大学の山賊たち / Daigaku no sanzokutachi / University Bandits (1960)

Release date: July 31st, 1960

Director: Kihachi Okamoto
Studio: Toho
Cast: Tsutomu Yamazaki, Akira Kubo, Mickey Curtis, Makoto Satō, Tatsuya Ehara, Yumi Shirakawa, Misa Uehara, Ken Uehara, Sachio Sakai, Kin Sugai, Akihiko Hirata, Ikio Sawamura, Yoshio Tsuchiya, Koji Tsuruta, Tadao Nakamaru et al.

Availability: Online streaming on Japanese Amazon Prime only within Japan; DVD release.

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This is an exciting one: a movie from Toho's "golden age" with all the dudes in it, directed by Kihachi Okamoto shortly after his solo debut, with a soundtrack by Masaru Satō - and it takes place in some kind of haunted cottage? Sign me up. Wacky unofficial English titles for this film include "The Spook Cottage", "Bad Boys at University", and "University Rascals". (This has nothing to do with Daigaku no Oneechan.)

This film is not obscure at all if you live in Japan; anybody with an Amazon Prime account can chuck it on right now. But having a DVD is so much more fun, isn't it? Almost as fun as having a VHS tape, which is almost as fun as having a LaserDisc.

Together, we're going to find out the answer to the foremost question on my mind: does he ski? (Spoiler: No.)

The film begins with the end of a film: the head of Marukyu Department Store (Ken Uehara) watching a film about skiing. Uehara's character, Niwa, plans to buy up huts on a mountain to take advantage of the current skiing fad. Hirata plays the manager of the department store, and Yasuhisa Tsutsumi plays the store's publicity manager. Tsutsumi's Wikipedia page notes that he turned down invitations to go hang out at Ishirō Honda's house - an invitation that Honda extended to many of the actors he frequently worked with, including Hirata, who apparently would go over there and sing. (Oh to be a fly on the wall, am I right?)

I digress. At the same time, an all-male college mountaineering group calling themselves "Sanzoku" ("mountain bandits") is recreating on a mountain. At the same time as that, a separate group of all-female climbers is also on the same mountain, hearing the college group's antics from farther away.

Sidenote: Mickey Curtis was a very inexperienced skiier when he was cast here, in a role that required him to ski. Yūzō Kayama, who had yet to debut as an actor at the time but was known to be a good skiier, taught Curtis during production. According to Curtis, this may have led to Kayama catching Toho's eye and eventually becoming one of their big stars throughout the 1960s, but it's just an anecdote, so take it at face value.

Mickey Curtis shibari? Alright, fine.

Niwa meets up with Officer Ikio Sawamura as he departs his train to the mountain. Sawamura's character tells him that the hut he's intending to scope out and buy is supposed to be haunted. There was an accident where a man died thirty years ago, and now his widow (chanson singer and Takarazuka lady Fubuki Koshiji) lives there with her servant Rokusuke (Sachio Sakai). The deceased man, as we will see, looked identical to Niwa.

I want to know specifically who got to paint Ken Uehara's portrait. I wish it were me.

Meanwhile, the college boys and the girls become aware of each other's presence because Makoto Satō's character Hara ("stomach", since he's always talking about how hungry he is; they all have nicknames) keeps yelling their catchphrase "Bakkyaro" (バッキャロー) loud enough for the whole world to hear. This is kind of a slangy colloquial term that comes from "bakayarou" ("stupid bastard", basically). Anyway, one of the girls bakkyaroes back at Hara and the two climbing teams begin singing in tandem as they draw closer to each other's camp, with the girls trying to ignore the guys.

Mickey Curtis' character Guinea (I'm thinking there's some kind of pun going on here considering that he is an OB/GYN student... "Guinea" could sound vaguely like "GYN" if you pronounce it a certain way) is pretty bad at skiing even within the film, which makes the anecdote I mentioned at the start of the film even funnier - he was so inexperienced, he had to be taught to be even a bad skiier. He's not as bad on a mountain as Niwa, though, who passes out during a blizzard on his way to the hut. The group - now an amalgam of the guys and the girls - has to rescue him.

