あの娘が泣いてる波止場 / Anoko ga naiteiru hatoba / Wharf with the Weeping Girl (1956)

Release date: May 17, 1956

Director: Shigeaki Hidaka

Studio: Toho

Cast: Akira Takarada, Michiya Mihashi, Momoko Kōchi, Akihiko Hirata, Machiko Kitagawa, Shoko Masa, Tetsu Nakamura(?)

Availability: No known home media release or online streaming. No known screenings.

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This is a movie that was adapted from a song! In 1955 Michiya Mihashi recorded Anoko ga naiteiru hatoba, written by Kimio Takano and Tōru Funamura, as a B-side on a King Records single. The song became incredibly popular with fishing boat crews in the port of Kamaishi and sold 1.8 million copies, which made it one of Mihashi's biggest hits. The next year, the song was adapted into a film, featuring Mihashi himself in his debut screen role. The song is just three minutes long and the lyrics seem relatively sparse, so it's fascinating that it ended up being adapted into an entire film. (To be fair, though, the film itself only runs just about an hour.)

Aw come on guys, I thought you hashed this out already like 2 years ago.

Director Shigeaki Hidaka co-wrote the script with Hirosuke Takenaka. Hidaka was active for a relatively brief period of time and didn't produce much of any note, save for a co-screenwriting credit alongside Takeo Murata on a blatant cash-grab sequel to some movie about a giant irradiated lizard. Hidaka is obscure enough that the date of his death is unknown. Takenaka is even worse; he has no Wikipedia page, but evidently he was the screenwriter for both Tea-Picker's Song of Farewell movies, which we have covered here previously. The cinematographer for the film was Jun Yasumoto, who is a bit more prolific; he worked on several Ozu features as well as some good Toho stuff like The Vampire Moth and Samurai I and II.

This is a pretty obscure movie. No reviews on Kinenote or Filmarks; 2 people on Kinenote have logged it as "watched", 2 logged it on eiga.com and 1 logged it on Filmarks (but maybe those are all the same people using different websites). While researching the film, I found a website that I could only access through Wayback Machine where someone wrote about a memory they had of the song. I want to include it for some cultural context.

To my classmates who graduated together in March 1957:

I graduated from a small junior high school in a mountain village famous for the amount of snow in the prefecture. There were 23 of us in my class, and 21 of us, except for two who went on to high school, have now jumped out into the real world. At the time, [...] "The Wharf with the Weeping Girl" was very popular in the school, and the boys often sang it with a parody version. "Goodbye, goodbye, everyone in the class, money is calling me, so I'm off..." It was a pretty intense parody version, but after that, everyone lived an honest and modest life. Every time I attend a class reunion, I think to myself, "Oh, I'm so glad I was in the same class as these people." The classmates who I studied with at the same desk in the classroom are my lifelong friends. Hayaboshi, Funaka-cho, Fushiki-gun, Toyama Prefecture.

From this ad we can infer that this film was the second picture on a double bill with Nobuo Nakagawa's Koi sugata kitsune goten at some point.

The film seems to have played at Cine Tokachi during its original run, but I cannot verify any screenings in recent (or even not-so-recent) memory, which probably means bad things for the chances of a print of this film currently being extant. The song is far more famous than the film. I wish I could give you more on this, it's very intriguing to me since it features a Godzilla cast reunion (and, apparently, Serizawa vs. Ogata, round 2).