2025 French Film estival

  Boris Lojkine’s Histoire de Souleymane/ Souleymane's Story is the film Donald Trump is warning us about. I can’t see it getting space at the repurposed Kennedy Centre though It has scooped up (mainly European) awards for a story about an unauthorised Guinean immigrant bike courier trying to keep it together without his papers. Well, Trumpy could always go off and watch Anora. I’m sure there’s something for him there.

Histoire de Souleymane/Sangare 

The way Souleymane's Story is made is remarkable. Following real deal illegal Abou Sangare on his run through Paris making fast food deliveries, the camera uses a specially built rig developed to keep up with his cycle weaving through traffic, largely blue tinted by nighttime available lighting.  The city never looked like this in any other film I’ve seen. The constant movement, between restaurant queues and apartments where he makes his drops, generates the desperation of the character’s circumstances.  If he has a problem, he has to double back to the home of the owner of the license he is using fraudulently, to have it verified by selfies on the iPhone which dominates his life. A manager orders him onto the pavement. One elderly customer is up seven flights and can hardly walk.  Delay means missing the last bus to the homeless shelter, where his few possessions are stored under a bunk bed and he gets a basic meal and a shower. Missing that means a night on the streets. A pause is a call to Keita Diallo the hometown girl who wants to marry him but has had another offer from an engineer.  Sangare ridicules the picture she shows and her screen image covers its face.

 Watching we begin to understand the mechanism that keeps his society in place. He scrapes together payments to one of the fellow immigrants, who is coaching him in his citizenship interview, berating Sangare for not retaining details of his fictional journey and imprisonments and not keeping up the payments for his services. At one point the delivery is to a parked van full of (Oh, Oh!) gendarmes who see through his story but send him on his way. None of the people who figure in this threatening environment are actually malicious, even the customer who refuses to pay him because the delivery bag is damaged.  

 Just as the routine is losing its impact, we get to the final interview section, which is extraordinary  - just two people sitting in a room but with all the suspense of defusing a bomb. The ordinariness of  Sangare and interrogator Nina Meurisse drives it and the abrupt ending can’t be faulted.

Well,  French TV News  ran an item on Sangare’s real-life accreditation and being given public housing (after winning a festival Grand Prix). That raises more questions than it settles but it would be a hard heart that didn’t welcome it. 

Souleymane’s Story is not the kind of film I seek out but I rate it the best thing I’ve seen in the event.

Sarah Bernhardt, la divine is a big Euro-culture movie which bombards us with Bel époque images, personalities, citations and music (Claude Debussy leading the hit parade). This is not new or even Infrequent. Think  Michel Ocelot’s winning animated 2017 Dilili  á Paris and Aurine Crémieux’  documentary Sarah Bernhardt - Pionnière du show business traveled this route as recently as last year. Yes it’s “Sigmund Freud would like to talk to you” time again. However, the determination with which this one piles on its references and the luxury of its imagery wears down resistance. 

Writer-director Guillaume Nicloux has come a long way in the twenty years since his Cette femme la & L’affaire privée thrillers.  His new Bernhardt life has the ambition to eclipse its predecessors. We kick off with titles in with flickering clips, mainly from the real Bernhardt 1912 Les amours de la reine Élisabeth and find ourselves watching the archaic surgery to remove her diseased limb. We never see  Kiberlaine performing with her wooden leg but there is a reference to the telegram from Phineas T. Barnum offering to put her leg on display.  Sandrine queries “Which one?”

That’s already into the distancing, which makes this one more digestible than most of these historical-romanticals. They are telling us about the most beautiful and famous woman of her time and casting Kiberlain, who not even her admirers, among whom I count myself, would describe that way, which means Sandrine has to act being gorgeous and magnetic - already interesting.

 Attention centers on Bernhardt’s relationship with actor Lucien Guitry (Laurent Lafitte). KIberlaine’s public confrontation with Mathilde Ollivier, who has taken her place with Lafitte, is on the way to being the high point.  The film unwinds backwards like Harold Pinter’s 193 Betrayal or Jane Campion’s l982 Two Friends so we get a chance to follow Lucien’s son Sascha Guitry back to his childhood, making him a welcome audience stand-in. Knowing the younger Guitry’s own work gives an odd perspective.

 The film overwhelms objections with its barrage of detail. A stage is showered in gold leaf.  Sandrine relaxes in her intensely decorated home, surrounded by her menagerie (relations with the mountain lion she shares a couch with, seem to be a bit nervous), approving a famous Art Deco poster and mixing with just about every celebrity and historical reference they can summon. We get normally glamorous Amira Casar doing austere Sapphic love interest Louise Abbéma, Sylvain Creuzevault’s Edmund Rostand trying to think of a name for his long nose character, Sandrine persuading Arthur Igual’s Emile Zola to intervene in the Dreyfus Case, recalling her youthful witnessing an anarchist guillotined in front of a blood-spattered crowd appalled.

This one is a class act pulling away from the horse hair art films that we normally get.

Frank Dubosc has had a curious thirty-year career path, working on TV, including a run as continuing character on a reincarnation of Coronation Street, playing straight man in increasingly ambitious comedies that nobody felt like importing here and breaking out as writer-director-star with his Tout le monde debout, whose fake wheelchair-bound character made commentators uneasy. Un ours dans le Jura/ How to Make a Killing, his third try as auteur,  has been better received.  

Frank and Laure Calamy are nicely cast as the failing middle-aged tree farmer couple with a special needs son in the Jura village (faded welcome mural on the side of a house) where everyone has known one another since childhood. Frank went to school with Emmanuelle Devos the Madam of the local Culpidon swingers club (“bang bang” “non-gang bang”) and Gendarme Major, the indestructible Benoît Poelvoorde finds himself competing with his ex-wife’s new husband, who used to be his dentist.

 The tone is immediately established when Frank swerves to avoid a black bear on the snow-covered road (well staged)  creating a multiple pile-up and launching a growing body count. He suddenly finds himself loaded down with Drug Cartel cash, having Laure count out the six-figure sum on her pocket calculator. The migrant fugitive mules are to be detained in Poelevorde’s cell,  if they can find the key. Any kind of secret is doomed.

The film nicely balances the affable incompetence of the locals with the murderous crime syndicate and the big city cops who take the case away from Benoît. He however proves to have a handle on the situation, complete with his plan outlined to Laure and Frank out of earshot on the isolated highway  - practical but ruthless. Curé Christophe Canard trying to assert moral authority is rapidly put in his place by his one-time schoolmate Benoît.

