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.