33号車応答なし / 33-go sha oto nashi / No Response from Car 33

Release date: May 31, 1955

Studio: Toho

Director: Senkichi Taniguchi

Cast: Takashi Shimura, Ryō Ikebe, Yōko Tsukasa, Akihiko Hirata, Akemi Negishi, Momoko Kōchi, Yoshio Tsuchiya, Gen Shimizu, Senkichi Omura, Renji Ishibashi et al.

Availability: None outside of theater screenings and at least one television broadcast.

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Today we're looking at a movie that, despite its lack of home media release, is not forgotten, and has a relative wealth of visual information as well as viewer impressions. It's also kind of a Christmas movie.

You will note that this movie's cast boasts three out of the four main players in Godzilla '54. This is something you take for granted if you're familiar with Toho films, but I need to stop writing under the assumption that everyone has intimate familiarity with the same things I do, so I will mention the "five-studio agreement": for several decades, the five major film studios in Japan had rosters of contracted actors who were exclusive to each studio. Freelance actors did exist, of course, but for actors who were not already famous enough that just their image could serve as an audience draw - this includes Hirata - and especially the kind of small-time actors who would show up as extras in the forefront of crowd scenes, for as long as the five-studio agreement existed (it fell apart in the early 1970s), they were with one studio or another and that was it.

This movie was directed by Senkichi Taniguchi, who we have mentioned before since he was one of Toho's more prominent directors (and had the chance to direct Godzilla but passed it up). One can see Toho's general attitude towards films change by looking at Taniguchi's filmography: after the mid-1960s, the work he directed was less what we might call "arthouse" and more geared towards popular consumption; for example he directed the rollicking Lost World of Sinbad (Samurai Pirate), several of the International Secret Police entries, and even comedies like A Smell of Money (Idiots and Scissors). Were he asked to make Godzilla ten years later, it may not have seemed so antithetical to his work.

Taniguchi (in the white hat) on set of No Response from Car 33

The screenplay for No Response from Car 33 was co-written by Taniguchi and Keiichiro Ryū (who also wrote under the name Ichiro Ikeda). Between the two of them, Ryū was apparently the only one not allergic to science fiction - he managed to write one single episode of Mighty Jack!

No Response from Car 33 is a cop movie. Set on Christmas Eve, the plot follows officers Murakami (Ikebe) and Harada (Shimura) as they carry out their duties while driving patrol car #33. After warning a driver against speeding earlier in the night, they later discover the body of a murder victim with evidence surrounding it that connects back to the speeding incident. Their investigation into the murder leads them to the culprit: Asanuma (Hirata), a criminal wanted for killing a police officer, who is hiding out in the home of a local philanthropist along with his accomplice Yuri (Negishi). A struggle ensues, but as is usually the case, the cops win out and officer Murakami is able to return to his wife on Christmas.

Momoko Kōchi has what sounds like a very small role in the film. She plays a pregnant woman who car #33 escorts to the hospital along with her husband (played by Yoshio Tsuchiya). Another cast member I want to mention is Renji Ishibashi, who is still alive and still working. I know him from the yakuza movies he was in during the 1970s, but most people apparently know him from his more recent work, when he was much older. Here is a sort of not very good picture of him in Car 33. A few reviewers say "he still looks the same today".

We've got a couple pictures of Hirata's character after he's stolen a police uniform:

credit for these to @gerako11e on Twitter

credit for this one to @ryochikun22. thanks ryochikun i love it

And here's another still of him with Akemi Negishi, so we can all pretend Noguchi from Farewell Rabaul got a happy ending (even if they did end up on the run from the cops):

The film has made the rounds in Japan's theaters that specialize in older films (Laputa Asagaya, Cinema Vera, etc) and so we have a few impressions from people who have seen the film. This is valuable information, since it tells us more about what the film is actually like than a simple plot synopsis which has been copied and pasted between sources for the past 70 years. From reviews, we gather that there's a distinct first half/second half structure to the film, with the first half containing mostly mundane police business and the second half focusing on the murder investigation and eventual apprehension of the culprit. The most recent screening was actually a matter of days ago as of the time of writing (although this post will go up much later), on June 29th, 2025. That gives me a feeling of gladness. You can read an example of one of the many reviews of the film here, and read a very detailed summary here (both in Japanese).

