Release date: December 20, 1949
Director: Nobuo Nakagawa
Studio: Shintoho
Cast: Kanjūrō Arashi, Ranko Hanai, Yoshiko Kuga, Ryō Ikebe, Eitarō Shindō, Eijirō Tōno, Makoto Kobori, Tamae Kiyokawa
Availability: DVD release. Also available on archive.org.
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December 2025 edit: I'm tremendously happy to announce that a year after making this post, this film is now available on DVD through Shintoho Cinema Nostalgia. The Internet Archive link will remain up until or unless it gets copyright-struck. The back of the box makes no mention of Hirata, but you and I know, don't we?
HUGE thanks to Pinball Novice for this one.
Before Akihiko Hirata became an actor, he worked part-time for Shintoho as an assistant director. This was something I knew about since I started this blog, but I was never able to find out which movies he worked on until I unexpectedly stumbled upon two Shintoho films that he supposedly worked on. Both are incredibly obscure, but one had been digitized at some point. This is the film we're going to look at today. I'll first get into a little background on the film itself.
Lynching was the first collaboration between Nobuo Nakagawa and Kanjūrō Arashi, one of Japan's early film stars, and was the fourth postwar work produced by Nakagawa. According to Ryō Ikebe, this film was the template for the yakuza films that Arashi would become prolific in later in his career. As of 1949, Shintoho's films were still being distributed through Toho, the company they had broken off from after the bitter labor dispute of the mid-1940s, but despite this, Shintoho attempted to release Lynching independently. Toho responded in classic Toho fashion and filed a provisional injunction, claiming they had financed production costs of Lynching and eight other films in advance; this injunction was granted, and Lynching was ultimately released by Toho. The film was based on a novel by Sunao Otsubo published the same year as its release.
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| Toho: "Nice movie you got there. Would be a shame if it didn't get released because it was tied up in a distribution rights dispute." |
So what does an assistant director do?1
In the past, an assistant director position was essentially an apprenticeship. It was not common at all for someone to become a full-time film director without having worked through the ranks (chief, second, third, fourth, etc) of assistant director positions beforehand. The relationship between ranks was complicated and each position came with its own responsibilities: second and third were generally much busier than chief, with duties that involved costume, makeup, and art/props; fourth was essentially an assistant position to third and was also usually the person in charge of the clapperboard as well as any animal handling necessary for the film. There are degrees even below fourth as well, but their duties seem to have been more nebulous. When film staff were largely contracted employees of a specific film company, rather than freelancers, only the chief and sometimes up to the second assistant director would receive credits on film.
Now, I don't have all the details on exactly what rank Hirata was when he was working as an assistant director at Shintoho.2 I don't know exactly what he was doing on set of Lynching, but from an interview where he speaks about the film, he does talk about working with Yoshiko Kuga, so he could potentially have been second assistant director, although I'm not sure if a part-timer would have that position. With no direct confirmation, though, he could have had a wide range of duties, such as handling props and writing staging descriptions, working with extras for crowd scenes, directing still photographs, or just assisting other ADs and holding the clapperboard. During production of Lynching he would have been not quite 22 and working under his real name (Onoda).
Good god I feel like I'm putting myself and everybody reading this through film school. Let's get on with it.
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| As assistant director one of the things Hirata may have been responsible for is setting up props in scenes like this one, and directing the extras to their places. |
The film is set at the beginning of the Showa era (so after 1925). It is a yakuza movie centered around the Sugawara family (yes, Sugawara as in Bunta). The family takes care of an annual festival at Kongōji Temple, but Seikichi (Kanjūrō Arashi), a young member of the group, was given short shrift during preparations for this festival due to the jealousy of his older peers. The whole suburb - of which the Sugawara gang is a large component - is busy with the festival, doing things like making dolls, hauling heavy stuff around, etc. There's a horse.
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| If he were fourth AD it is entirely possible he also dealt with this horse. |
Seikichi is also in love with a waitress named Okayo (Ranko Hanai). She wants him to leave the yakuza and run away with her, but he hesitates. Umewaka (Eijirō Tonō), an older member of the gang, offers Seikichi a deal: if he steals a golden Buddha statue that is important for the festival, he will be allowed to leave the gang with Okayo. Perhaps vulnerable to bribes and deals due to being in love and disillusioned with his fellow gang members, Seikichi takes it - but it's not what it seems. Umewaka (and another member, Hiō, played by Eitaro Shindo) just want him gone.
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| Ranko Hanai played the lead in the 1938 film Falling Blossoms, and would unfortunately die at the age of 42. |
To cap off the tension created in the scene where Seikichi takes the deal, we see him chopping wood with an axe immediately afterward. This is one of a few one-off shots that feel very satisfying because the pure symbolism provides a quick break from the action in front of us. I also noted a shot of ripples in a pond while Seikichi is on the run later in the film. Nakagawa is an excellent director even in his non-kaidan works.
This foreshadows the following events: Seikichi knife-fights Umewaka in a well-choreographed scene on a bridge, soundtracked by rushing wind. The title of the film comes from the scene after this, where Seikichi is lynched by the rest of the Sugawara family who weren't in on the Buddha statue heist, trying to get information out of him about its whereabouts.
