日蝕の夏 / Nisshoku no natsu / Summer in Eclipse [1956]

Release date: September 26th, 1956

Director: Hiromichi Horikawa

Studio: Toho

Cast: Shintaro Ishihara, Yoko Tsukasa, Mieko Takamine, Setsuko Wakayama, So Yamamura, Kuniko Miyake, Akihiko Hirata, Makoto Sato, Nadao Kirino, Noriko Sengoku et al.

Availability: No home media or streaming release. Very infrequent theater screenings of a print that is noticeably degraded.

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It's finally summer! Not right now, because I’m writing this way back in spring and putting it in the queue, but that's not important - let's celebrate the solstice with a summery-titled movie.¹

This movie brought to you by... canned peaches, I guess?

This film was adapted from an original work by its star, writer/actor/sucky politician Shintaro Ishihara, who we met briefly in our post about Toho's Youth School TV series. Ishihara is the brother of Yujiro Ishihara, himself quite a prolific actor who has shown up on the blog a few times, most notably in his mainstay role on the long-running detective drama Taiyo ni Hoero!. Shintaro Ishihara was enjoying quite a bit of success in 1956, with Eclipse being the fourth film released that year in which he had a leading role.

Adaptations of Ishihara's literary works were instrumental in the development of what are referred to as "Sun Tribe" films, which portray a kind of rebellious, youthful subculture closely associated with similar American movements such as rockabilly. (Eclipse is the only Sun Tribe movie in Hirata's vast filmography, due mostly to the fact that Toho was generally not putting these kinds of films out; it was usually Nikkatsu.) In addition to writing the original material, Ishihara also co-authored the screenplay with Toshiro Ide, who we've seen here a few times before as well.

Ishihara plays Naoki Mishima, who from plot synopses sounds like a generally disaffected youth, spending much of his time riding motorcycles and motorboating. He has an elder brother named Masaki (played by Hirata) who recently broke off an engagement to a woman named Taeko (Setsuko Wakayama). We later learn that the reason why the engagement was nullified was because Taeko was having an affair with Masaki's father Kozo (So Yamamura). This is only one of what sounds like quite a few joyless and ultimately futile romantic endeavors had by numerous characters, including the protagonist: starting off the film with a girl his age named Kyouko (Yoko Tsukasa), Naoki eventually begins a relationship with another woman, Setsuko (Mieko Takamine), who is several years his senior.

While Ishihara was at the height of his popularity around this time, it doesn't seem like Eclipse is one of his more well-regarded films. Even the director, Hiromichi Horikawa, a purveyor of otherwise very solid films for Toho, regards this one as "a flop" (shippaisaku). Funnily enough, I also encountered an interview with Nobuyoshi Ishihara, Shintaro's fourth son, in which the interviewer brings up a poster for Eclipse hanging in Nobuyoshi's studio; his response was to say, basically, "Yeah that movie was fine but did you hear about the one he did with Francois Truffaut?"

This is a tie-in poster promoting Suzuki's "Colleda" motorcycle model, which featured heavily in the film. (Reminiscent of the Godzilla posters that want to make sure you remember Ogata rides a Cabton.)

Try as I might (and buddy I am trying) I cannot turn up any pictures of Hirata from the film. Reviews that I've read describe his character as "calculating/scheming" which would seem to imply he does have some kind of role in the overall plot, but evidently it was not a big enough role to get him featured on any posters nor even have a little portrait of him in press sheets, the way Toho often did. Here are some weirdly high-quality stills from the film; none feature our man, but I want access to whatever OP's source was for these. I am very curious about this role because I cannot imagine how a character could be described as "scheming" while also having his fiancée end up leaving him for his dad. What exactly is Masaki scheming? A way to win his fiancée back from his dad?

Screenings of the film seem incredibly sparse and reviewers have noted that the print does not look good. This person writes a travelogue featuring a poster for the movie displayed in the city of Ome, which seems to be a smallish place known as a nice respite for those looking to get away from the general Tokyo-ness of Tokyo. Laputa Asagaya has, of course, shown the film at least once.

Thanks to the attention given to the Sun Tribe movement by film scholars studying Japanese cinema, Eclipse has been cited in multiple research papers. None that I've seen, however, go in-depth on the film's actual content; it is simply mentioned as part of a list of Sun Tribe films produced around this period that demonstrate the same kind of boundary-pushing sensibilities as all of their ilk. The majority of these papers have been in English (I assume there are some in Japanese as well, but have not found any) save for one in Italian and one in French.

Outside of Japan, the film made its way to Hawaiian theaters in late 1957 under the unusual but poetic title The Summer the Sun Was Lost. The Honolulu Star-Bulletin advertised the film as "a tense drama of modern Japan". Thanks to the Hawaii Hochi, we have - blessedly, gloriously - an actual English-language review of the film, written by your friend and mine Max Morinaga. I will quote it here in its entirety.

