Before Kurosawa.

Heinsuke Gosho

I'm a long time admirer of Japanese director Heinosuke Gosho,  His 1952 Entotsu no mieru basho / Four Chimneys / Where Chimneys Are Seen and 1954 Ôsaka no yado / An Inn in Osaka struck me as the pick of their Shomin geki or common people cycle, which was compared to the post WW2 Italian Realist films incorrectly. Nothing I've seen deals with the grinding poverty which dominates those. As he's not from the Blessed Trinity - Kurosawa, Mizoguchi and Ozu - which still dominate the discussion of Japanese film, I've never encountered a Gosho retrospective and have had to pick odd examples out of cultural events. However, Mubi now does a good selection of the later work and, raking through You Tube, I did discover a random lot of his earliest surviving material, with quite a number sub-titled. I'm up for that challenge, even when it means dealing with copies that are soft and washy.

All of Gosho's forty odd 1920s silent films appear to be lost (!) but his 1931 Madamu to nyôbô / The Neighbor’s Wife & Mine survives, considered to be the first all-sound Japanese film. We must take Shochiku Company's allocating Gosho to this project as a measure of his importance at that time. Their industry came late to talkies, allegedly under pressure from the benshis or screen-side narrators who had achieved celebrity influence in the twenties.  In Asia and Russia silent films continued to be produced in the thirties, when European industries had gone over to sound.

Tanaka & Watanabe

 The Neighbor's Wife... is pretty basic for a film of 1931, when comparative sophistication was expected in Hollywood product. It opens with an extended pan across fields, which reveals a local working at his canvas for the Imperial Exhibition, on an easel set up there. Bowler hat wearing Atushi Watanabe, later a farmer in 7 Samurai, happens by and their discussion develops into a comic brawl with the artist's palette smearing Watanabe's face. To clean up, he heads to the local bath house but is berated by resident Satako Date for using the women's entrance. 

Despite these set backs, Watanabe is so taken with the area that he buys a house there and moves his family in, wife teen age Kinuyo Tanaka no less, daughter Mitsuko Itsimura and the baby. At this point, the plot and the reason for the film assert. He is a playwright needing to complete a 500 Yen commission for his Tokyo theater and meet pressing bills. With as many sound effects as possible to demonstrate the Tuchihas Recording System, he is distracted from his work - a premise we will see in Hollywood productions like the Broderick Crawford sub plot in Del Daves' A Kiss in the Dark or the Tex Avery Sh-h-h-h-h-h.

Watanabe encounters a screeching cat, crying baby, the daughter waving a ringing alarm clock over him, a strawberry mark faced medicine salesman, Tanaka's sewing machine and finally the neighbors' jazz band rehearsal, where he goes to complain about the noise and is confronted by Date again.

This provides the film's most interesting element, the contrast between Watanabe's traditional household and the neighbors, who have their "Merry Jazz Band" banner in English next to a Ruth Chatterton Madam X poster and do the "Speed Generation" number, which our hero eventually joins. He goes back home where Tanaka has found his play-writing pad to be blank and he tells her that his work needs to incorporate speed. Unac-knowledged renditions of "Broadway Melody" and "My Blue Heaven" figure in the track.

No one could describe this as sophisticated. Scenes of the child peeing remind us that it is contemporary with Jean Renoir's On purge bébé. There is nothing here to suggest the complexity of Gosho's best work, though the film does finally become engaging as Watanabe and Tanaka fall in with the enthusiasm of their westernised neighbors.

 

Pick of the batch, 1933's Koi no hana saku Izu no odoriko/ The Dancing Girl of Izu is, not surprisingly, still silent complete with benshi captions and images of sound sources, as in the music performance. An immediately involving opening, has bicycle policeman Michitarô Mizushima telling the idlers that he is looking for a woman, who must have used the road to flee the local Yukawaro mine owner's house.  

Dancing Girl... Tanaka & Kobayashi

Outside the village, the family of itinerant players, headed by glasses wearing Tokuji Kobayashi, is faced by a sign reading “Beggars and traveling actors are not allowed to enter.” They are bailed up by the enraged locals till Student Den Obinata  intervenes. The eye witness account of a local kid confirms the family’s innocence and they are let go, the boy getting a slap from his dad who was one of the accusers. Obinata asks to join the troop on their walk to Shimodo Port.

Engineer Reikichi Kawamura spits - details add to the whole picture. He's come to approach mine owner Reikichi Arai who rebuffs his demands for compensation, when the worker had not supported them in their difficulties. Kawamura’s threats are seen as blackmail. The owner has to intervene when the retainer tries to see the disgruntled former employee off with a shotgun and he makes a token payment which Kawamura takes - “for train fares.”

On the road, we see Obinata buy a cloth cap to replace his student one, as he attempts to join the troop, but he is booked into a more suitable Inn than the one where the family stays.  