From Twitter we can also learn that in 2021 it was shown at Laputa Asagaya as part of a "vehicle film festival" along with a Truck Yaro movie and - wait, hang on, is that Makoto Satō's son saying this?

I'm really fond of the press sheets Toho would put out that include little portraits of the actors in whatever film they were promoting. These would be used the way ad copy was; newspapers or other media looking to promote the film could paste together ads using the image elements and logos provided by Toho. So that means we have these:

I wish I knew who Toho's in-house artist for these sketches was. I assume it's one person since the style is so consistent, but I suppose it could have been a team of artists trained to work in the same style.

That is all for today, I will remain hopeful that I'll get to see this movie someday. While not the most well-known movie, it's nice that prints of this do exist, with a theater screening every couple of years (yes, this counts as "relatively un-obscure" around here). 

不良少年 / Furyō shōnen / The Wicked Boy [1956]

Release date: June 1st, 1956

Director: Senkichi Taniguchi

Studio: Toho

Cast: Kenji Sugawara, Akira Kubo, Chishū Ryū, Kyoko Aoyama, Kyoko Anzai, Yasuko Nakata, Tatsuyoshi Ehara, Yu Fujiki, Akihiko Hirata, Makoto Satō, et al.

Availability: Theater screenings and possible television broadcasts within the past 5 years. No home media availability.

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Let's look at an old, obscure movie with Akira Kubo in it.

Because of its generic title (a less poetic translation could be something like "Bad Boy"¹, and it's far from the only movie called that), this one is a little difficult to find information about online. Even more difficult to find is information about the work it was adapted to the screen from, so that's what I'll cover first and foremost. Shigeru Nishimura's Humorless Diary of Youth [Warawanai seishun], released the previous year, formed the basis for the film. Nishimura seems to have had a rough go of it as a young man, first losing both of his parents before the age of 10, then landing in a sanatorium for tuberculosis treatment in his 20s (during which time he wrote his first novel), and eventually becoming a staff member at a juvenile welfare facility. Much of what Nishimura wrote centered around juvenile delinquents and orphans. Nishimura also wrote in opposition to nuclear testing and war.

In November of 1955, the work was adapted into a stage play by Haiyuza Theater Company. It ran for only just under two weeks and I can find virtually no information about it, but here's a page with some names of the staff and here's an auction listing of a pamphlet showing the names of the cast. Note that there is very small text in the lower right-hand corner of the cast page mentioning that the work will subsequently be made into a movie by Toho.

Adapting Nishimura's work to the screen fell to a team of two people: Ryūzo Kikushima and Dai Nishijima. Of the two, Kikushima is the most famous by far, with screenwriting credits for some of the most internationally famous Japanese films of all time: Stray Dog, Throne of Blood, Hidden Fortress, The Bad Sleep Well, and Tora! Tora! Tora!, just to name a few. Nishijima has fewer credits, but readers may recognize Farewell Rabaul and Girls in the Orchard.

Other names involved in the production of the film are some of our Toho frequent fliers: Tomoyuki Tanaka as producer, Senkichi Taniguchi as director, a young Kihachi Okamoto as assistant director, and Kazuo Yamada of The Vampire Moth as cinematographer.

The work seems to have been partially autobiographical, with the main character's name (Shigeo Nishida, played by Kenji Sugawara) bearing very obvious similarity to Nishimura's own. The film is set at a reform school for juvenile delinquents that houses a lot of war orphans, and Nishida, a teacher, was a former resident himself. As a teacher he tries to help the boys at the reformatory but they respond poorly. From synopses, there seems to be a story about multiple women in Nishida's life having to turn to prostitution running in parallel to the story of the boys at the reformatory. Akira Kubo and Tatsuyoshi Ehara play who I assume are the "leaders" of the delinquent boys, since their characters' names are the only ones mentioned in synopses. Hirata plays a character named Miyashita; given his age at the time I'm guessing he probably played a staff member as opposed to a resident at the reformatory, but who knows. His name is on posters, so he must have had some kind of role, but I can't find anything out about it. This was also Makoto Satō's debut film.

