Wellman and Wicked Woman

Wellman & Wicked Woman.

You Tube remains heaven’s gift to the serious movie watcher. I never stop finding things there that I never knew existed or thought I’d never get to see. Quite often they look like they were filmed in a blizzard and developed in weak tea but every so often they are stunning sharp and well graded. That’s the lottery aspect of the game.

It's just as well it only surfaced comparatively recently. I find the time I spend between dialing it up and closing it down spreading  to fill whatever leisure I have. I just chalked up William Wellman's first Paramount movie and an example of the fifties Japanese exploitation cinema both of which came as surprises, despite all the time I've spent mining all the other sources I've encountered down the years.

Dokufu Takahashi Oden / Wicked Woman, directed by Nobuo Nakagawa in 1958, comes out of the void. It has the interest of being an isolated example of the Dokufu or femme fatale movies from what was the Golden period of Japanese cinema. A couple of these dealt with real life Oden Takahashi, the last woman to be beheaded in Japan. Films like this were more familiar in the ‘States, where Japanese producers had their own chains of cinemas in the fifties - Toho La Brea anyone? The copy’s English language sub-titles probably date from that period.

The only recognisable name in the credits is busy Tetsurô Tanba (Five Man Army, Suna no utsuwa / Castle of Sand) who does an authoritative turn as the lead’s pimp-gangster employer-lover. As with other infamous women of fifties movie history (Martine Carol doing Lucrezia Borgia, Rita Hayworth as Salomé) then thirty year old Katsuko Wakasugi as Oden is presented as a victim of evil men, a spineless drunk husband, an ailing lover, a seduced policeman and Tamba, who has a line in kidnapping women off the street to stock his below ground brothel.

We kick off with Wakasugi outwitting a Tokyo jeweler, whose diamond she steals by gumming it to the tip of her parasol, where a diligent body search doesn’t find it. However a sharp eyed constable spots the gem and soon she’s dragging him behind the paper screen - less physical than Betty Amann in Asphalt. Her drunken rickshaw-man husband claims he needs money to care for the daughter she abandoned but the mite succumbs, believing she’s going to join her beloved dead mum in heaven.

The action shifts with whore-monger Tamba to China, where Wakasugi becomes queen of his

gambling palace, joining the roulette and strip poker game and taking a brief but uncharacteristically sensuous spa bath (close up of her tattooed back going into the water and long shot where she appears naked cf. the Everybody Pays episode of Tokyo Vice. The cop is on hand to rescue his superior’s sister, who has been installed in the cellar and our heroine ends hands roped, on the train to pay for her sins.

You Only Live Twice - Tamba and Sean Connery.

This mash up of soap opera and sub-noir thirties gangsters derives some interest from the Meiji period plot and settings, all tailored to a formula we are not familiar with. Director Nakagawa handles the variety of subject matter with mechanical assurance. His rickshaw sequence drew praise from those who presumably didn’t think it was a poor man’s version of the set piece in Inagaki’s 1943 Muhomatsu no issho. The film is a must for the curious and has interest for the casual viewer. The copy is passable. 

A more inviting discovery was William A. Wellman’s 1926 You Never Know Women. Though well before his famous work, this one is already a piece of sophisticated film making, even with its formula scripting. 

Walking at night, elegant Florence Vidor is just missed by a falling girder when a workman pulls her out of it’s path. Passing playboy in evening clothes Lowell Sherman takes the credit and later shows up at the theater, where she is appearing with Clive Brook’s Russian (!) circus, bribing the doorman to let him in and offering a replacement for the umbrella that was crushed in the accident - like Mozjoukine in Manulesco.

She is one of the ensemble appearing in doll make-up and masks, along with comic El Brendel, accompanied by a goose wearing glasses, strong man Joe Bonamo coming on twirling a dwarf like a spun parasol and devoted star Brook, doing a Houdini act where they chain him and lower him into a water filled tank in a trunk - which doesn’t trail bubbles.

Lowell moves on Florence, complete with romantic encounter on the studio moonlit terrace and his top hat being dropped over Clive’s Pierrot mask. To simplify the situation, Clive fakes drowning in a failure of his new act, where they dump his trunk into the harbor.  No one seems too worried about the effect on the theater company’s future. It’s only a movie, Ingrid!

Rejected bounder Lowell stays in the theater after everyone has gone and moves on Florence, pursuing her with a convenient flashlight. Film’s best moment is when she pauses in the illusion cabinet and believed-dead Clive appears in her place, halting Lowell’s advances.

You Never Know Women - Vidor and Brook.

Film making is particularly stylish in the staging of the show - curtain propelled by the performers wearing it, legs visible under its edge, the line of made-up players removing their mask-hats. We get Bonomo seeing, through the opened legs of his on-stage partner, bit playing Eugene Palette moving on his tootsie at the party.  Growing intimacy is shown by dissolving (in camera) to a closer medium shot view of the leads or Brook’s attention closing in on Sherman by blacking out the other half of the frame. (I though that was stylish when I saw it first in Thorold Dickinson’s 1949 Queen of Spades) The cast emerge with credit, offering Brendel probably his best role, plausibly Russian and switching to knowing and serious in his last scenes.  

You Never Know Women is not a great film but it is remarkably assured and stylish and a marker in its director’s career. Wellman buddy and later director, Charles Barton worked in Hans Dreier’s art department here and Brendel appears again in Wings.

Though the passable The Boob does beat out the film as the earliest of the Wellman features to survive, this one's You Tube copy is tinted and taken from a sharp original. That’s worth a look on its own account.

Incidentally, as predicted, the copy of  The New Adventures of Get Rich Quick Wallingford has been taken down. You Tube is treacherous, like the ocean. Never turn your back on it.

    

Barrie Pattison 2023