 Dubosc is not always sure-handed with the edgy material and his technique is not in the class of the great European filmmakers that preceded him but he makes his characters real in a way that holds its own with the competition - the mature couple in their home closet finery for a last night out, the major’s (old enough to be legal) daughter Kim Higelin making a deposition to him about her make-out in a crime scene car,  nondescript deputy Joséphine de Meaux, who conducts a motherly language lesson for the prisoners but proves to be familiar with the Swingers Bar and not intimidated by the need for lethal force.  Poelvoorde gradually works himself into the intrigue’s center to remind us what a force he can be even when he’s not getting top billing. Our last glimpse of him is the film’s biggest laugh - and then there’s the bear. We were wondering what had happened to that.

I enjoyed this one the most of what I've seen.

Finalement / At the End of the Day is recognisably Claude Lelouch - great looking film with imposing cast, scenics, misleading developments, Nazis, Musical Numbers, May '68, (tame) porn, self citations & issues. Unfortunately, it keeps on going past the one-hour mark where the format runs thin.

Tramp Kad Merad announces himself as a fugitive defrocked priest-rapist to drivers he hitchhikes with, while picking up clues on caring for sheep. They promptly turn him in. However, he manages to complete his wanderings acquiring a bric-a-brac trumpet, which he proves able to play, from shop owner Clémentine Célarié. Sleeping rough in a barn he is given a breakfast by farm owner Françoise Gillard and they end up doing a trumpet-piano duo. Her husband takes a dim view of having a vagrant in the house even though Kad on his way out wrote them a cheque for the new tractor they need. He makes it to Mont Saint Michel, Le Mans and the Avignon festival, with the occasional fit before they put him into the care of Dr. Dominic Pinon and therapist Julie Ferrier. There is a genuinely disturbing scene of Kad blowing away his nice family.

The piece loses impetus when we start to hear about “frontotemporal lobar degeneration” and the glimpses of his fantasies are gradually pushed out by the reality of life and home, worried wife Elsa Zylberstein front and center. This runs to a second plot stream with Gad’s half sister Bonnaire introducing herself  to mum aged Francoise Fabian who is contexualised with poor quality clips of Heureuse Aniversaire  to match the beach number lifted from L’aventure est adventure. Turns out Sandrine is carrying on the work of her mother in protecting (glamorous women) sex workers and they slap a warrant on her for procuring. 

The film lacks the discipline it needs to keep the audience sympathy. Kad meets Jesus and the disciples including Judas, explained as “It’s wrong to hold a grudge.” OK but then he keeps on encountering scruffy God Raphael Mizrahi, which is milking it. The rant by the disgruntled visitor to the Theatre festival or the opening piece of stand-up do suitably disrupt expectation.

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The action is broken up by musical numbers most featuring Eurovision finalist Barbara Pravi, one of those winning young women who inhabit Lelouch movies. In their final song together Merad, who had been carrying the piece effectively, proves to be a pro vocalist.

A companion veteran work is ninety one year old Constantine Costa Gavras’ Le dernier souffle / What Comes After. This one is unlike the thoughtful European and lesser Hollywood films that he rolled out after the massive success of Z - He Lives, not exactly tent pole popular attraction cinema. -The now senior citizen director contemplates not death but dying, with a palliative care specialist, Kad Merad again, here in the company of writer Denis Podalydès. Kind of like an inflated industrial movie but not without interest.

Finding Merad as the lead in this one too is remarkable in itself. His two characters are totally distinct without any help from make-up and speech patterns. Merad is moving into the imposing place once occupied by Harry Baur, who he somewhat resembles, as their great French character-actor-star. Alain Jessua once told me they were going to be without one of those and all I could come up with was Rufus.

Le dernier souflfe, Before What Comes After is something different. While it has all the features of a Boulevard release - name stars, polished mobile camerawork, tight scripting, significance - this one curiously adopts the structure of one if those industrial movies where the outsider is shown the sponsor's activities.

Denis Podalydés is a celebrity author whose Boston Hospital MRI reveals a dark spot on his liver. Understandably disturbed, he flies back to Paris and gets a second opinion from Palliative Care Specialist Merad, again excellent. They discuss collaborating on a book and Kad suggests Denis put on one of the lab coats in the closet and accompany him as he deals with celebrity guest stars playing contrasted patients, kind of like Clifton Webb going about with Dana Andrews visiting suspects in the murder of the woman in the picture?

This one is not a film about death. It's a film about dying, Haughty Charlotte Rampling attempts to manage her own demise. Endearing Francoise Lebrun (La maman & la Putain) chats philosophically with the white coats. In deep denial, Hiam Abbass demands they continue futile treatments for husband Frank Libolt. A daughter contemplates the scuffle with her stepmother, to come when the father dies without a will. The squad of bikies who show up in formation to see a member off, tends to distract from the show-piece finale, where gypsy royalty George Coraface and Angela Molina arrive in a motorcade of their followers for her treatment, which proves to be less productive than having the colony's young girls sing her off with a Joseph Kosma-Jacques Prevert number. Using the once voluptuous Molina is a considered choice. It makes a point that I don't know I want to be reminded about.

Merad works in abundantly resourced hospitals where the staff have time to knock off and applaud patients taking their last ride home. There is a bit of distraction in recognizing the senior citizen movie stars in hospital gowns and movie technicians and the director's family doing bit parts - Andrew Litvak, Romain Gavras. Informational content occasionally breaks through - a quarter of the population is no longer contributing to society, one-third of prescribed drugs are of no value to the patient.

While it's a work of high seriousness and made with big-budget know-how, I'm not sure that I would recommend this one. I wonder if it's not a bit too close to home.

The effectiveness of the early passages manages to win out over the notion that Elyas is a French re-tread of the Denzel Washington  Man on Fire, even if we do get another hard man bodyguard (“pas soldat - guerrier”) looking out for the teenage girl put in his charge.

Elyeas/ Zem & Michel

The Iraq war opening shifts to face scarred, self-medicating veteran Roschdy Zem working out and stripping his sidearm against the clock. The clicking of his paratrooper knife will become significant. He’s recruited by a friend for a bodyguard gig at the palatial French villa of Arab millionaire Sherwan Haji. The magnate’s women are restive at being confined within the grounds, even with the pool that auto-fills when trim French TV star Laëtitia Eïdo in her two-piece steps in. Laëtitia wants to hit the shops and her young daughter Jeanne Michel snatches a chance to ride her bike out when the gates swing open, with Roschdy in pursuit spotting the black helmet duo on their motorbike and striking the shooting from the knee pose though they took his Biretta away. In the angry recrimination that follows, there is no image of the bike on the CCTV. Everyone including our hero begins to wonder about him.