This is unfortunately quite an obscure one. Thanks to its screening at Showa Nerd Mecca Laputa Asagaya, we have this very tiny still photo, showing Akira Kubo and another actor (possibly Kenji Sugawara, given his prominence in the film) mud-wrestling.

Another tiny wee still comes from cinemanavi.com, again showing Kubo and Sugawara.

Oddly, the only actual promotional still I could find for the film is just a picture of Chishū Ryū's character. (We know it's from this film because the auction listing shows the title written in pencil on the back.)

Two separate Toho News pamphlets seem to have been produced for the film. These sort of pamphlets usually came with a text side that would give a synopsis, some hype, and the staff/cast, but unfortunately I can't find clear enough pictures to be able to translate any of the text. A Toho Studio Mail flyer was also published, but again, pictures are too grainy to make any of it out.

Speaking of screenings, there are a few that I can confirm: three at Laputa in 2010, 2017, and 2019, and two in 2014 at the unfortunately now closed Kichijoji Baus Theater and Shibuya's Cinema Vera. There must have been other screenings or television broadcasts because Filmarks also has reviews from 2023 and 2024. Reviews are a bit lacking in detail but seem generally quite positive, and one reviewer links the film to Taniguchi's previous film (also starring Hirata) No Response from Car 33. It is very reassuring to at least know that prints exist and are in good enough condition to be viewed.

you and I could have been seeing Furyō shōnen here if not for stupid inconsequential reasons, such as "not being in Japan in March of 2014"

Twitter user @honehone_man_7 gave us some pictures of Sugawara and Satō just a few months ago. From the quality of the pictures, these seem to have been taken from some kind of satellite TV broadcast. I'm guessing if it was broadcast on television it would have been on SkyPerfect, probably on the Satellite Theater channel, since that's where these kinds of things usually get shown.

That's about all I can give you. This film is still being viewed, and prints survive, which is more than I can say for a lot of things I talk about here, but it's frustrating that I can't see it (at least not now). As always, though, if I find a copy of the film or more information about it, I will post updates.

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¹ Nishimura's fifth novel was titled Furyō shōnen after the film adaptation of Warawanai seishun, but this seems to have largely been a name-recognition strategy; the content of the novel was completely different.

嵐の中の男 / Arashi no naka no otoko / A Man in the Storm (1957)

Release date: February 5, 1957
Director: Senkichi Taniguchi
Studio: Toho
Cast: Toshirō Mifune, Kyoko Kagawa, Akio Kobori, Akemi Negishi, Jun Tazaki, Midori Isomura, Akihiko Hirata, Yoshio Kosugi, Ikio Sawamura, Makoto Satō, Yoshifumi Tajima
Availability: No DVD or streaming release. Occasional theater screenings and broadcasts on SkyPerfect and possibly other television networks as recently as last year.

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Consider this a sequel to my post about Rainy Night Duel - another entry in the "Toshirō Mifune Does Judo" Cinematic Universe, if you will. The two films are unrelated but highly similar and were both directed by Senkichi Taniguchi with Kihachi Okamoto as AD, so I will skip the production background, for the most part. Several years ago I was searching for this movie and became very excited when I thought I found it, but I had in fact found the Nikkatsu film Man Who Brings a Storm (Arashi wo yobu otoko)... and I watched it anyway, it was really good.

Much of my information and stills come from this person's blog post. They seem to have mistaken someone else for Yasuhiko Saijō in one photo. Saijō was acting in 1957 (just barely) but I don't believe he was in this film.

And here's something very interesting: a (closed) auction listing for an album of behind-the-scenes photos from the time of the film's production. I'm not sure what the story behind this is. I suppose it must have belonged to someone who worked on the film.

This film isn't that obscure - it's still being seen in Japan, with theater screenings in 2023 and television broadcasts in 2024. However, at least one reviewer has mentioned that the print being shown at Cinema Vera in 2023 was degraded, which is very concerning. At least there is a digitized version.