The group takes him to the creepy mountain hut so they can all wait out the storm. They meet the widow who lives there and introduce themselves. She's a little "off", and I love how Koshiji is playing this character. It's perfect to have a stage actress in the role, her theatrics feel over-the-top outside of a stage setting and it works great with how eccentric the widow is meant to be.

The widow takes them upstairs to her terrifying cobwebbed attic where the ghost of her husband sits in a chair. Only she can see him. The room is decorated with nude portraits he did for which she was the model. While Niwa is still delirious, the group realizes how much he resembles another portrait: the one of the widow's deceased husband! The widow's behavior is creepy on the outside, but really just kind of sad.

"Shujin desu." ("The man of the house.")

[all bow confusedly]

Sidenote: I really wasn't ready for baby Makoto Satō's super fluffy hair in this.

After Niwa wakes up, the widow just assumes he's her husband - she has been seeing, hearing and interacting with him all this time, so it's not strange to her that he's there in the flesh. But it's quite strange to him.

Uehara being called "boya"

One of the girls (Otora, played by Rumiko Sasa) can see the ghost too, and it's a great scene: she wakes up in the night to use the toilet, encounters the ghost-husband sitting by the fire, asks where the restroom is, and he extends his arm for her to link elbows with him, but when she tries, she passes right through him. The ghost is actually very much a part of the film, and he's distinguishable from the living Niwa by his pipe and his wig. He skis. He gets hit with snowballs. There's another cool (and very trademark Okamoto) shot here where the ghost getting hit in the face with a snowball segues into Niwa getting splashed with water as the ghost squeezes out his wet gloves back at the hut. (The ghost can, of course, teleport.)

I'm really not used to seeing Ken Uehara in a comedic role like this. Like, that's Metalder's dad! What's he doing sledding down a flight of stairs?

Niwa does reveal eventually that he's not the woman's husband, he's from a department store and he wants to use her for land development. He explains his plans to develop the cabins into exclusive hotel-style resorts and all the skiiers are against it. Even the ghost is against it.

We are now just over a half hour into the film and the main villains are introduced: Tadao Nakamaru as "Ken", a gangster posing as a foreign prince who is really on the run from the police, and Akira Wakamatsu as "Sabu", posing as his servant. They are being pursued by Yoshio Tsuchiya keibu. The two gangsters convince Rokusuke that they're bigwigs so he will escort them safely to the hut and away from the pursuing detective and cops. I should mention that Masaru Satō score: for most of the film it's very stately and not too distinctive, but there's a faux-Arabesque leitmotif that plays when Ken and Sabu are around that is very much the Satō we're used to.

The cops vs. thugs shootout triggers an avalanche. The skiiers are now snowed in at the cabin along with the widow, the president, and the ghost. They sit down to eat together, but the widow, realizing Rokusuke has been caught outside and is probably dead, wants a moment of silence. During this silence, Rokusuke enters, carrying the two gangsters with him. Back down the mountain, the president's staff and the police are all now well aware that there's trouble going on up at that hut, and send a team up after them.

Akira Kubo's character Uchuu ("Space", kind of the nerdy one) fixes up an old radio, and the group is able to hear a report about what's been going on while they're snowed in. They're relieved to hear that people know they're missing. The gangsters are less than relieved that the skiiers now know they're gangsters and not foreign dignitaries. They order the skiiers to hand over their limited supply of food at gunpoint and also order Tsutomu Yamazaki's character Okashira ("Head" since he's the leader) to escort them down the mountain.

This ends up being their downfall, since Okashira is a much stronger skiier, and leads them down a difficult trail, watching them struggle to keep up while he's doing just fine. He and Tatsuyoshi Ehara's character Zeimusho (literally "tax office"... yeah, I don't see the logic behind that one) leave the gangsters in the lurch and return to the hut with their stolen food.

The widow remarks with pity on how the two gangsters were left to basically die of exposure, which makes Okashira realize that leaving people to die on the mountain is not the way real mountaineers do things, and he decides to go rescue them. Zeimusho objects but is overruled by all, including the ghost. So now we're partying with the gangsters again.