Seikichi is ultimately arrested for stealing the statue. He leaves behind Okayo, who at this point is pregnant with their child. Shogoro Sugawara (Makoto Komori), the boss of the gang, has a young son who has been hanging around - he will become important later.
Seikichi escapes prison, but it doesn't take long before his old family tries to kidnap him. He manages to escape and there's a struggle with a gun afterward in which Umewaka is killed and Seikichi is wounded, all while the police are in hot pursuit. Seikichi makes it just close enough to where Okayo is staying with their daughter to be able to hear her crying before he is again arrested, despite pleading with the cops.
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| Let me tell you, I was looking reeeeeeal close at the extras in this movie. |
War has broken out by the time of his third escape attempt. He is imprisoned once more and put to work at a sewing machine, with fifteen years added to his sentence.
It is now 1945, and Nobuo Sugawara - the boy from before - is grown. This is Ryō Ikebe's role in the film. Ikebe is one of those people who is much older than he looks; in this film he is 31 playing a ~24-year-old.
Seikichi's daughter Kuwako, also grown up now, is played by Yoshiko Kuga, all of 17 and already with three years' acting experience, singing her heart out solo. Nobuo looks after Okayo and Kuwako while Seikichi serves the last years of his sentence.
Kuwako is a bit of a firebrand and sings in the black market in association with Sakurai Bussan, the gang formed after the dissolution of the Sugawara family. Nobuo, a demobbed soldier, is now a shoemaker. They have a budding romance, but the Sakurai Bussan dudes don't care for it. There's an excellent scene where Nobuo brawls with the gang while Kuwako plays with a pop gun in an arcade, unbothered. I'm gonna level with y'all: Kuga is the centerpiece of this film. She's fantastic.
Seikichi, meanwhile, is released from prison. He is fraught with the anxiety of having been away from his wife and child for 18 years. He hasn't escaped the yakuza life, however: the boss of Sakurai Bussan is Hiō, the old boss of the Sugawara gang, and they know to wait for him as soon as he gets out of prison. They get him good and drunk to try to make him reveal the location of the golden Buddha. But Nobuo witnessed him being hustled into a car by the Sakurai gang, so he lets Okayo know what happened. Seikichi is too smart to get fooled again this time, though, and absconds in the middle of the night.
So. I remembered something about this movie. Or rather, I remembered something, but I didn't know that it was about this movie until now.
In the Kinejun interview I translated, Hirata brings up holding a platform steady for Yoshiko Kuga to stand on, but since I hadn't seen this movie (and had previously only read that interview as a garbled translation), I didn't realize what he was talking about. So that means that in this scene right here...
Just out of frame is a 21-year-old Akihiko Onoda holding a wooden platform steady while the woman he would marry 12 years later stands on it to kiss her co-star.
And, I mean, not to be weird about it or anything, but oh my fucking god.
So anyway. The end of the film.
Seikichi escapes and runs into the shoe shop where Nobuo works and where Kuwako is staying. He doesn't recognize her and just begs her to be quiet and hide him while the gang is after him. After the coast is clear he reveals who he is to Kuwako, who runs to Okayo and tells her, the two of them both in disbelief. Nobuo asks Seikichi why he's on the run and he confesses the story of the stolen statue. This is all very emotional: 18 years in prison for basically not much; getting tricked into stealing a statue and killing someone in a situation that was hardly his fault where his own life was in danger. Nobuo gives Seikichi a dressing-down and convinces him to reveal the whereabouts of the statue to the police.
Hiō captures Seikichi and tries to lynch him again. Nobuo, meanwhile, goes to the police. A situation ensues which is essentially an inverted car chase: Seikichi seizes the wheel from one of the Sakura gang members while they're driving him off to who-knows-where, and now the gang members are all effectively at his mercy. But one of them has a little pistol and shoots Seikichi. Despite this, he yet lives, and leads the police to the location of the hidden statue. All charges are dropped and the film ends with him in a legitimate job and his family living a happy, normal life.
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| Headline about Sakurai Bussan's boss' unmasking and the end of the gang |
I love movies so much.
This was good. A very solid piece of Japanese cinematic history. Techniques which would have been new at the time like dolly shots, cross-screen fades, and double exposures are all utilized here to great effect. Arashi is a charismatic lead who has some je n'ai sais quoi about him that makes him stand out from other silent-era actors, but Yoshiko Kuga steals the show. She's irrepressible in this. What a blessing to have this film, to be able to see movies like this one. I will burn it to a DVD and I already have multiple copies in various places, so I am now another link in the chain of people who are keeping this one preserved. Though, I do wish we had Youth Decameron, too - maybe someday.
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1 I'm sourcing my information from Japanese Wikipedia to try to get a better picture of what the position entailed in the Japanese film industry specifically.
2 The assistant director who was credited on this film is Akira Hagiwara, who had been working since the 1930s across multiple film studios and eventually became a full-time director.