Their performance at the Inn turns into a shambles, with a drunken client snatching the samisen and the sword play dance, Kobayashi performs to distract him, interrupted in a struggle which puts the point through the screen separating the room from that of the engineer next door. Appearing sympathetic, he comes in and sorts out the rowdy before having a conversation with Kobayashi, whose family we learn sold the mine. He tells them they were cheated.

Kobayashi goes to new owner Arai asking for compensation (“I was deceived”) and is told the only way he will get support is if winning young sister Tanaka, in her best outing in this series, is sent to the mine owner’s home, taken to mean that she will have to become their geisha.

The student is understandably drawn to Tanaka and himself goes to see Arai, saying humbly that he feels the family is hard done by. The owner explains that he doesn’t believe Kobayashi is a bad person and that he will one day reform but the dissolute life the family leads is unsuitable. “There is not much difference between being a traveling actor and being a geisha.” The offer is to take Tanaka into his home as a ward, who will one day marry his own son. He has kept a bank book for her.

Obinata is now torn by his mutual attraction with Tanaka, who winningly throws stones off the bridge with him and runs up the bank to join him, when he walks ahead on the last stage of the journey. She sees the city as somewhere where he can take her to the movies but instead he goes to the ferry.

The film has the sustained and touching ending, where he asks for her comb as a souvenir and gives the brother his new cloth cab, resuming his student one. She asks to be allowed to write him and, in the suspense of the protracted scene, he finally discloses the mine owner’s plan, saying that it will provide security for herself and the family. They exchange gifts as he climbs onto the launch and she runs along the bank watching his ship pull out of sight. The question of his return the next year remains.

Her mother had brought the student a bag of persimmons for sea sickness, which she still
holds, unaware of developments.

This one echoes other prewar classic Japanese films - Souls on the Road or in the poem comparing the actors to floating weeds. European influence continually registers. The educated people wear Western clothes and smoke cigarettes while the locals still get about in kimonos. A motor bus passes the walking group. The student is admired for his short hair cut but a striking Japanese texture dominates - Shamsen & wood block dancers, the Go game,  charcoal brazier etc. Of the batch this still-silent entry is the film in which the director's mature personality is most evident.

In contrast, Gosho's under an hour long 1933 Hanayome no negoto / The Bride Talks in Her Sleep, again scripted by Akira Fushimi, is still an early Japanese talkie production. Basic staging in unremarkable studio constructions follows five male students, of whom only Tokuji Kobayashi  has graduated and married. The boys gather in a small bar. 

As they drink, his college mates are irritated that Kobayashi has moved on and now leaves them to return to new his bride (as it turns out Tanaka again). One gets a call from his dancer lady friend and goes off to join her, leaving the other three alone, so they resolve to drop in on the husband’s flat, finding him not back there and wife Tanaka uncertain. She locates the group photo and offers them hospitality - slices of sausage to eat with the wedding gift bottled liquor they volunteer to dispose of, as neither of the couple are great drinkers.

The Bride Talks... - Kobayashi & Tanaka

Kobayashi comes back to find the event advanced and reluctantly joins in. The friends are now pretty much out of it, so he and Tanaka go to their dorm room to sleep. Meanwhile bearded burglar Takeshi Sakamoto invades the house and ties up and strips the boys.

When the couple come back home they find them. The gang go off in borrowed kimonos. Tanaka’s talking in her sleep has been witnessd by the fourth member - pretty slight as plots go and no one gets a chance to make an impression.

The picture of contemporary urban Japan is muted. We only get out of doors for the views of entering or leaving the premises and a few model shots of the one car train distant at night. The slightness and constricted settings irritate at first but they generate the piece's style as it progresses. Gosho made a follow-up Hanamuko no negoto - The Bridegroom Talks in His Sleep in 1935.

 

Another Akira Fushimi script, Gosho's Jinsno ei onimotsu / Burden of Life was also filmed in 1935. Here control is developing, though the work still lacks assurance. 

It’s a family study, misleadingly opening with beret wearing artist Kenji Ôyama painting wife, a topless (on the canvas) Kinuyo Tanaka again, when his brother in law, who shows interest in having a look at Kinuyo, drops by. The visitor’s wife has gone home to mother again. Preparations are in hand for a third sister’s wedding and attention shifts among them with domestic squabbles (“He gets upset when I come back with shopping bags”) and the women manipulating their husbands with “Reverse Psychology” like those irritating leading ladies of British TV series.

 Burden of Life : Yoshikawa & Saitô

However the focus rather belatedly shifts to the sisters’ retirement age parents Tatsuo Saitô and Mitsuko Yoshikawa  and young Masao Hayamason, the son they unexpectedly had at fifty. The boy plays with the neighbor’s children and eats at the kitchen table with the maid, trying to avoid his father, who is given to drinking and singing at meals.

After the briefly shown wedding (line of town cars on the road) his mother accuses dad of not caring for the boy, who he considers apprenticing rather than paying for schooling now that the expenses of his sisters’ marriages have made them sell off a couple of the family properties. No one seems really short of money in this film, with all the households retaining maids though peniless artist Ôyama is interested in touching relatives for a loan.