Ken has a knife, but Zeimusho has a gun... an unloaded gun. Ken and Sabu seize the stores of food and begin spitefully devouring it all as the widow and the non-ghost watch. But then it happens: Ken develops appendicitis. Noooobody expects the Sudden Appendicitis. The closest thing they have to a doctor is Guinea. Guinea is forced to do a jury-rigged operation on Ken, but he needs blood; fortunately the widow is a universal donor. (Funny bit here where the group is asked what their blood types are and Otora replies "C!")

With their food stores running out, something has to be done. Okashira and Zeimusho leave the cabin to try to find help. They're gone for a long time, and the group fears the worst, but eventually Okashira returns with a bag full of food. However, with Ken still recovering from his super gross mountain hut blood transfusion, Sabu is in charge, and Sabu is the mean one. He wants that food, and takes one of the girls hostage. The ghost turns on maximum spook mode, but there's only so much a ghost can do, and Sabu escapes down the mountain. Hara, Uchuu and Okashira pursue, catching up to them easily since they're on skis and the gangsters aren't. While Hara is slapping the stuffing out of him, we see the rescue team crest the mountain.

Niwa rips up the contract he brought to try to get the widow to sign over her property to him. The police and everyone else arrive, and the detectives and cops escort the two gangsters out in handcuffs and a stretcher. Koji Tsuruta is here too, but he's got a very nothingburger role. I guess they just wanted him in this. At the very end the actual crown prince who the gangsters were faking affiliation with shows up but I did not take screenshots of him because he's Arihiro Fujimura in brownface. (Everybody is kinda in brownface here because they're all sunburnt to hell, but Fujimura is in, like, brownface brownface.)

This was a fun watch. Kihachi Okamoto is in full swing after crafting his earlier directorial efforts in a relatively restrained, "just doing a job" mode. The flourishes that we love to see in his movies - creative cuts that blend scenes into each other; irreverent, often lewd humor; a little absurdity and a little bit of heart - are all here. I love how the story about the widow living with her husband's ghost looks strange on the surface but is handled with so much empathy - and, really, she's not delusional at all, because the ghost does objectively exist. My only complaint is that this had just the tiniest smallest most inconsequential role for Hirata but I'm plenty used to that at this point.

青島要塞爆撃命令 / Chintao yōsai bakugeki meirei / Siege of Fort Bismarck [1963]: Another Very Special Post

Release date: May 29th, 1963
Studio: Toho
Director: Kengo Furusawa
Cast: Ryō Ikebe, Jun Tazaki, Yosuke Natsuki, Makoto Sato, Tōru Ibuki, Yūzō Kayama, Akihiko Hirata, Mie Hama, Susumu Fujita, Bokuzen Hidari, Yasuhisa Tsutsumi et al.
Availability: Unsubtitled Japanese DVD available via Toho. English dub available online. English-subtitled Blu-Ray also available.

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I come to you once again with another movie that I subtitled (check out the last one too). 

I first watched this unsubtitled several years ago, and although my Japanese skills were worse then than they are now, I still enjoyed it for its many explosions. In fact, the film's remarkable tokusatsu was something that I remembered very clearly even years later. The effects were done by Eiji Tsuburaya, who had previously created miniatures for propaganda films that were so realistic they fooled the U.S. government into thinking they were real, and other recognizable names populate the effects department too: Sadamasa Arikawa was in charge of photography, and a young Teruyoshi Nakano served as assistant director of special effects, uncredited.

This is a plane nerd movie. The film takes place in the second year of WWI, when naval aviation in Japan was still in its infancy and airplanes were starting to be used in battle worldwide for what was essentially the first time. It is set in the time leading up to and during what is known in the West as the "Siege of Tsingtao", a joint Japanese-British operation against the German port of Qingdao within the Jiaozhou Bay Leased Territory, a section of China that Germany had acquired following political tensions at the turn of the century. Japanese troops massively outnumbered the Germans (24,500 to 3,750) and also took far greater losses. While the film is much more character-driven and doesn't focus too much on historical background apart from the opening narration, it is accurate that the Japanese Navy at this time did indeed have exactly two airplanes, one of which was destroyed. Read more about the event in its Wikipedia article here. Notably, British presence in the operation is entirely absent from Siege of Fort Bismarck.

There are incredibly detailed miniature replicas of planes...

...and there are extremely impressive full-scale models of planes.

That’s a real human on top of it, not a model.

