Rusty Knife

Big N’ Rusty

Rusty Knife (Sabita Naifu)
1958 Japan
Directed by Toshio Masuda
Nikkatsu/Criterion Eclipse DVD Region 1 
(as part of the Nikkatsu Noir boxed edition).

Warning: Light, rusty spoilers within.

Made the following year, after Kurahara’s I Am Waiting (reviewed here), Rusty Knife, the second in Criterion Eclipse’s excellent boxed edition Nikkatsu Noir, retains the same lead actor and actress from I Am Waiting but now I find myself in more familiar territory with Nikkatsu, in that this movie is shot in “Nikkatsuscope”, allowing this movie’s director more room to design some compelling compositions.

I’m not so sure, after having seen this film (another first time watch for me here) that I’d personally call Rusty Knife a film noir... maybe more of a crossbreed between a crime thriller and police procedural, I would say. The tone is quite dark but certainly the characters and atmospheres mostly don’t seem moody enough for what I am used to seeing in a noir and, to be honest, I would have said this is more like the later films I’ve seen in the Nikkatsu releases (the majority of which were directed by Seijun Suzuki... although I’m not sure how much he was influenced by his contemporaries at the studio or, indeed, whether his contemporaries were paying much attention to his particularly uncompromising style at the time).

What I do know is that the storyline is a little skewed again and doesn’t necessarily follow a simple narrative line as you might expect. Starting off as, like I said before, a police procedural movie, the lead detective arrests the mascot boss of a gang of criminals but, as often happens to him, has no proof that he has killed anyone, as they suspect. No witnesses will go against him in court. When the police are tipped off that the man in question has killed someone and it was witnessed by three people, the man who wrote the letter tells the police that he will be the one to finally testify against this small-time “kingpin”.

The man who prompts the reopening of the investigation is a trademark Suzuki actor in an early role, Jô Shishido... not two years after he had undergone the plastic surgery which made his cheeks more prominent and earned him the nickname, in some quarters, of “The Chipmunk” (he is perhaps best known to Western audiences as the anti-hero assassin of Suzuki’s Branded To Kill). It doesn’t take that many minutes before Jô is in trouble with the gang who have tailed him and when he thinks they are the police, he follows them aboard a train... only to be thrown from there into the path of another oncoming train in a brutal murder. It is his tip off letter which his girlfriend sends to the police when he doesn’t show up after a pre-arranged amount of time has passed, that allows the police to both identify his body and go off to find the other two men who witnessed the fake suicide.

Things get complicated as the two men are working in a diner they opened after the main protagonist, played by Yûjirô Ishihara, served some jail time for a crime which is revealed in its scope later. Now he just wants to stay straight and out of trouble with the law, while still keeping himself out of danger from the gang who know he and his friend were witnesses. Then things start to get ugly, as friend turns against friend, people are bought off and ultimately elected for disposal by the main antagonists.

Ugly for the main characters, at any rate. Quite beautiful for the audience, though, who are able to watch the action unfold in Masuda’s not too flashy but still quite beautiful shot compositions and it’s an especially good picture for those who require some action in their movies. There’s a great little high speed truck chase which leads to fisticuffs in one sequence and there’s also some betrayal and a quest for vengeance as Ishihara’s young friend finally turns up for the police, only to be taken out by a sniper while he’s left in one of their interview rooms. It’s at this point that we realise that a character at the police station is also corrupt and very much, on the take, as it were.

The film is nice to look at with some engaging cinematography, the editing is naturalistic and leading lady Mie Kitahara’s screen presence, while not nearly as “smouldering” as it was in I Am Waiting, is still something which is very much on the forefront of your mind as you watch the scenes with her in them. Godzilla and Kurosawa composer Masaru Satoh’s score is serviceable but doesn’t really stick in your mind after the film is done... but it does it’s job, to be sure, and so the viewer (or listener) should be happy.

There’s not a lot I can really say about this one since my knowledge of this particular part of Japanese cinema is not as great as some other areas but I will say the film lives up to the other 30 or 40 Nikkatsu branded movies I’ve seen by being slick and having a certain stylistic bent towards empty but beautiful posture and artifice within the shot. These Nikkatsu films really couldn’t look bad if they tried. Certainly another film I’ll be looking at again at some point in the future and absolutely a must see for fans of these kinds of features.

I Am Waiting (Ore Wa Matteru Ze)

The Wait Escape

I Am Waiting (Ore Wa Matteru Ze)
1957 Japan
Directed by Koreyoshi Kurahara
Criterion Eclipse Region 1 (NIkkatsu Noir Box)

Warning: Slight spoilers waiting in the dark shadows.