A film which I saw recently and which I found to be oddly entertaining was titled "The Summer The Sun Was Lost".

Shintaro Ishihara, one of present-day Japan's most popular authors, was the star of the film. As an actor, he ain't much. But as I understand it, his novels about juvenile delinquents and teenage sinners are sold by the hundreds of thousands!

"The Summer The Sun Was Lost" didn't do so well at the box office of the Kapahulu, where it was shown last week, but it did a terrific big business in Japan.

One of the high spots of this picture was the scene showing sweet-faced Yoko Tsukasa indulging in some mighty passionate kissing with Shintaro in the semi-darkness of a private garage.

Shintaro is mighty disillusioned when he discovers that his sweet-faced girl has had numerous affairs with numerous boys, and he is also disgusted with his parents when he learns that his father has a mistress and his gentle and gracious mother has a lover!

Shintaro himself indulges in an affair with a middle-aged woman (Mieko Takamine) who still looks mighty good in a bathing suit!

On that note, I think I've given about all the information about this surprisingly obscure film that I can. Considering that its Sun Tribe contemporaries are much better preserved, it's disappointing that this one only seems to live on in dingy prints and no home media release. One can always hope it'll get some kind of digitization before the print degrades past watchability, if it hasn't done so already.

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1 I am not allowed to write about Summer Farewell [Natsu no Wakare].

Koto no Tsume, Revisited (or: Koto no Two-me)

This is just a quick post to make mention of something I'm extraordinarily excited about. Recently, I was contacted by someone who had read my post about Koto no Tsume (which we're henceforth going to call Last Days of the Samurai) and asked me if I was interested in subtitling the movie, since they actually had a copy of it. That's the kind of thing you don't have to ask me twice!

You can now, for the first time in close to 70 years, watch this movie with English subtitles here. Massive thanks to kagetsuhisoka for proofreading and re-timing the entire thing after Aegisub let me down.

Now that I've actually watched the movie, I can say more about it. Last Days of the Samurai is a very emotionally fraught film, but in terms of its visuals, it's quite the bare-bones affair: there are maybe two or three sets (which could very well have been re-used from another production), the whole thing takes place over the span of about two days, and it has a relatively small cast, out of which surprisingly few people have speaking parts. Hirata's character Ushioda only has a couple of lines; his role is basically to be salty about the whole affair and then eventually die off-screen, and yes, as seen above, when we first see him he is shaving Yu Fujiki's face, which is, uh, interesting? Again, not as fun as his role in Inagaki's Chushingura, but I do always enjoy these roles where he gets to be angsty as I think he plays that particular emotion very well.

I find it kind of unusual that Ushioda isn't referred to by name in the film - as in, there's no point where anybody directly addresses him using his name (his name is mentioned, but only when he's off-screen). The same goes for most of the miscellaneous ronin. Looking at the Toho News sheet I included in my last post, it seems like the actors did have their characters' names written under their pictures in promotional materials, but aside from that, you wouldn't be able to tell who the less-prominently-featured members of the cast were meant to be playing.

As for the rest of the cast, this film feels mostly like a vehicle for its three leads (Ganjiro Nakamura, Chikage Ogi and Koshiro Matsumoto), and they really hit it out of the park. There's not much of a script to work with, here, and the storyline is well-trodden territory, but Ogi and Nakamura as the star-crossed lovers especially give a very evocative performance, and Matsumoto pulls off his role with exactly the strong sense of dignity that was no doubt intended. (We may recall Senjaku Nakamura getting all his teeth pulled out in Yagyu Secret Scrolls.) 

Takanori Ushioda's terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad day.

Anyway, if all of that sounds like something you'd be interested in, you can now judge the film for yourself. It's a pleasure to know that this is out there in a format more accessible to English-speakers, so I hope you'll give it a look-see. The link, again, is here, the movie is available as both an mp4 with burned-in subtitles and as a higher-quality mkv.

琴の爪 / Koto no tsume / Koto Plectrum [1957]

Release date: July 13th, 1957

Director: Hiromichi Horikawa

Studio: Toho

Cast: Senjaku Nakamura, Ganjiro Nakamura, Chikage Ogi, Shin Morikawa, Haruo Tanaka, Kojiro Matsumoto, Someshou Matsumoto, Akihiko Hirata, Yu Fujiki, Ikio Sawamura, Sachio Sakai et al

Availability: No home media release; infrequent television broadcasts. Now available on archive.org.

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Edit: Since writing this post, I’ve been given a copy of the film and have subtitled it myself. You can watch it here. I’m leaving this post as is for posterity but do be aware that it is outdated since the full movie is now available.

We've beaten the drum and played the flute, now we're going to pluck the koto with this obscure little 50-minute-long film.

