toho movie ever made.)
But even an obscure movie needs marketing: lobby cards and posters were produced to advertise the film, many of which still exist and are or have been up for auction. All of the lobby cards share one thing in common; they're very colorful, very mod, very 1960s. That gives us an idea of what the film itself looked like, even if the actual full movie is at present nowhere to be found on home media or streaming.
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| This one isn’t up for auction anymore because I bought it and now it’s in my house. |
The film was adapted from a literary work, although not The Taming of the Shrew; Maruo Shioda's Ijiwaru nyobo sojuho ("A Cruel Wife's Management Ways") provided the source material. Going off of the Kinema Junpo synopsis, it sounds like this is a salaryman comedy about hard-working husbands who are very annoyed by their wives asking for those pesky things women always want (basic attention and stability). At only 66 minutes in runtime, and considering that between its release and today it has fallen into essentially total obscurity, I'm going to hazard a guess that Toho didn't really intend for this to be one of 1966's big blockbusters.
Hirata seems to have played a coworker of Tadao Takashima's character, who was passed over for a promotion in favor of Takashima (or perhaps Takashima just happened to be promoted first, the synopsis isn't very clear). At some point in the film he ends up in a traffic accident (oh no, not Get 'em All again) although the details of that are also not spelled out in the synopsis. He has to have been important enough to end up on one of the lobby cards shown above, but I'm not sure what all he does in the film as he isn't one of the central characters.
I genuinely think maybe 2 people have seen this thing in the past 60 years. There are no reviews on Kinenote or Filmarks and one person has logged it as "seen" on eiga.com. It doesn't look like it's ever been screened in a theater past its initial release. Upon its debut, it played on a double-bill with a Keiju Kobayashi vehicle called The Stranger Within a Woman (Onna no nakani iru tan'nin). Basically, it just kind of seems like Toho needed a second movie for a double bill and immediately forgot it existed after it had done its duty.
That's it for today, thank you for reading if you've gotten this far.
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