Bucket List Movie

That slight movement of the earth you just felt may be accounted for by the fact that this is SPROCKETED SOURCES 100TH ENTRY - Well actually 105 but I've knocked out some that were no longer relevant.  - B.P.

I'm getting on for having exhausted my inventory of important works of cinema left to see but then again I must be on the way to exhausting the time I have to get through them - and of course there are all the ones I have yet to hear about, to start with a vast range of Hispanic and Arab films which are never considered in English language writing. 

One title which has always eluded me, though I made a serious effort to track it down on visits to Italy, was Mario Camerini’s 1929 Rotaie / Rails celebrated as the major Italian film of  the last years of their silents. Well, there it is on You Tube at the press of a button. Another one off the bucket list.

Rotaie opens with a most Germanic sequence, the camera tracking down the dark street following shabby couple Käthe von Nagy and Maurizio D’Ancora, obviously experiencing hard times. They take a room in the cheap hotel, planning a suicide pact - close up of an effervescent tablet in a glass - but buoyed up by their mutual affection, they leave and face the glittering lights of the nighttime city. The pair find themselves in front of the rail station (montage of travel posters). In the buffet, a man, rushing to catch the train that's leaving, drops his wallet. He is seen, pulling away, as they pick it up and look for him. The wallet is full of banknotes.

On impulse (“Dove andiamo”) D'Ancora buys them tickets on the train at the platform, its giant locomotive bellowing steam, and they find themselves in a compartment headed for Monte Carlo. In the breakfast car, diner Daniele Crespi changes his seat so they can be together. He has a thin mustache, so is obviously a hand-kissing foreigner of loose morals, the kind normally played by Warwick Ward at the time.

 Rotaie - Von Nagy & D'Ancora

They arrive as the speed boats are racing on the bay, like the scene in the l933 Gloria Swanson - Laurence Olivier Perfect Understanding. Crespi is following the action from the hotel terrace and, seeing Nagy struggling with her new purchases, he sends the uniformed page to help her. Taking the young couple in hand, Crespi introduces the husband to the gaming room where he soon is captivated by roulette, winning big only to see (best sequence) his new found wealth raked back away from him by the croupier. In desperation, he tries to steal chips from the next gambler but is spotted by the floor manager and only saved from calamity by the intervention of  Crespi, who gives him another handful of notes which he is sure to lose.

Planning to collect on his investment, Crespi sends Nagy flowers and an invitation and, outraged by her husband’s irresponsibility, she accepts only to find herself in a situation she can’t control. After a dramatic confrontation, the leads flee the luxury hotel and buy a third class rail ticket home, sharing the compartment with the breast feeding mother, her son who gives them an apple and the father who accepts a cigarette. A couple more montages - one of those familiar geometric shots of tracks filmed from the moving train and one of giant factory machinery pumping away and D’Ancora is finishing his shift with Nagy bringing his meal in a basket, now happily part of the industrial working class.

Finally Rotaie emerges is a scaled down Sunrise, (simple couple lost in the big city) trading actual settings for the exuberant theatricality of the American film. The plotting in Rotaie is too familiar and too simple minded to impress, like its "stay with your own kind" message, which seems to have been in step with the Italian populism of the day. The craftsmanship is not sufficiently stylish to redeem it. 

However Rotaie is an interesting enough item coming from a place and time whose films we don’t know.  The film’s odd mix of twenties gloomy expressionist streets and Soviet editing with society drama from the thirties and forties' location shooting, does make it a revealing bookmark in movie history.

Von Nagy.

Appealing Fraulein von Nagy’s performance outclasses the others. She would have a strong career in the thirties, playing leads for most of the major German directors of the decade in films that it appears nobody bothered to sub-title. She does get second billing in Gustav Ucicky’s splendid Fluchtlige but that one is all Hans Albers’ film. D’Ancora, only seventeen when he made this film, continued headlining till after WW2. Crespi does double duty here also working as designer. Cameraman Ubaldo Arata went on to film Open City. Director Mario Camerini, whose agreeable comedy films (including Darò un milione) would shortly launch the star career of Vittorio De Sica, can be glimpsed at the gaming tables.

The copy on YouTube is the 1931 "sonorised" re-issue running marginally too fast with a so-so added music and effects track. It was lifted off Italia Tre and the quality is just passable. The sparse intertitles are not translated but it doesn’t take fluent Italian to follow what’s going on.