The first thing to know about this movie is that it's directly related to Chushingura, the story best known worldwide as "47 Ronin". While the incident itself took place in the early 1700s, the background of Koto Plectrum dates back only to the 1930s, to a series of Shin Kabuki plays written by Seika Mayama collectively titled Genroku Chushingura. These plays were produced and staged over a seven-year period starting in 1934 and ending in 1942. Koto Plectrum is an adaptation of the last story in the cycle, and its full title is Genroku Chushingura - Oishi's Last Day. For a pretty detailed report on an actual stage performance of this story, see here; you'll need a translator extension if you don't read Japanese, but it seems to translate fairly coherently.

Koto Plectrum was an installment in a surprisingly little-known series of films that Toho called their "Diamond Series". These were very short films (usually under an hour) that were adapted from stories by well-respected authors and were made on a small budget. The first film in the series was Will-O'-The-Wisp, directed by Yasuki Chiba and starring Daisuke Kato; virtually none of the films that follow have had any lasting Western name recognition save for Nobuo Aoyagi's The Living Koheiji which is known to kaidan nerds such as myself. While these were small films, they did not lack for stars; their casts boasted some of Toho's most popular actors at the time.

The cast of our movie is filled with kabuki actors, the most prominent being the two Nakamuras and the two Matsumotos, one of whose career took a bit of an odd turn: Someshou Matsumoto started out on the stage and then left to become a screen actor in the mid-1950s, taking some very small roles in some very recognizable films such as The Human Vapor, King Kong vs. Godzilla, Crazy Big Adventure, and Onibaba, just to name a few.

Speaking of small roles, Hirata plays Takanori Ushioda, also known as Matanojo, a real-life personage who was (obviously) one of the 47 Ako ronin. Matanojo inherited a 200-koku fief and was known to be skilled with a spear; not much about his personal life outside of his involvement with the raid seems to be available. I haven't been able to find any mention of this character in reviews of the film, so I really can't tell you anything about how Hirata plays this role or how involved his character is with the plot (probably not very). I think it's fairly safe to say that whatever he does in this movie is not as cool as his role in Inagaki's Chushingura, because in that one he gets to carry Kira's head.

We have a grand total of two pictures of Hirata in this role, and neither of them are very good.

Laputa Asagaya I'm begging you please use images that are larger than 200x200

...we'll need to "computer, enhance!" that second one...

am I your favorite purveyor of grainy images? please say yes

While there are a fair amount of reviews of the film out there (generally middling; mostly written by kabuki fiends who know their stuff) from its various screenings and television broadcasts - some as recent as last year - there is, as far as I know, no footage of the movie itself available online and not really even any stills. Oddly enough I was able to dig up a bizarrely high-quality behind-the-scenes photo from an obituary for Chikage Ogi on [checks notes] a sports website:

...but, really, there's scarce little mention of this out there, although it has apparently been digitized, which means it could be released on DVD if Toho saw fit. 

Another odd thing to note is that this film is on Letterboxd (which itself is surprising) under the English title "Last Days of the Samurai". This title seems to have been more or less arbitrarily chosen; it's the kind of phrase you hear tossed about in reference to various events and media, and was also the English title of a more famous film, The Pass: Last Days of the Samurai. While the film did have a Western release (again, this is very surprising to me), it was not under that title; the export title was instead Chushingura Hero, which will provide our segue into talking about this film's life outside of Japan.

Most probably the film played in other theaters, but the only record of it in Hawai'i that I can find is a few showings throughout Februrary of 1958 at the Kapahulu in Honolulu. It played on a double bill with 1956's Engagement Ring which does appear to also have been one of Toho's Diamond features. 

Quite soon afterward, in March of 1958, the film played in Los Angeles' Adams Theater; I can find virtually no information about this. It seems to have played on a double bill during this run as well, potentially with Floating Clouds which if you ask me is just not really very fair to Koto Plectrum.

After this initial 1958 run, the Rio Theatre in San Francisco showed the film in March of 1961 under yet another English title, A Samurai's Last Hour, on a double bill with Saga of the Vagabonds. And look! Look!! They actually name our man in the cast! (For Vagabonds, not Plectrum, but still, this is rare to see.)

The final American run of the film I can confirm was when it finally made its way into the Toho La Brea in January of 1962. While the film itself first showed in Western theaters in 1958, America seems to consider 1962 its "official" release date, and you'll still see that listed as its year of release in various corners of the internet. I guess a movie doesn't matter until it plays in Los Angeles?

In 1962 our film was included (under the title "Last Day[sic] of Samurai") in the Academy Award Reminder List of Eligible Releases, a booklet given to members of the Academy that - as the name would imply - lists every film eligible for an Academy Award that year. Now, Koto Plectrum was, of course, nowhere even remotely near being nominated for an Academy Award, but it is very interesting to know that members of the Academy were aware of it, and perhaps thought about it for a moment before moving on to whatever else was popular that year.

And now, today, where is this movie? Nowhere. Can you and I watch it? No. From Oscar eligibility to total (Western) obscurity in 64 years...