The two types of plane featured in the film are the French-imported Farman MF.11 Shorthorn (whose engine was produced domestically in Japan under the "Re-type" name, and the aircraft itself produced under the name "Mo-type") and the Rumpler Taube, the latter of which is just a gorgeous machine, although it doesn't have as much screentime. Even the smaller model planes in Fort Bismarck had a wingspan of over one meter (3.2 feet), and the full-scale models were suspended from a helicopter for filming. (The full-scale models had functional rotors, but presumably could not actually get airborne.)

I also have to emphasize that, again, the explosions in this movie are unparalleled. The final ten minutes of this movie features a chain-reaction explosion sequence that is more intense than pretty much any other Toho movie of this era - that includes Godzilla films.

We're now going to move outside of Japan to talk about the movie's English dub. It was dubbed in Hong Kong by Axis International in the same year as its Japanese release and available for TV syndication through Westhampton Film Corporation. The dub is fully extant and you can grab the audio online here; for some reason, it's also available as an optional track on the Italian DVD release of the film. It's... certainly a '60s Hong Kong dub, that's about all I can say. Our patron saint of obscure Toho MSpaceHunter has the dub credits on YouTube, so you can watch them below.

As with most Japanese releases from this era, Hawai'i got the movie first. The film played throughout May and June of 1965. Unfortunately I can give no further information on the Hawaiian run other than that it happened; after June the movie disappears from the papers.

Moving on to Los Angeles, the film has more of a presence.

According to TV guides from the Los Angeles area, the film began airing on television in the middle of August 1966. This is a bit unusual because it actually precedes the Los Angeles theatrical release of the film by two years. In March 1968, the film opened at the Toho La Brea. Here's the full review, cobbled together from an OCR'd newspaper page:

'Fort Bismarck' Opens at the Toho La Brea 

BY KEVIN THOMAS Times Staff Writer 

Just before the outbreak of World War I, the Germans built a fortress on the Chinese peninsula of Liaotung. Siding with the Allies, Japan sent out military and naval forces to put down the Huns. She also provided two fragile-looking planes, a pair of Farmans imported from France. "Siege of Fort Bismarck," an old-fashioned action-packed war picture (at the Toho La Brea) focuses on the exploits of the four men who piloted the Farmans. It's the perfect entertainment for small boys. In fact, with its episodic plot and strong doses of service comedy, it resembles nothing so much as a condensation of an old serial, complete with cliffhangers.

The novelty, of course, is that the Japanese are fighting the Germans this time instead of us fighting them both. Most adults, however, are likely to consider this picture the way they consider such World War I airborne adventures as "Hell's Angels" [...] great in the sky, silly on the ground. (Believe it or not, our four heroes even run afoul of a Chinese Mata Hari.) "Siege at[sic] Fort Bismarck," nonetheless, is strong in production values and special effects. Its director, Kengo Furusawa, supplies plenty of verve.

That "great in the sky, silly on the ground" thing is a point I noticed while I was subtitling the film as well: I didn't catch any of the comedy the first time around, but after having to translate every single line, I realized that it is very goofy. The pilots are mostly a bunch of chuckleheads who sometimes end up having to be towed across the Chinese peninsula by oxen, although in their defense nobody really knew how to fly an airplane yet.

We will now take a deep dive to look at the film outside of both the U.S. and Japan. We'll start off with the film's Thai release and its corresponding poster. Mie Hama-sploitation aside, this is a surprisingly well-made poster; a real human artist had to spend a lot of time on those portraits and they do look pretty nice. (The tagline says "See battles from World War I like you've never seen them before!")

She was wearing much more clothing in the scene this was based off of.

Italy put in less effort, and was also slow to acquire the film, releasing it in 1972. The poster art they used looks like it was recycled from a pulp magazine for boys. This also reflects the troubling Italian tradition of putting a big picture of a white guy and a bunch of random Western-sounding names on a poster for reasons that I can only assume have to do with wanting to avoid making it too obvious that the movie is Japanese.

I can't lay the blame solely on Italy for that artwork, though, because Greece's earlier release of the film seems to be the source of it. Or at least I think that's the case; I can't determine whether Greece got the film in 1963 or whether the website I found this poster on was just listing the original Japanese release date. Aesthetically, though, this flyer does look older than 1972. The art itself looks like it could date back to the 1940s (or even '30s, honestly.)