Driving the claustrophobic women folk results in a spectacular traffic incident and, while Roschdy is reclaiming his piece, a large-scale shoot-out erupts. Director Florent-Emilio Siri, who did the Algerian War piece l’ennemi intime and Bruce Willis’ Hostage is absolutely in his element on these, and the film rates top class as thick ear entertainment, with the body count staying just within the bounds of credibility. 

However, at one hour forty-five minutes, Elyas has ambitions. We get everybody’s back story. Gypsies, immigrant smugglers, mercenaries including a camper van load who we suspect are innocent bystanders and an Arab Royal heavy with five wives, thirty children, a private army, and a penthouse in the desert city needlepoint high rise, with its own museum of antiquities.  Some of this is spectacularly effective - parachuting down the urban tower, Roschdy bursting out of the blazing semi-trailer on a forklift. His friend advises the hired muscle “You messed with the wrong man” about the time they claim that they only found seventeen bodies. The ultra-violence must be aimed at convincing us that this is serious stuff but just reminds everyone that we are stepping up the Charles Bronson tradition. The film fared miserably in its home market.

Elyas / Zem

 The intensity undermines Elyas’ satisfactions as action entertainment without managing to convince us about the film’s seriousness of purpose. There’s the nagging suspicion that they are telling us something we are supposed take on board about nasty Arabs. Still, it’s always nice to see Roschdy Zem doing grim. The rest perform as well as they are allowed.

Romain & Maxime Govare‘s ‘scope & colour Heureux gagnants/Lucky Winners turns out to be a would-be outrageous four-part film á sketch providing wide spaced laughs.  

Lively Comédie Française redhead Pauline Clément has just had her millions-winning ticket photo taken when she is hit in the street by dream boat cyclist Victor Meutelet, who rushes her to the Pharmacie. They make a date that night. Our perception switches between her roommate’s downbeat take on him as a gigolo fortune hunter and his self-presentation as NGO founder digging Third World wells, who has turned his back on the rich family home he shows her. Next, overworked dad Fabrice Eboué is in the family car with wife Audrey Lamy and the kids when they discover his winning ticket is about to expire. He has to make an auto stunt dash through Marseilles, racing against his Satnav deadline.  Three jihadists, Sami Outalbali, Mathieu Lourdel and Illyès Salah have just fitted an explosive vest when they discover their win and menacing police, who move on them in the Métro, turn into an escort until their cover is blown.  Anouk Grinberg’s medical team make off with the winnings of their elderly misogynist patient Gilles Fisseau when he expires with the shock. Serial calamities strike leaving them believing the prize is curse. What we are to make of fellow prisoner Michel Masiero’s uplifting monologue is just confusing.

Happy Winners/ Fabrice Eboué

This one is not as clever as it needs to be but the cast is expert and there are scattered laughs generated by some deliberately off-kilter moments -  the family photo removed to reveal one of smiling Arabs, a comic-grisly splatter effect between the automatically shutting doors, dragging away a body leaving a trail of blood just out of view of guests dancing at the out of doors disco pool party, after the one shot of doctor Sam Karmann’s new Slavonic trophy wife dabbing her eyes. 

 

A retrospective look at Jean Pierre Melville's L'armée des ombres, best film of an overrated director, is still to come.

Barrie Pattison 2025

 

 

 

Leda Borelli: Back to Turin

A moment of light in the gloom of the local enthusiast film scene occurred when the Italian Cultural Institute imported and screened two of the films of Lyda Borelli at the Newtown Dendy last week. Borelli was one of the celebrated Divas of the Italian Cinema in the World War One period, when its Turin Studios were a leader in film production. Occasionally we read about these but, outside of Pordenone where they are considered the home team, this material usually remains a footnote in film history. 

Beginning at the age of eighteen, Lyda Borelli became a prominent figure on the Italian stage, triumphing in works like the Oscar Wilde Salomé. As the new film industry emerged, it was natural that she would become involved.  Her first movie, Mario Caserini's 1913 Ma l'amor mio non muore.../But My Love Does Not Die/ Love Eternal was on show and proved exemplary.  A sharp, detailed copy ran at the right speed in the correct format and with clear English sub-titles. Reproducing the original tinting would have helped but we have the moon...  Signora Borelli’s flamboyant hand gesturing, hair tossing theatricality fitted right in.

But My Love... is a fascinating demonstration of the ability of the first European filmmakers to produce work that comes down the years effectively, though it is made in the conventions of early cinema with minimal editing inside the proscenium arch frame and making no use of fades, dissolves or optical devices until a final black vignette isolates our heroine's face. There are some effective sorties into exteriors but the most imposing material is sustained, static runs of the camera in detailed art deco studio-interior settings. A copy of Le peit journal spread on a table flutters to the floor blown in the breeze, suggesting that these have been constructed in the open air to take full advantage of sunlight and get their striking depth of field.

In a WW1 Europe torn by intrigue, a brief intro shows that shifty Giampalo Rosimo in a frock coat can only escape the burden of his excesses-induced debt by stealing the battle plans of the Duchy of Wallenstein from  Col. Vittorio Rossi Pianelli.  We then move into the set piece interior in the decorated Pianelli home living room with alcove, where the camera remains bolted (?) to the floor and the characters move in full-length shot, cropping at the ankle if they get close enough.

At dinner in the home with fellow guest, uniformed mutton chop whiskered Col. Ellio Petacci, Rosimo cultivates piano-playing daughter Borelli. It is only when the officers move to the dim alcove to study the plans that we get an edit, the jump covered by the insertion of a full-screen title. 

  Love Etern - Borelli, admirers, mirror & perforations

Grasping a chance to rifle their unattended document case,  Rosimo wastes no time motoring the documents to his employers. Discovery of the theft brings disgrace, with suicide the only option. Borelli is exiled, driven to the ridiculously under-manned border crossing. The signpost. reads "Suisse & arrow"  However in her new home, her musical talent is recognised by impresario Camillo De Riso, who makes her an opera star, acknowledged with giant flower baskets in her dressing room - another fixed camera decor where having a full length three panel mirror increases movement-in-the-frame, reflecting diner suit admirers crowding through the screen-right door and later (they don’t get this one quite right) doubling up the passionate embrace.

