Release date: June 29th, 1966
Director: Kazuo Inoue
Studio: Produced by Tokyo Eiga, released by Toho
Cast: Tomoo Nagai, Keisuke Sonoi, Aiichi Yamada, Yasumi Hara, Gen Shimizu, Nobuo Kaneko, Mayumi Ozora, Akihiko Hirata et al.
Availability: Infrequent theater screenings and at least one pay-per-view television broadcast. No home media release.
____
About 20 years ago, a BBS for Akihiko Hirata fans (yes, there was once such a thing, 'twas a glorious time) conducted a poll where people could vote for their favorite role of his from a fairly decent roster of films. Dr. Serizawa won, to absolutely no one's surprise, but what intrigued me was this movie at the very bottom of the poll, with no votes at all. Although the poll did not include every one of Hirata's 350-odd credits, multiple people voted for roles as obscure as the maybe-an-arms-dealer city councilman in At This Late Date, The Charleston. And yet no one could muster any enthusiasm for (New) News Reporter - The Trap of the Big City?
 |
| Credit to @herenkera1 on Twitter. |
This was part 1 of Toho's duology of films spun off from a popular NHK television drama called Incident Reporter (Jiken kisha), which ran from 1958 to 1966 with a total of 279 episodes. Shortly after it ended, Fuji TV began airing a follow-up series with a few of the same actors from the original that had a shorter run of only 24 episodes, broadcast from October 1966 to March 1967. Concurrently, Nikkatsu also produced a series of theatrical movies - each very short in runtime, around 50 minutes - connected to the series. Ten of these were produced from 1959 to 1962, with, again, a different cast. This brings us, finally, to the Tokyo Eiga/Toho version, a set of two films in which most of the cast from the original series reprised their roles.
Most people who have even passing familiarity with Showa-era media have probably heard of Nikkatsu and NHK, but Tokyo Eiga is a name that comes up less often around here. They were one of two major subsidiaries of Toho (the other being Takarazuka Eiga) that had their own studios, independently located outside of Toho's lot. Being subsidiaries, Toho supplied the studios with their contracted actors and directors, but the technical staff belonged entirely to each studio. Tokyo Eiga was reorganized into Tokyo Eiga Shinsha in 1983 and finally fully merged with Toho and dissolved in 2004. Although Tokyo Eiga was a subsidiary, it actually produced some of Toho's most profitable films, such as the Ekimae series and a few later entries in the Young Guy series.
 |
| The cast of the original NHK drama. Credit to Yoshito Iio on FB. |
As we've just seen, the original series was popular enough to spawn a multitude of spinoffs, but unfortunately Trap of the Big City was not one of the most notable of them. One source1 for information about the film comes from a blog post written by someone who saw the film at its Laputa Asagaya screening in 2014. There are invaluable plot details contained therein, but the best the writer can give us in terms of an actual opinion on the movie is that it's "not that bad". (It is interesting, however, that the writer references the film apparently having a reputation for being mediocre, because that hints at prior critical reception of the film that may be lost to time.) Most reviews I've seen seem pretty positive, although I've heard at least one person say that Nobuo Kaneko does not put in his best performance here.
 |
| Both posters actually use the same picture of Hirata, but the poster at the top of this post flipped it horizontally, for some reason. |
Hirata's role in Trap of the Big City doesn't appear to have been particularly noteworthy. He plays a man named Yano who, according to the Kinema Junpo plot summary, is arrested as a suspect in a mass poisoning event involving a soft drink company. He initially denies responsibility, but is revealed to have had a hand in it after another person confesses to having laced the drinks with poison at Yano's request. Yano doesn't seem to have been the central antagonist of the film, judging by how most of the synopses I've read bring him up and then move on; never having seen the film, though, I can't say for certain how important Hirata's role was. In 1969, he and Yasumi Hara played against each other as culprit and investigator once again for episode 20 of Operation: Mystery.
Aside from the two posters, I haven't been able to scare up any actual pictures of Hirata from the film. Some of our only stills come from a person who appears to really like buses in movies. (Command or ctrl+F "大都会の罠" to find the stills if you don't feel like looking at buses.) As we can see, the film was in color, which I think was considered a point in its favor since the original series was black-and-white. Friend of the blog2 Toshiaki Sato provides a color still of something other than buses.
While I can't find any information about screenings from around the time when the BBS poll would have been going on, I can confirm at least three showings at Laputa in 2014, 2018, and 2022, as well as a pay-per-view broadcast in 2016. In 2010 it was also screened at the Jimbocho theater as part of a film festival focusing on film workers from Azabu, an upscale district of Tokyo. (I'm not sure who among this film's crew hails from Azabu. It wasn't our man, at least; his people are from Nakano.)
So, the movie's obscure, but not forgotten about - it actually has more Google search results by far than most of the stuff I've done research into. The print shown on pay-per-view doesn't seem to be in the best condition, but it blows some of the DeAgostini DVDs I own out of the water. As with almost everything I talk about on here, I can only hope someday this might get a DVD release, or at least some kind soul will upload it in full to the internet.
______
1 There is an old fc2 site that purports to give a very detailed plot summary of this film, but unfortunately, it appears to actually be a summary of the follow-up film.
2 Not really. But I wish he was.
No comments:
Post a Comment