Mia Xama!

Mexico was just a little bit behind, receiving the film in 1978. This is the sole record I have of a Spanish-language release, and I don't know whether the film was shown subtitled or dubbed. At least viewers knew it was in Eastmancolor! (It wasn't, it was in Tohoscope, which has basically the same specs, but it still bothers me when people call them the same.)

credit @grajallywood on insta

The film was apparently shown in Brazil in 1964 at Cine Jóia, a Japanese theater in Sao Pãolo that was later turned into a concert hall. Or at least I assume it was; the paper only says that a trailer for it was shown, but that would lead me to believe that the full film did come some time later.

The main feature was Kigeki ekimae chagama ("Station Front Comedy: Teakettle"), starring Frankie Sakai.

Totally off-topic, but man, check out this picture of Cine Jóia with a huge marquee of Akira Takarada on it.

I hope you've enjoyed our little excursion around the world, but now we're going back to Japan to talk about the star of the show. Akihiko Hirata plays Navy Captain Yoshikawa. He is in full dress uniform for the entirety of his screentime (which isn't much) and boy does he have a mustache. He does quite a lot of shouting in the last act of the film, but that aside, it's always nice to subtitle him because he usually enunciates very clearly, unlike SOME people I know (Tatsuya Mihashi).

"Maybe I will grow a mustache." -Lieutenant Nakazawa (Submarine E-57 Will Not Surrender)

That's a 2.5mb png, baby!

The thing that I remembered most from the first time I watched this movie is that there's a scene where Yoshikawa jumps into the ocean with all his clothes on. Which is disgusting, because this was probably filmed on Toho's Big Pool set and that thing was a cesspit.

The last thing I'll say about this one is that it happens to be the one and only time that Hirata and Masahiko Naruse appeared in the same film together - this is significant because Naruse voiced Dr. Serizawa in the 1954 radio play version of Godzilla, making Siege of Fort Bismarck the only movie that has a cast of not just one but two Serizawas. I have mentioned this before because I think it is neato. (Naruse plays the Chinese spy who attempts to blow up the Japanese ship using a junk boat set on fire.)

I gotta say I enjoyed this one more the second time around. It's a fun movie. I can see why it was exported for the U.S. market. More importantly, I hope YOU enjoy it when you see it with subtitles.

青春デカメロン / Seishun Dekameron / Youth Decameron [1950]

Release date: May 9th, 1950

Studio: Shintoho

Director: Goro Kadono

Cast: Kyoko Kagawa, Akira Kishii, Saburo Boya, Kyu Sazanka, Shintaro Kido, Kasho Sanyutei, Motomi Hirose, Kingoro Yanagiya et al

Availability: No home media or streaming release. One confirmed theater screening and one confirmed television broadcast in the 1980s. Prints said to be extant.

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A while back I posted about the two films I know of that Akihiko Hirata worked on as an assistant director during his time at Shintoho before he became an actor. The earlier of the two, Lynching, I was actually able to get a hold of, but I wasn't going to go into as much depth for Youth Decameron, since it's much more obscure. However, I've decided there is in fact enough information about it to fill out a post (and consequently I'm going to take down my original post about both movies, since it's not necessary now that I've written about them separately in their own dedicated posts).

This poster is from the film's shortened re-release in 1956 under the title Crazy Uproarious Laughter (Bokusho koukyo tanoshi¹) (extremely rough translation).

Let's start with the director, Goro Kadono. Kadono was one of the founding members of Shintoho, working with the company starting in 1947 after it split off from Toho. In 1948 he began working as an assistant director under the likes of Kon Ichikawa and Yasuki Chiba, and in 1950 he made his debut as a solo director with Youth Decameron, but would continue picking up work as an assistant director even afterward, while still also directing his own features. Kadono directed 20 pictures for Shintoho, but after the studio collapsed, the last record of him is that he worked on a pink film called Peeping Private Room (Nozokareta koshitsu) for Sankyo in 1964. Nothing else is known of his whereabouts after that, and his date of death is not recorded.