Love Etern - Bonnard & Borelli.

Though feted on all sides, Lyda is attracted to fellow loner Prince Mario Bonnard (his directing career will extend to the Steve Reeves Last Days of Pompeii) who isn’t anywhere near as good at making the theatrical gestures, overdoing his palm to the brow grief. They go sailing together, reclining in the stern of the speeding sailboat (one shot that seems to get into all the compilations) There’s also an impressive paddle wheel steamer landing.

However the evil Rosimo is also smitten with Lyda (a regular event in her movies) and she takes the chance to destroy him, only to expire on stage watched aghast by true love Bonnard, from his theatre box seat.

This all holds attention surprisingly well. Director Caserini has mastered the Turin film craft of his day. He manages to fill his static frames with high-fashion detail and showcase Borelli’s flamboyant performnce. 

 

The second film Malombra was another matter. By 1917, director Carmine Gallone had been able to absorb the advances introduced by Birth of a Nation. As happened throughout Europe, the innovations that would become the basis of film language were taking hold in Italy. Not only is this one tinted but it uses the full vocabulary of the new international cinema - close ups, dissolves, action matched on movement within the shot, fades frame a flashback, a double exposure shows Borelli falling under the evil spell. 

 In this one Lyda is welcomed by her uncle Francesco Cacace to Malmobra Castle and rejects the gloomy chambers allocated to her, wanting the room with a view of the lake. The flunkies are horrified, considering this to be haunted by the spirit of the Count's father's dead wife. However Lyda has her way. There she accidentally opens the secret drawer in the desk and discovers a diary, (another) mirror and a hank of hair, the instruments of the curse placed on the nobleman's descendants after he unjusly suspected his young wife of encouraging the advances of a castle guest, in a green-tinted flashback.

Leda's life ceases to be a matter of being feted by the peasants in aquatic flower festivals. After breaking the mirror, she becomes the agent of the dead woman's vendetta against the count. This is not going to end well. Possession and death ensue. 

Unfortunately, as would be the case throughout his long career, Gallone failed to understand what will make his on-screen action play for an audience. Compositions are awkward and pacing erratic. Also the reconstituted Desmet Process copy had become disturbingly contrasty in trying to reproduce the original colour tints.

So much for an opportunity to demonstrate the development of film language, the encroaching Hollywood model, the dominance of feature length. No such luck. The Italian Culture Jefe wheeled in a USyd Film Studies Senior Lecturer's live introduction, complete with a young woman wearing a replica of Borelli's Liberty Culture wardrobe. The comparison between those and the outfit for her Salmomé has been noted. No comment on how ugly this style was, in the gap between hoop skirts and bobbed hair. 

Not only was there no attempt at film study but we were told that the inset titles, which were part of the film's structure, didn't require translation (not even a handout synopsis). Customers whose Italian was better than mine confessed themselves baffled. We were still making up our own plotlines when the lights came up. To work out what was really happening I had to go home and run the YouTube Copy - murky but literate English language captions.

The Italians had rounded up Mauro Colombis to provide one of his expert piano scores. The effort of mixing this with a voice-over translation, let alone providing English subtitles proved beyond the team. This was not the first time a silent film became an add-on to live music here. 

Even so, I rated this a great chance to increase understanding of the evolution of world cinema. Leda Borelli was a dominating performer. Her body language ranked her with Brigitte Helm or Bette Davis. Decades later she could have had a career to compare with theirs. Isa Miranda or Kay Francis would have been no competition. There were curious anticipations - is Malombra the point of departure for later Italian spooky film makers like Ricardo Freda and Mario Bava? Borelli's death is shown by inverting her face, as with Cocteau's Orphé or Albert Lewin's Living Idol. Are we watching the first of the malignant female movie presences that will surface in the forties as Rebecca, The Uninvited or the Isa Miranda re-make of Malombra? 

 However Leda Borelli married well and abandoned her career early. She set about destroying all memorabilia - posters, programs, costumes. I wonder if this is the reason that I'd not seen her before, where her more proletarian fellow Diva Francesca Bertini has been given occasional showings. 

Well, when you live in Australia where there hasn't been a National Cinematheque for fifty years, I guess you should be grateful for anything that comes along.

Love Etern - Bonnard, Borelli & iris.

Barrie Pattison - 2025

 

John Ford vs. the Microphone

 I've discussed the appeal of the first talkies before, a surprisingly brief period where Hollywood on its own tried to feed the monster it had unleashed by adding sound to movies, faced by the derision of critics and celebrity directors like Chaplin and René Clair. By the time other countries got into the act - silents were still the norm in Russia and Asia into the thirties - all the mistakes that could be made had been made and were there to be learned from.  

You can suspect that the first American sound films were rapidly shelved as much to avoid embarrassment as for marketability problems. For nearly a Century John Ford's 1930 Men Without Women (no relation to the Ernest Hemingway stories) has been unavailable, missing from a couple of retrospectives I worked through in Europe. The mute copy included in the fifties vanished. Now (and I'm sure there is a story here) an excellent first generation Movietone copy has appeared without fanfare on YouTube, easily the best of Ford’s first efforts in sound. The foul-ups and miscalculations make it if anything more fascinating and once it settles into its sunken submarine material, atmosphere and suspense assert over the clunky technique.

Give this team the same subject two years later and we would have had a title that would not have been allowed to vanish as this one has. Unfortunately shooting with early sound has stretched them to - and beyond- their limits. The erratic score disturbs with unmotivated bursts of music and inappropriate choices - “A Life on the Ocean Wave”, “Popeye the Sailorman” for the opening! After beginning with music and effects, we get to some recorded dialogue. Second thoughts have been added in inset titles, which sometimes interrupt or finish speech recorded on the spot. For the ending, the track is largely unintelligible and the same information is repeated in titles. This is disconcerting and audiences of 1930 must have found it that way too. 

The film opens quite ham-fisted, though even here interesting touches keep on intruding. Yankee sailors on leave in Shanghai are bellying up to the longest bar in the world quite convincingly staged, complete with a cage of Chinese vice girls that the older men try to set the kid up with, and a raddled woman singer doing her number. Familiar Ford (or is it Fox Company) face J. Farrel Mc Donald is prominent with shore radio operator John Wayne to follow.