As for further crew: prolific screenwriter Kenrō Matsuura (who also went by Takeo) co-wrote the script with Taniguchi and Tomoyuki Tanaka produced the film. Urato Watanabe, a classical composer who didn't work too much in the film industry but did a lot of school songs, handled the score. The cinematographer was Kazuo Yamada who I note here because he was apparently the person who hired Toshirō Mifune on at Toho - not as an actor, initially, but as a strapping young lad to carry photography equipment. This would then lead to Mifune entering Toho's New Face program.

I can't see how Mifune's role here is much different from his role in Rainy Night Duel. However, the film is set during the Russo-Japanese war, so it has some political turmoil going on in the background. Akihiko Hirata doesn't play a rival judoka like he did in Rainy Night Duel but is instead the leader of a group called Sekishinsha. This group did actually exist in the Meiji era; they were Christian colonists aiming to settle in the north of Japan in the 1880s. Hirata also doesn't have long hair in this one like in the previous film, but he does have a mustache. (Jun Tazaki gets to wear the bad wig this time, and according to reviewers he was not good at judo.)

That print really is looking yucky.

As early as 1959, the film had been dubbed into English and was being promoted for international release by Toho (a subbed version was produced at some point as well). The film was also included in Toho's 1962 catalogue of international releases. The earliest screening I can confirm is a short run at the Nippon Theater in Honolulu in 1963.

The film would also be released in Mexico in 1962 and Argentina in 1963. To me this seems like a bit of an odd choice for an export, considering the political backdrop of the film. I would think Rainy Night Duel would be less complicated to translate. The American release was handled by Toho International and doesn't seem to have been edited for export, since the running time is the same as the original.

I did some Google scouring and I came across one of those things that I feel like I might be the only person to have looked at in many years. A 700-page, Spanish-language volume - fully scanned, and god bless the people who did it - on every film exhibited in Mexico from 1960 to 1969.

So we know that it played on February 22nd, and we know where. Here is the Polanco Theater and... maybe the Coliseo, I can't figure out if the theater in the picture is the specific Coliseo referred to in the book.

As for the 1969 U.S.American run, I had a hunch it probably played at Toho La Brea, given that none of Toho's other U.S. theaters were operational at that point, and it turns out that it did. I'm not paying through the nose for a newspapers.com subscription to see the full issue, but, I mean, I don't really need to. It's right there.

The Toho La Brea was opened in 1926 as Chotiner's La Brea and then renamed to Fox La Brea; no photos seem to exist from the specific time period during which it was operated by Toho. It is currently a church, but as it was a theater, in some way, it was always a church.

The film also had a little tiny run during late September 1969 at the Toyo theater in Honolulu, retitled as "Story of Judo" - or possibly that is not a title but just a tagline type of thing.

I had quite a difficult time finding information about the Argentinian run of the film, and was about to give up, but after some more scouring, I found out that it played at the Cine Hindu in Buenos Aires, which has been demolished and is now department stores. The film was still playing on September 25th, but I don't believe that was the opening date. While the Mexican market titled the film either "El Hombre de la Tormenta" or "El Judoka", I believe Argentina used "El Judoka/Yudoka" exclusively.

violence, suspense and action - oh boy!

credit to @buenosairesperdida on insta

So that's that. I can't go back in time, but I have the internet, which is, like, the same thing. 

I don't know if this is interesting to anybody else, but it is to me. I don't know how to explain why it feels important to remember that there was an era where the only way you could see a movie was to physically go to a theater. All of the theaters I mention in this post are beautiful buildings, and none of them now exist in the form they did when people were sitting down to watch A Man in the Storm. I was not able to do the same deep dive into international releases for Rainy Night Duel since it doesn't appear to have been exported, although according to Stuart Galbraith it did receive an English subtitled version. 

黒帯三国志 / Kuro-obi sangokushi / Rainy Night Duel (1956)

Release date: January 29, 1956
Director: Senkichi Taniguchi
Studio: Toho
Cast: Toshirō Mifune, Shin Saburi, Akio Kobori, Kyōko Kagawa, Mariko Okada, Asami Kuji, Akihiko Hirata, Hideo Saeki, Yū Fujiki, Haruo Tanaka, Shōsaku Sugiyama et al.
Availability: No availability on home media. Infrequent screenings and television broadcasts.