The film's screenwriter, Umetsugu Inoue, is a far bigger name. Inoue had been at Keio University's Faculty of Economics when he was drafted, and after the war he continued school and graduated in 1947, subsequently beginning a career at Shintoho. He became a director after working as an assistant (and other jobs) for only five years - a relatively short period within Japan's rigid studio system. He joined Nikkatsu in the mid-'50s with some success, then went freelance in 1960 and worked for several studios before ultimately joining Shochiku Ofuna. This put him on a trajectory that would result in him being mentioned on this very blog: Inoue directed for Edogawa Ranpo's Beauty Series, which is one of only a few series that could boast appearances from multiple Onodas. Inoue also directed Hirata in New Hangman. Since both Ranpo and Hangman aired in the '80s, their paths had been crossing for well over 30 years at that point.

I wrote more about what an assistant director's job was at this time and what Hirata may have been doing more specifically in my post about Lynching, but in short: since he was uncredited, he could not have been either a chief assistant director or a first assistant director and was probably not even a second assistant director, which means we can narrow down the scope of his work on the film to things like setting up props, writing staging descriptions, working with extras for crowd scenes, working with any animals required on-set, miscellaneous work assisting the other assistant directors, or just holding the clapperboard. He would have been 22 at this time and working under his birth name.

Now onto the movie itself.

You can probably tell from the posters and the cast that this is a comedy. In broad strokes it seems to be of the "country bumpkins come to the city" story type. Ken Shimomura, who does data collection for Nippon Eiga's Shintoho database (a website which I very frequently use), managed to get an original pamphlet for the movie which has a little chunk of blurb on it as well as a cute portrait of Kyoko Kagawa.

A quick machine translation of the text says:

"A lineup of top entertainers, featuring art, songs, and pink excitement! A dreamlike tale of Tokyo's One Thousand and One Nights!"

"This is a striptease film with songs, and a very entertaining film. The staff is amazing. Director Goro Kadono is a rising star, and we have high hopes for his future. [Umetsugu Inoue] also showed his sharpness in the [...]"

Yes, that's right, our man worked on pink films. Keep in mind that this was de rigeur for Shintoho, and what was racy back then would hardly merit a batted eyelash today. Director Goro Kadono actually got in trouble during another production for asking Michiko Maeda to hike up her skirt.

One of my other main sources of general film information, Toshiaki Sato², relates a general outline of the plot: four friends working as shepherds on a ranch dream about moving to Tokyo and getting hired at a renowned cabaret called "Blue Fantasy". They learn where the owner of the cabaret is staying, and try to plot and scheme their way into getting him to hire them, only to find that the "owner" is an impostor. According to Sato, there were a lot of musical interludes featuring tons of performers who were popular at the time.

Kyoko Kagawa was not top billed, but she was undoubtedly who Shintoho wanted people to know was in the film before anyone else. The tagline even mentions her character Oharubo (a nickname, probably for "Haruka") by name. Without a real plot synopsis, though, I can't tell you anything else about who she plays. The rest of the main cast is mostly comedians, one stripper (Motomi Hirose), and several more prominent actors in small roles, including Kingoro Yanagiya and jazz singer Dick Mine.

Fitting for such a vanishingly obscure film, the only confirmed theater screening in the last 75 years took place at a bit of a strange location: Studio ams, a multi-purpose hall (not a movie theater) on the fifth floor of the Sangenjaya building, as part of a Kyoko Kagawa film festival. All of my information about this screening comes also from Ken Shimomura, who says he thinks the screening took place sometime in the 1990s but has no more specific details than that.

Now I did mention that the film was re-cut and re-released in 1957 under a different title, but unfortunately the extent of what I can find about the re-release version is that it exists. Given what I found out about the shortened version of my pet movie Rakugo nagaya wa hana zakari, it's possible the film was recut to be played at a small film festival, or it could have just been a regular theatrical re-release by an ailing film studio desperate to bring in cash.

I think that's about all I can tell you for this one. If I can manage to find out any other films Hirata AD'd on (there has to have been more than two) I will of course write about them, but for now, I think I've pretty well covered it.

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^{1 If you Google Translate the kanji for this into Chinese it says "Hilarious sex orgy". Just thought I'd throw that out there.}

2 Toshiaki Sato please hit me up. You are my idol.