In the glass paneled-off officers’ area,  Charles K. Gerrard & Warner Richmond are filling us in on a dumb Beau Geste back story about the vanished officer who accepted disgrace rather than let it incriminate the women he loved. After rather too long, they join the shore patrol in rounding up the crew of Submarine S-13 for a surprise mission. New Ensign Frank Albertson is told on the pier they are “The best bunch of fighting me you’ll ever see” and cautioned that he should ignore drunkenness as the M.P.s smash liquor bottles returning sailors have hidden on their persons - puddle of booze spreading round the feet.

Without further delay, they set out to sea and (terrible model work for a film that has all that effective full size surface shooting) They have a collision in a storm (“We’re struck aft right”) and go ninety feet to the bottom. The crew in the tower are wiped out leaving Albertson the senior officer. Radio man Stewart Erwin is desperately trying to make contact, as the survivors, gleaming with sweat, consider their worsening circumstances. Religious fanatic George le Guere freaks out and menaces them with a detonator. We’ll see this again with Boris Karloff in Ford’s The Lost Patrol. Here Albertson has the pistol.

 Erwin. Albertson, Walter McGrail, Warren Hymer, Le Guere, McDonald, McKenna.

This section is remarkable, the best thing in Ford’s first sound films and something that holds its own with later submarine dramas like Morgenrot, Morning Departure or Grey Lady Down. Water rising in the compartment adds to the tension here but since then we’ve been familiarised with the dangers of the bends, while all the attention survivors get here is a cup of brandy. Suitable military finale with men saluting as Taps is blown.

Dudley Nichols

This is writer Dudley Nichols’ first film and he’s determinedly packed it with naval detail - limited oxygen in cylinders,  closing the valves on the torpedo tubes, helmet divers cutting away obstacles with acetylene torches, water reaching the batteries releasing chlorine gas. Trying to accommodate the archaic honor plot with top-billed Chief Torpedoman Kenneth MacKenna (about to be a Fox Bulldog Drummond and husband of Kay Francis) is a bit of a stretch but Albertson’s last line is a resonant solution. Nichols will become the most respected writer in Hollywood, largely through his collaboration with Ford, and go on to adapt Mourning Becomes Electra and For Whom the Bell Tolls.

The other notable member of the Ford team, cameraman Joseph August, who shot William S. Hart westerns, emerges with distinction - convincing confined-interior lighting, capturing smoke blowing across the line of static surface vessels, star filters on the gleaming valves of the radio room.

The foul-ups and miscalculations make Men Without Women, if anything more fascinating and, once it settles into the sunken submarine material, the atmosphere and suspense assert over the clunky technique. It is rare to see such an excellent copy on one of these, possibly the result of the film being stored away undisturbed for all these years. 

Over at Paramount, Willam Wellman’s 1929 Chinatown Nights was, in its nature, one of the first sound films. Like Blackmail or Michael Curtiz’ now-lost Tenderloin (“the first film to have a substantial amount of spoken dialogue”) it was begun as silent and, when The Jazz Singer started coining it, was rapidly put back into production of added scenes to cash in on the demand for talkies - a “goat gland” production. Traces of this remain in shots from the original shooting, which are obviously running too fast, and dialogue post-synched inexactly. The elegant Florence Vidor was so ticked off with the whole thing that she didn’t report back to do her lines, which were re-voiced by Nella Walker.

Chinatown Nights' arresting mobile camera opening picks up a tourist coach driving through Chinatown streets, where a line marks the division between Tong Territories. Disgusted with her snotty society escorts’s dismissal of fakery, socialite Vidor leaves the bus only to find that the “rubber Chinaman for the rubbernecks” body is a real victim of the Tong War shoot-out which is breaking out around her.

In genuine peril, she lets Irish (!) Tong Boss Wally Beery usher her off the street and (more moving camera) into his steel shuttered building (cf. Scarface) where the radio-telegraph room, with a giant wall map of America, is an indicator of Wally’s plan to place all the country’s Chinatowns, under his control.  She has to be locked away all night for her own protection. Finding his college Shakespeare text, Flo matches Wally in quotations. Meeting a real man, unlike the effete society types she knows, Florence can’t get enough of him.

Writer Julian Johnson had titled Wings, the mega-hit and first Oscar winner Wellman has just completed. One scene here opens with his text on black dissolving into the scene. The film’s four credited authors insert a couple of uncomfortable subplots - Jack McHugh as a cloth cap Jackie Coogan youth character and yellow-pressman Jack Oakie, who provokes a riot with Tong rival Warner Oland’s Boston Charley, at the Chinese Theatre. The reporter enters on the cops’ coattails. This scene, with the on-street violence continuing on, visible behind the characters, gives a hint of the imposing production the makers envisaged before the complication of sound.

Beery & Vidor

Vidor settles in. (“head up town-body Barbary Coast”)  Chinatown women wait inside for their men and she’s indignant when forbidden (“Boss say missee no go out”) to join the dangerous funeral motorcade. She’d challenged Beery on the lack of government intervention in the mayhem and learned the secret use of illegal aliens which sustains the Tongs. Wanting Wally to break with the rackets, she rats him out to the cops. At this point the piece loses traction, with our stocky hero turning her out ( “I can’t go back up town!”) soon pacing irresolutely towards the door she had used. Even the bottle is denied her.  “You ain’t gonna get no more liquor” mean Bartender Richard Cramer snarls. The sniper in the opposite building takes his toll.  

The film does get away from the makers. Beery, speaking for an audience for the first time, is clearly ill at ease but still an extraordinary presence, his bulky, virile lead registering opposite Vidor’s elegant socialite. Place this pair against the Chinatown background - a play that started last Tuesday, the calligraphy Tong War declaration posters, that the beat cop can’t read, setting up the police raid where a menacing wall of uniform silhouette officers chase fugitives through the cellar tunnels under the floor, in the best Underworld tradition, while Wally brandishes dead Asians' immigration papers that are being re-cycled by his operatives - because Chinamen all look the same. 

What we end up with here is a fascinating oddity, carrying the shadow of what might have been a major achievement. 

Beery, in an uncharacteristically serious role, had already scored in Wellman’s savage Beggars of Life but Paramount, unimpressed with him here, let him go, only for him to have a hit at MGM in The Big House and become one of their major stars, working with Wellman again in the 1940 This Man’s Navy. Swedish Oland continued as Hollywood’s resident Asian. Long-time Wellman associate Charles Barton (appearing in his 1939 Beau Geste) was assistant director among non-celebrity technicians who frequently did their best work on this film.