I Am Waiting is one of those films that, as a watcher of many pieces of cinematic art, you are just waiting to stumble across sometime because they are such cool films and you know your life just got richer when you’ve seen something like this for the first time. It happens less and less the older you get but I, for my part, do get at least three or four movies a year like this slipping in under the radar still... and I really love it when I find something which I know I will be going back to in certain moods and moments of my life yet to come.

The first feature film by Japanese director Koreyoshi Kurahara, I Am Waiting, dates back to 1957 and stars the “on the rise” Japanese matinee idol Yûjirô Ishihara (who got to have such a following in Japan that he even turned up in the movie Those Magnificent Men In Their Flying Machines). This is my first watch of this, as it’s included in a boxed set my parents got me for my birthday earlier in the year, the Criterion/Eclipse imprint of Nikkatsu Noir. As a fair few of the “cooler” movies I’ve seen over the last 20 or so years have come from the Nikkatsu studios, I was keen to see what some of their early “noir” movies looked like... this, like many I presume, is styled in such a way as to compete with the various American and French films that were so popular in Japan at the time (and probably still are today no doubt... especially American movies, who are back to being the rulers of most of the world when it comes to getting their product seen, it seems to me).

The film opens with the lead character, Jôji Shimaki, closing his riverside restaurant for the night and walking the gloomy path to post a letter which will have some significance as the story progresses. Here, he is the epitome of the relaxed and gloomy noir sensibilities required in abundance for this shadowy kind of movie making and, as he continues on past the post box, he stumbles upon Saeko (played with much on screen presence by Mie Kitahara), a mysterious woman who looks like she’s just about ready to throw herself in that river. Jôji comes to her rescue with offers of shelter and employment and before you know it, she is developing an unrequited relationship with him... but he has no time for love as his missing brother’s shadowy past and his own former life as a championship boxer who killed someone by accident outside the ring return and collide to haunt his world. When he finally finds out what has happened to his brother, who was supposed to have gone to Brazil a year and a half ago and “set up shop” so he could follow along after... it turns out it all ties in with the gang of cheap hoods who have reclaimed Seiko and her “canary voice” as their own.

Shot in stark black & white and featuring a story that doesn’t always quite unfold the way you think it’s going to, you can see exactly the route laid out for you like an open map when you realise how these kinds of films evolved and mutated into the kind of youth culture crime movies I normally associate with the Nikkatsu studio, namely and especially with the gradual evolution of their infamous director Seijun Suzuki, who himself only made his debut feature a year before this. It’s interesting to  view this film as possibly one by a young bunch of director contemporaries who would all evolve via the same kinds of influences and make these kinds of films at Nikkatsu, Daiei and Toho studios that would define the style of film-making that went on in that country... certainly influenced by the outside forces in other countries who were dictating their market for them but also, I am sure, forging their own visual/audio language that are what we think of when we think of what they were doing from, say, the mid sixties to the mid seventies.

At least, that’s how I’m guessing it all went down anyway... without having seen any other of Kurahara’s movies to date but certainly having seen a fair few of his contemporaries flex their visual muscles. And Kurahara certainly lets loose with a certain amount of creative flair in this one. Shots composed beautifully for a 1.33:1 aspect ratio that are easily the equal of anything he and his contemporaries would have been designing for either Academy Ratio or whatever novelty form of ‘studio re-christened scope’ alternatives were the going rage some five or ten years later.

It’s really beautiful to behold and it doesn’t hurt that it’s got a score by semi-regular Kurosawa and Godzilla composer Masaru Satô either. And it’s also got some great performances in it too... Yûjirô Ishihara plays Jôji as a depressed but good natured man haunted by his fate, while at the same time also managing to balance that with a smart sheen of energetic enthusiasm, which makes him interesting to watch. Kitahara’s performance as Saeko is similarly haunted and depressed in its basic execution but where Isihara is all action and movement, Kitahara just uses a kind of static force to lift the scene and she is content to quitly smoulder and speak and act in a more minimalistic style which, offset against her leading man, is really something which holds your attention. It all just works very well.

I Am Waiting is not going to be everyone’s cup of Japanese green tea but certainly, if you like the look and feel of films by such directors as Jim Jarmusch, Seijun Suzuki, Sam Fuller and, I think, the young Ingmar Bergman, then I Am Waiting is probably going to go down very well on the tastebuds I reckon. Sip it slowly and savour every frame though... don’t gulp it down when you have no time to reflect afterwards. Certainly a movie I’ll be coming back to, I’m sure, and something I kind of wish I’d had the opportunity to be able to see a few decades ago when I was in my teens. Give it a watch if you get the chance.