Barrie Pattison 2021

Sorry Cantinflas

Career movie comedians are generally considered beneath the dignity of serious critics world wide - so it's twice the fun when you come across the accomplished work of film makers like Italian Adriano Celantano,  Egyptian Mohamed Henedi or Hong Kong's Chow Ching chi - lots on You Tube, mostly unsubtitled. 

Mexico's national legend, Cantinflas seemed a likely candidate and I was was delighted to get my hands on his El Mago directed by Miguel M. Delgado in 1949, in Columbia Classic's beautiful transfer with excellent English sub-titles.

Unfortunately you can drop this one in another basket with contemporary Abbott & Costello, Louis de Funés or Ismael Yassin comedies, technically competent but totally unfunny. It may be that Cantinflas' work became more bland and uninvolving in the 1950s, the process we can see with Bob Hope, Toto or Fernandel.

In mythical Eastern country Hariche, that bears a distinct resemblance to Maria Montez’ Bagdad, the ruler dies and his evil brother plots to take over the throne and dispose of the legitimate heir who for some reason is telling fortunes in Mexico.

Meanwhile Cantinflas is answering the ‘phone at the Su Suotro Yo agency which supplies lookalikes to replace people who want to take a break. Mago José Baviera (El ángel exterminador) is kitted out with a double (split screen) who manages his crystal ball readings while he goes on vacation, leaving file cards with his client predictions and  secrets that must not be revealed to them, on the back. We expect merry japes in vain.

A series of misunderstandings has Cantinflas take the double’s place and he’s transported by a turban wearing delegation headed by an agent secretly in the power of the Uncle. Set up in a luxury hotel (jokes about fish eggs being smaller than chickens’ eggs) he becomes the subject of interest to glamorous Leonora Amar (with Richard Greene in Captain Scarlet), the agent’s two blow pipe assassins and a local gangster who wants him to predict the outcome of robberies.  Lackluster developments ensue as the assassins kill off the wrong dignitaries and the gangsters kidnap our hero and Amar.

After a Katzman-esque brawl, Cantinflas hitches back to base in a coal truck and is flown to Hariche where they talk about elephants we never see. He is set up as the ruler and bankrupts the country lazing about in a harem to the strains of Rimsky Korsakov’s "Scheherazade." He imports new bikini recruits, introduced in the manner of bulls at a corrida. (that will go down well in the present climate) The punch line is the arrival of a fat girl!

El Mago - Cantinflas & friends.

Baviera shows up and sorts things out (we still don’t know why he was in Mexico) and our hero has one request. Cut to him back home spruiking a tent show with (is that?) Olga Chaviano from the harem leading her hoochy coochy  dancers.

A succession of dumb routines have no dramatic impact and don’t get laughs. Bits of would- be comic business - Cantinflas’ tortilla lunch getting cold as the boss instructs him, swatting a bug on the hotel bed where he’s putting pillows under the sheets so he can visit Amar in the next suite, suggest being added by the lead - to no effect.

It's of interest to anyone curious about the star’s career but Sharp B&W and mundane scoring go with unremarkable support performances. The competent camerawork is not well deployed. An off-center composition telegraphs the fact that the lookalike will arrive through the door that occupies screen left etc. 

Finally if you want to investigate the prolific Mexican trash movie output of the day you're better off with Santo the Man in the Mask of Silver and his wrestler chums.

Barrie Pattison 2021.

Get Me to the Church on Time.

 This one has been a movie legend since before I was born, a Dutch version of "Pygmalion" that so incensed George Bernard Shaw that he refused permission to film any of more his work, until Gabriel Pascal, once the third member of the Hungarian Alexander Korda, Michel Curtiz trio, sweet talked him into the deal that produced the Lesley Howard Pygmalion, Major Barbara, Caesar and Cleopatra and Androcles and the Lion.

Well now the Nederlands film has bubbled up from obscurity on You Tube in the Eye film archive copy complete, with good integrated English sub-titles. This one’s a bit rough around the reel changes but by and large we get an excellent transfer. It’s curious and off putting to see the familiar material playing out not in Covent Garden and Mayfair but in Amsterdam and Haarlem, with characters speaking  Dutch and paying in Guilders.