Also 1929 was Universal’s super production Broadway, which was an attempt to match the success of Warner’s Jazz Singer and MGM’s new Oscar winner The Broadway Melody (of 1928) with an adaptation of a Jed Harris - George Abbott stage hit, complete with song, dance, gangsters and what passed for snappy dialogue. Finding this on YouTube fulfilled an ambition dating from the time I saw  Paris Cinémathque's beautiful original sepia print of the silent version  - where the lengthy numbers and dialogues played mute with a few titles cut in.

This one has ambition stamped all over it. A gleaming transparent giant stalks through a model of the Great White Way, spilling his chalice of liquor, and we go to one of the film's stylish montages of revelers staged in Charles D. Hall’s enormous Paradise Club decor, where the squad of dancing girls keeps on sweeping through the three storey, expressionist pattern curtains with Hal Mohr’s specially designed camera.   Rge film repeats the combination of director Paul Fejos and star Glenn Tryon from the studio’s admired Lonesome of the previous year, where Tryon had been acceptable because, unless you  cracked it for the version extended with sound sequences, you didn’t have to hear him doing his wise guy voice, snarling “Sez you” and bragging “I got personality”, like a road show William Haines.  A plausible song and dance man, Tryon is trapped in tempo-destroying one-take dialogues with Merna Kennedy, fresh from Chaplin’s The Circus. 

The Specter of Times Square

They get no help from direction. The handling is clueless with the leads on one side of the backstage area cross-cut with a chorine on the significant pay phone, ignoring sound perspective. Kennedy pays no attention to her partner in a scene where he’s speaking right next to her and there’s only a feeble attempt to convince that the inset of a dancing Evelyn Brent is part of the big finale.

They are backed by Robert Ellis and Otis Harlan with the stage production’s Paul Porcasi and  Thomas Jackson in the first of the cop/reporter characters which will make him a familiar face over the next decades and who is the only one here who can deliver his lines plausibly.

The plot is the now familiar one of bootlegger Ellis simultaneously moving on Kennedy and offing his racketeer rival Leslie Fenton. Still carrying the incriminating gun, Ellis bluffs it out. (“Should I sew up my pocket just because there’s a bull outside?”) and stages a backstage party with the chorus girls and mobsters (“some of them two time men”) which breaks out through the screen-height doors of manager Porcasi’s party room, where Kennedy has to field off advances. (“I’m not that kind of girl”) A near miss shatters the window of Ellis’ car and his nerve breaks, with the cad planning to exit taking innocent Merna for a ride. Cop Jackson is on about a Sullivan rap and trim but over-age chorus cutie Evelyn Brent is vengeance bent.

Attention is caught by the knowledge that we are seeing many of the clichés of the gangster and musical films to come getting a first airing - except nice people don’t pay for their crimes here. (“A gang killing’s no novelty in this burg”)  By the time we get to a short, dupey Technicolor final number, the film has made you realise just how long a hundred and forty-four minutes can be.(https://www.youtube.com/watch(v=ra0RCb ya9Y&list=PL8Nn95jd6kYXBY62xgDciyBqoh9IEXIal&index=64)

Broadway - Mohr's camera, Hall's decor.

YouTube has put up substantial sections on 1929 movies - not as imposing as it seems, with titles appearing multiple times and a few ring-ins like Werner Hochnaum's Brothers. It is still the best access we've had to this material since it first appeared. The copies vary but for anyone who has lost interest in endlessly re-cycling The Wizard of Oz and Gilda, this provides an invaluable insight into vintage  Hollywood and film itself. I found relating to this trio a challenge but genuinely rewarding.

Men Without Women - McGrail, Mc Donald & McKenna

Barrie Pattison 2023

Kinuya Tanaka Director

Kinuyo Tanaka had one of the most extraordinary careers in film, Starting at the age of fourteen she became a star in over two hundred and fifty productions spread from silents into the seventies. She was the lead in the first Japanese sound film.  She was associated with Hiroshi Shimizu for a period and speculation centered on her long-running partnership with Kenji Mizoguchi (she claimed they were just good friends) Like her contemporaries Jean Gabin and Gary Cooper,  she managed to have the lead in the best films of their industry's best directors including Shimazu's Kanzashi/The Ornamental Hairpin, Kenji Mizoguchi's Ugetsu and Sansho Dayu/ The Bailif, Heinosuke Gosho's Madamu to nyōbō/The Neighbor's Wife and Mine, Koi no hana saku Izu no odoriko/ The Dancing Girl of Izu & Entotsu no mieru basho/ Four Chimneys, Keisuke Kinoshita's Rikugun/ Army and Narayama Bushiko/Ballad of the Narayama, Kurosawa's Akahige/Red Beard, along with films by Ozu and Naruse. After her visit to America and meetings with Joan Crawford and Silvia Sidney was not well received at home, Tanaka chose to make her 1953 debut as director, becoming the only Japanese woman then in the profession,  supported by Ozu, Naruse and Kinoshita but opposed by Mizoguchi creating a rift after their fifteen film collaboration.  

  A welcome break in the lack of archival screenings here came when the Art Gallery of New South Wales put up a season of the six films directed by Tanaka, starting with 1953's Koibumi/Love Letter starring Masayuki Mori, who had played the Lord in Rashomon, opposite Machika Kyo and Toshiro Mifune. The script was in part by Kinoshita. Tanaka appears in the minor role of the landlady.

This one was a contemporary-set shomingeki film, having more in common with Kinoshita's 24 Eyes or Shinoda's Children of Hiroshima than the Samurai adventures which were attracting international attention. Showing a society debilitated by the war and the U.S. Occupation shares attention with the film's narrative.      

Love Letters - Kuga & Mori

Love Lettter starts with returned naval officer Mori joining his brother in the room they share in the crowded wooden Tokyo apartment block, in a street where the pedestrian crowd includes a Chaplin imitator billboard man. Mori has been drained both by the war and by his loss of childhood sweetheart Yoshiko Kuga, forced to marry in his absence and now untraceable. Mori haunts Shibuya station believing he glimpsed her there. He is supported by his hustling sibling who has developed a business peddling second-hand books and magazines. We see him persuade a street food stall's owners to rent him their fence to hang his products.  