Yoshikawa leaves, taking her son with her to a new home he doesn’t like as much as the old one and is further from his school. This brings up Saitô short. He goes clubbing in the pleasure quarter where a couple of his employees happen to be visiting and they make up an uneasy drinking circle. A hostesses makes off with one of their felt hats, like the more rowdy girls in the Kurosawa Ikiru.

When the boy happens by the house next day,  Saitô calls him in and the maid is sent for his favourite bean paste sweets. He is feted by his father, signalling a new warmer relationship among the re-united family - and that’s the end of the film. Put it next to Poil de Carotte and this one is slight. The subject matter does anticipate Gosho's more substantial 1957Yellow Crow / Kiiroi Karasu.

Gosho’s technique is developing but still self conscious, posing people to make studied edits or create less conventional groupings. A liquor bottle is placed in the foreground and there’s a three shot montage of the bar lights. A track in on the father is butted onto a track in on the boy. Scenes end with an image already seen, as punctuation. Music is sparse. The director seems largely uninterested in the settings, which are the most significant element to present-day viewers with western clothes and furniture again alongside traditional Japanese items. The film is quite agreeable but never fields the issues and situations that it continually seems to be about to investigate.  

In Gosho’s Shinsetsu / New Snow, the qualities of his major work are now coming into focus.  Made in 1942, it was the Daiei Company’s first major commercial success. This one runs more than two hours.  

Michitarô Mizushima, The Dancing Girl of Izu's bit player postman has become the school teacher lead, presented for our admiration. He stands apart from traditional Teachers College trained instructors in the classes he runs for his National School kids and argues with his fellow teacher, who has given a low mark to a student who draws a train as an abstract. Another scene has him being pulled across the playground by a line of his young class members, while lying on a wheeled platform. The exact educational benefit of this exercise is not explained.

New Snow

Mizushima also runs civics classes for the parents, where the feedback includes “When you are educating them, you are playing with them.” One military type criticises Mizushima for putting his hands in his pockets while lecturing. The message content of this film is near opaque. It really needs to be seen several times and backed with historical research. I don’t like it enough to do that, so we will have to rely on a first impression. 

It is clearly a WW2 propaganda production and there’s no pretense otherwise. Mizushima tells his pupils that they are learning to be good servants of the Emperor. When a member of his class’ bald headed dad abuses him, our hero calls him “Churchill” and, after we get a reference to the Yasukuni Shrine, Mizushima ends the film in military training joining the granfdather who still practices his archery skills in a traditional robe.  However Donald Richie tells us the authorities were unhappy that the director had turned the approved message making into a romance and it was only Gosho’s ill health which prevented reprisals. Despite severe TB, Gosho's career would continue to 1968.

New Snow's personal material also qualifies as inscrutable, though it’s rather more winning. The antagonist-father, now called Dhama, becomes a friend when Mizushima doesn’t tell his son about the indignant visit to the school. The leads are too reserved to pursue the romantic attractions they feel but discuss them with work mates, though at one stage we do get a visualisation in the form of photos falling out of a scroll letter. The people certainly  emerge with much more sympathy than those in Mizoguchi’s overtly didactic 1941 Genroku chûshingura/ 47 Ronin, which is four hours about the glories of dying for your country. Well, Metro’s The Human Comedy pushes a similar message. Oddly Gosho is often compared to William Saroyan.

The climax has Mizushima called up for military service. There’s a nice farewell dinner where the characters edge towards letting their feelings be shown.  We then see him drilling in the way he had his classes perform and he writes back to say how much he values the experience. 

The cast often had long careers in Japanese film without coming to our attention.  Mizushima figures in the support of a few of the Baby Cart series. They mesh into a plausible ensemble. The film making is curious. Gosho is claimed as a specialist in editing. The cutting is notably choppy but you can see an effort to deal with problems through montage. An image of the child’s train drawing goes to a real train with the performers in the shot, which is followed by a closer view of their feet and then to them in the studio replica of a street, easing the transition between the two backgrounds. Trains are prominent, with the night time studio simulation of  a cityscape coming with a model railway running through its background.

New Snow - art classes.

The setting is particularly interesting, again showing the country’s advance towards westernisation. This gives New Snow some interest straight off. Both men and women dress in kimonas but they work in military or hospital uniforms. Their houses are still divided by screens but these are solid timber and glass affairs and not paper. It doesn’t match any other Japanese films I’m aware of, possibly through the inaccessibility of War Time material.  The Occupation Authorities were said to have got in there burning negatives and the You Tube copy is from a worn projection print, though the transfer and sub-titles are good.

Watching progress in this random selection of Gosho's early work, we can observe his development both as a technician and a commentator. That's already intriguing and makes a great introduction to his major films. 

 

Barrie Pattison 2023