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This is a film that has multiple English titles (and no English release). I've decided to go with the title that the film is listed under on Letterboxd, but it's not a literal translation - not even close, actually. A literal translation would be Black Belt Sangokushi, which is sometimes elaborated into Black Belt Romance of the Three Kingdoms, since that's what "sangokushi" means. ("Romance of the Three Kingdoms" is a historical novel attributed to Luo Guanzhong which is set during the end of the Han dynasty and the beginning of China's Three Kingdoms period.)

Got all that? Okay. Let's move on.

This promo still was the blog's header image for a good long time. I also own it physically, and it lives in a frame on my desk.

I have to continue talking about the title for a moment longer, because now that we know the historical context that it implies, I must disabuse you of the notion that this movie takes place in ye olde ancient times. It takes place at the end of the Meiji period (early 1910s). The movie is in fact bookended by shots of trains. I have read that the "Three Kingdoms" in the title is an allusion to Kyūshū, Honshū, and Hokkaido, but I'm not sure about that, due to not having seen the film.

On the surface, this may look like a samurai movie due to the way everyone is dressed, but it's actually about judo and karate. The story was written by Akira Shimomura and serialized in Novels and Readings magazine; I can't find out much about the story or the author, but it seems like Shimomura may have written other works about judo. The film was directed by Senkichi "No Way In Hell Am I Directing Godzilla" Taniguchi, and the music was done by our favorite, Akira Ifukube. You can actually find his score for the film on CD here and there, but the movie itself remains elusive. Kihachi Okamoto also served as assistant director. It would be a few years before he would make his solo directorial debut.

I don't own this, unfortunately

eiga.com and a translator will give you a decent summary of the film. Be sure to check out reviews on kinenote as well for much more plot detail. Toshirō Mifune plays what sounds like a righteous dojo member who is excommunicated from his former dojo and repeatedly pitted against human traffickers, people from rival dojo, and other opponents, while attempting to romantically pursue a woman who isn't allowed to be with him. 

I didn't start this blog to talk about Toshirō Mifune, though. Hirata's character is one of two sons of the head of a rival dojo who, as I understand it, does get some one-on-one fight scenes with Mifune. I must also mention that, yes, that is him with long hair in those photos up there. I don't know what to make of it either. Hirata seems to have the primary antagonist role here, which is interesting, and I'm hearing a lot of people express surprise to see him playing a karateka - get good and watch you some Tetsuwan Namida Ari!

I previously didn't have any pictures of Hirata from this movie aside from really small and grainy portraits on press sheets, but I've recently found a Twitter account that keeps giving me treasure, so clap your eyes on this one:

There are some more stills here, but whatever print this person was watching is so bad it looks like something made by the Lumiere brothers. There's been a handful of reviews from people who have seen it in theaters or on pay-per-view television over the years, so, as with many things, this could easily be released to home media, but it just isn't. Now is the time to be digitizing and releasing movies such as this one - the further the print degrades, the less use there’ll be in producing a home media edition.

It would appear that this was adapted into a manga twice in the same year that it was released. From what I can tell the serialized story came first, then the film and the manga concurrently, as a promotional campaign. (I managed to find some pictures of the actual manga itself and I do find it very amusing that the mangaka has chosen to make Hirata’s character bald.)

I'll end this post with a few miscellaneous impressions I've gleaned from reviews:

• The judo choreography is not good but the karate is alright.
• Some of the tertiary dojo guys use weapons like brass knuckles and chains, which is unusual.
• People don't really know for sure what the "Three Kingdoms" in the title refers to, what I mentioned above is just speculation.
• There's shakuhachi.
• General consensus is Mifune was too old for this role (he was 36 at the time).
• Hirata may have been playing his role comedically or it just came off that way unintentionally.

This is a really interesting movie that remains essentially unknown outside of its home country, and inaccessible even within it aside from the odd theater screening and TV broadcast. But people are seeing it somehow - the last review on Filmarks was from October 2023. Even though I haven't seen it, there are enough reviews of the film that I feel like I know a lot about it. And now you do too!