Jukichi Uno, an old school friend, plies a similarly marginal trade, writing pitiful letters in English to U.S. servicemen who have abandoned Japanese women.  He's doing well enough at this to farm out some of the work to Mori. Sure enough (it's that kind of film) Mori is in the back room when Kuga comes in to commission a letter to the American she had lived with during the grim occupation period.  Facing his lost love in a sunny park, Mori is unable to reconcile with the notion that she had associated with an American, like the coarse whores who greet her as one of their group. The sustained long shot of Kuga walking away after their park meeting works better than the ending of The Third Man,  which must have been its model.

Reconciliation comes with the exchange where Mori accepts the notion that the Japanese all carry the responsibility for starting the war.  Film like this and Shûe Matsubayashi's 1960 Taiheiyo no arashi/I Bombed Pearl Harbor are big on Japanese war guilt. The film's qualities are its detailed, surprisingly bleak picture of post-war Japan and a chance to see Masayuki Mori in a dominating, thoughtful characterisation.                                                                                                                                                                           

Two years later The Director's Guild of Japan was trying to resurrect the Nikkatsu Company, drawing opposition from established production houses concerned that their talent would be poached by a new rival. Yasujiro Ozu no less intervened, reviving one of his old scripts for the proposed Tsuki Wa Noborinu/ The Moon Has Risen with touches associated with his style visible in the finished production - include the camera placed like someone seated on a tatami mat and the spacing "pillow shot" scenics separating sequences. Tanaka's first film having been well received, she was accepted as the director.

The new try at directing became a polished, unconvincing romcom. Everyone sees a different literary equivalent - “Little Women” or how about Shakespearean comedy with parallel couples going through their paces during a night where the moonlight drives their romantic impulses. This one even runs to a befuddled maidservant, a comic turn which is the best of Tanaka’s guest shots in her films and also anticipates the touching role of Mieko Takamine as the devoted follower in Tanaka's final film

The Moon Has Risen -  Hisako Yamane, Yoko Sugi and Mie Kitahara.

Head of a relocated post WW2 Japanese family Chishû Ryû, of whom we don’t get to see all that much, leads performing the sutras in his Buddhist chapel. Turns out that he heads a family of three daughters, passive widow Hisako Yamane, middle sister Yoko Sugi and the youngest Mie Kitahara, shortly to star in teen exploitation hit Kurutta kajitsu/Crazed Fruit where, as here, she's again not all that comfortable displaying youthful enthusiasm. 

Kitahara provides the film’s dynamic, trying to get sister Sugi paired off with city visitor Ko Mishima, calling on the aid of mutual friend Shoji Yasui. Turns out that the prospective couple only need to be placed together in the moonlight for the plan to work out. The pair communicating in the code of telegrams with verse numbers of classic Japanese poetry is lost on a foreign audience and I suspect didn’t do all that much for its intended public. Then we go into the romance of Kitahara and Yasui with an ending swinging back to Ryo and the oldest daughter rehearsing.  Over the horizon, we get the attraction of bustling Tokyo against peaceful rural Nara, whose temple buildings figure in the false appointment episode.

There's another drear Western score and once again it's the detail of fifties Japan which is the major asset rather than any dramatic content, though it makes a curious addition to an international gallery of moonlight romances including the Swedish Smiles of a Summer's Night, Hollywood's Moonstruck or the Spanish The Goalkeeper.  

In 1955 Nkkastsu produced Tanaka's 3rd movie Chibusayo Eien Nare/The Eternal Breasts/Forever a Woman,  a determinedly female affair. More serious than her previous directorial choices, The Eternal Breasts deals with real-life poet Fumiko Shimojô, played by Yumeji Tsukioka, an actress who is not widely know in Western distribution, though she did leads for Shinoda and Gosho.  

We see her Shimojô in a bad marriage from which the only relief is her participation in the Regional Poet's Circle, where she is encouraged by married couple Masayuki Mori & Yôko Sugi. After Mori’s efforts her poetry is published but his health is failing, though the pair are attracted. After his death, Tsukioka is sustained through the divorce from her cheating husband by Sugi’s friendship.  The poet is stricken with breast cancer and has a mastectomy which shocks her friend. Tsukioka refuses to see a city reporter come to create a story about her dying writer, expecting a sensational piece of journalism but the pair connect and he puts aside his other interests to see her through her last days.

  Tsukioka & Sugi

The most memorable passage is Tsukioka alone at night in Sapporo hospital, following a trolley to the barred area which she recognises as the morgue, where her own remains will shortly be transported in the presence of her distressed children.

The film’s subject requires bold and sensitive handling of the kind Fred Zinneman might have brought to it but Tanaka chooses tasteful and comes out closer to Ross Hunter. That just registers as as morbid and the film’s claim to fame is that it may be the first and possibly only movie to have a mastectomy as its central event.                                                                                                                                                 

Following in 1960. Tanaka’s next direction Ruten no ôhi / Wandering Princess was a departure,  her first costume drama and filmed in ‘scope & colour. It is a more ambitious undertaking than her previous films, fielding screens full of dress extras in a succession of designed decors. By the standard by which we measure these, this is not a super production but it did demonstrate Tanaka's willingness to move beyond realist contemporary subjects.

The subject matter was the nineteen thirties Empire of Manchuku where the Japanese Army  imposed Fuketsu, their own "Puppet" ruler of Manchuria, on the resentful Chinese population. The film is derived from the then recently published autobiography of Hiro Aishinkakura,  daughter to an aristocratic family who became the arranged wife who joined the Chinese Emperor's younger brother, played by Eiji Funakoshi (Fires on the Plain).  Heading the cast is Machika Kyo, then Japanese superstar of Rashomon, Ugestsu, Gate of Hell and her one venture into English language production, the Hollywood Tea House of the August Moon.

The setting, a fallen  state subjugated by an aggressive empire, creating an elaborate but ultimately 

Wandering Princess - Kyo & Funakoshi 

pernicious illusion of restored glory, is a  natural, full of intrigue, passion, conflict, spectacle and flawed but sympathetic characters — the stuff of a dozen books of the month rolled into one.  Usually dominating and sensual, Kyô gives a surprisinly staid performance, striving to present her character as concientiously working in the interest of her uneasy subjects and facing the indignities of Japanese Army Control and capture and deportation by the equally vicious Chinese conquerors from the People's Liberation Army escort. Modestly staged official occasions alternate with more intimate material like Kyo winning over the playground children, who warn her of attacks on Japanese or the hardships of caring for her family on the punishing retreat in captivity.

The film does however contain the most striking sequence in Tanaka's work as director, set up by scenes of her easel painting's scarlet sky. The same colour scheme is used in the studio filmed scene where Kyo sees, distant on the horizon, a silhouette procession taking the condemned woman to her crucifixion, a single close up included.

With only minor alterations (character names etc.) to the facts, this one has detail which will be lost on an outside viewer - the Japanese woman with unbound feet unlike the Chinese around her, the range of Asian languages the cast are asked to perform, historical events familiar to its target audience. An audience for the sub-titled copy is likely see it as a footnote to the later cycle of Pu Yi films - Bertolucci's Last Emperor of China or the biographies made by Li Han-hsiang for Hong Kong and Mainland studios. Those who have put in a bit of serious movie-going will recall similar material done better in Warners'  Juarez or Feng Zaogang’s  YiJiuSiEr/Back to 1941. 

Onna bakari no yoru /Girls in  Dark, Tanaka's next film as director was made in 1961, three years after prostitution was made illegal in Japan, followed by a series of police raids and arrests, mostly concentrating on women sex workers to be sorted into two categories, those classified incurable sent to jail and the remainder placed for six months in rehabilitation centers aimed at returning them to everyday life.

Girls of Dark

Tanaka's film starts in one of these centers, the Shiragiku Protective Facility. The all-female management, headed by Chikage Awashima, see Hisako Hara as their most promising charge and we watch her selected among more hardened inmates for an outside position as clerk in a neighborhood grocery. This proves not to be a smooth transition, with low pay, the male hangers-on eyeing her as a prospect and the store owner's wife's suspicions about her proving justified, when her husband the owner moves on Hara during the wife's absence. 

Returning to the Facility, Hara finds toughened detainees getting into fights with women they knew on the street - compare the street women associates in Love Letter. The organisers try again, placing Hara with sympathetic management of a nursery where she will not have to deal with the public. Her horticulturist mentor is attracted to her and finally proposes marriage but even the well-intentioned owners support his rural aristocrat family in forbidding the match, asserting "Country people are different." At this point, Hara's former pimp shows up recruiting her for a new whore house.

Female director Tanaka reduces the nudity here to a couple of glimpses of nylon bras which is tame stuff for any thrill-seeking movie public and the production values are undistinguished - competent black and white 'scope studio interior filming, which only occasionally breaks out into location footage like the liberating bike ride crossing the railway bridge from the Center into the town. The performances are mainly ordinary and the score again drab. 

Its admirers offer this one as a serious try for sympathy with the victims of the vice industry but it is a poor relative to the exploitation films of the day, which often had more energy than Tanaka can muster. It joined the European hooker films which had preceded it in metropolitan double feature showings. Ralph Habib's 1953 Compagnes de la nuit has plot elements in common with this one but the crime melo content there provided much livelier viewing.

Tanaka's last film as director Ogin Sama/Love Under the Crucifix was made in 1962.  This was again a costume piece, telling the story of celebrated Sixteenth Century Tea Master Sen no Riku but Tanaka worked with a different imagery. We don't get the shots of sandal wearing peasants and rickshaw-riding notables framed by the tiled roof of alleyways, trademark of the jidaigeki. Instead we follow shaven headed Ganjiro Nakamura (from Ichikawa's Kagi/Odd Obsession and Enjo/Conflagration)  through his daughter, played by Ineko Arima, against a background of the persecution of Catholics, who were seen as a point of access for foreign influence, undermining Feudal society. Films about Japanese Catholics tend towards the grim - Children of Nagasaki, Silence. 

Here Arima has studied the tea ceremony under her father, in the company of Christian Lord Tatsue Nakadai (regularly defeated by Mifune in the sword duels climaxing their films) Nakadai's spooky, wide-eyed quality worked nicely for his aristocrat character.  She falls for Tatsue but he tells her that his Christian notion of piety means that she should become a nun - while treasuing the crucifix he gives her. However wealthy merchant Hisaya Itô desires her and arranges a marriage, only to find her unresponsive and worse, the object of the passion of Osamu Takizawa, the local Taiko Governor, who plans to have her moved to the castle so he can satisfy his lust. A bad lot that one. He negotiates the construction of an ostentatious gold-painted chamber for his personal tea ceremonies. 

Meanwhile, Nakadai's wife having died, he permits himself to give in to his own passion for Arima. We know from his Mifure movies that Nakadai is a dab hand at slicing up riff-raff and he assures Arima about despatching the ruffians set on their trail but it's not that kind of picture. There's no blood here. Disgrace all round with Nakamura having no option beyond sepuku. I did warn you about Japanese Catholic pictures.

In a gallery of Sen Riku movies, two by Kei Kumai alone, Tanaka shows individuality and growing technique but the film remains undistinguished. We can't help feeling that Tanaka was wise not to give up her day job. Having become the Japanese Bette Davis she would have been making a bad switch  to the status of of one of the Dorothys (Arzner and Davenport) directing in America. Tanaka did sustain a decade-long run as director. In a similar position, Lillian Gish gave up after one movie - embarrassed at having to instruct important players - like Ricardo Cortez! No way of telling what input Tanaka's turn as the only working  Japanese female director had on creating opportunities for women who followed her but you can be sure it was mentioned in their discussions.

The Japan Film Foundation's input to the event was impressive. In a city where attempts at serious archival screenings continue to flounder, they delivered on schedule impeccable sub-titled copies shown as originally intended and accompanied by an attractive, informative booklet. Compare the Sir Isaac Julian exhibit running down the road at the MCA which was inaudible and with the multiple images rigged so that the light from one would wash out the one opposite, using shine-through screen material which meant that half the viewers saw lettering flipped over. You had to consult Julian's website to work out what this was all about. Watching the trailer on line was frustrating -  revealing what we were missing.

The comparison made you appreciate the Tanaka event, even knowing how much more rewarding a season of her work as performer would have been  - with maybe one of these dropped in. Unfortunately that's not the world we live in. Ideology trumps quality every time and female directors are what we are buying this year.

 Among the usually murky Tanaka film copies available on YouTube, many with English sub-titles, you might enjoy the agreeable Kinuyo no hatsukoi /Kinuyo’s First Love at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30PDj20GnUA&t=96s. There's also an excellent copy of the Tsuki Wa Noborinu/The Moon Has Risen original trailer.

My thanks to Richard Wong for his work on original Japanese texts.

Kinuyo Tanaka in Keisuke Kinoshita's great 1958 Narayama bushikô/Ballad of the Narayama.

Barrie Patison 2025