We kick off with Lily Bouwmeester, made up grubby, selling her flowers in the pouring rain. In the crowd Johan De Meester’s Prof. Higgins is taking down her dialogue phonetically and the familiar plot develops. There are minor variations like an attempt to get laughs out of the “not bloody likely” routine by extending the scene as hip current speech for the socialites.  Freddy, now George, is a silly ass comic who is likely to get cut out when a distributor wants a shorter version. Matthieu van Eysden’s “Doeluttel” is similarly expendable. Lilly and her accordion get a few musical numbers - that must have gone down a treat with G.B.S. - and there is of course the “happy” ending which the author objected to, though it follows, here  pretty clumsily, a line used in most adaptations.

Pygmalion - De Meesters & Bouwmeester.

The Dutch unit’s production values are a try for polished with small, busily decorated studio decors, but the piece is non stop talk. The few attempts at cinematic material, working with the kids gang, the shopping expedition and particularly the ball, are chopped off before they get a chance to work up any steam. Of the cast only Higgins’ mother, one Emma Morel who made just one other movie, seems to be at ease in front of the camera. De Meesters’ bombastic Svengali character totally lacks the charm balancing his arrogance, which Leslie Howard and Rex Harrison traded in.

However Lily Bouwmeester, here in her initial sound film role, scored a hit. She jams in a few moments - her delayed reaction to the first experience of chocolate - and nearly makes us forget she was going forty when she made the film, which became a personal triumph for her repeating Eliza Doolittle in stage productions during the rest of her career.

Director Ludwig Berger, then interdicted by Josef Goebbels, moved in exalted circles, making Ein Walzertraum for Erich Pommer at UFA in 1925, directing Emil Jannings in Hollywood, reworking Max Linder’s Le Petit Café for Maurice Chevalier at Paramount, presenting the then stellar Pierre Fresnay - Yvonne Printemps duo in Trois valses and filming on The Thief of Bagdad for Korda. He became a musicals specialist. You would have expected him to be totally within his element here but he fails miserably to make the piece build to dramatic peaks or present the characters as sympathetic. His command of the Dutch language is suspect.

It would have been a better story if this one had turned out to be a suppressed masterwork but sadly what we get is a rather draggy oddity. Still, how many pre-Bert Haanstra  Dutch movies have you seen?

Barrie Pattison 2021

Into the Archive.

Lockdown and what better time to look at hundred year old movies? I just jammed in two.

In 1920 Humoresque was Frank Borzage’s first major film, the foundation of his great Hollywood career. The opening (“New York a sample of all the civilisations of history”)  is frequently considered it’s major asset, with “stolen” actuality of the Albert St. Ghetto market and Jewish stall holders and customers, prefiguring hundreds of films like Frank Capra's 1929 The Younger Generation or The Jazz Singer.

A crowded tenement flat holds the Kantor family including the first appearance of mother, stage star Vera Gordon, along with dad Dore Davidson, who is in the business of "turning new brass into Russian antiquities", and  retarded son Sidney Carlyle, a mind that never developed after an incident fleeing the Tsar. 

Humoresque - Connelly & Gordon

On his birthday, then child star Bobby Connelly in his freakish new suit, is duffed up by the street kids but he comes to the aid of young Miriam Battista, getting all the endearing camera work when she cradles a dead cat on which she lays the potted flower’s blossom - nice bright light circle close up of young Connelly.

Dad Davidson offers Bobby a Harmonica toy gift but his heart is set on the shop’s violin. Mother Gordon is elated, her prayers for a musician in the family answered, but Davidson scoffs. “Couldn’t you have prayed for a businessman.” Archivist Robert Gitt thought he was onto something when he found this one but disillusion set in about this point.

 We dissolve from Connoly to Gaston Glass as his grown self, the concert star. Davidson is impressed by the medal they have given his son which he could sell for a tidy sum. Our hero gives a concert for the poor people of the ghetto in the huge theatre. “The Kol Nider played as if his very blood were weeping” one of Frances Marion’s flowery titles announces and Glass is offered a four figure contract by a celebrity producer. However he eyes the recruiter’s stand in the street below.  Remembering the injury inflicted on his brother, he has to take a stand against autocracy and with freedom. “Father I’ve just signed a contract with Uncle Sam.”

About now top billed Alma Rubens shows up as the neighbor girl Battista grown to be his
sweetheart. She is appealing before her tragic addictions took hold. The protracted family farewell is the film’s big tear-jerker scene.

We never see any combat footage but a cable announces Glass’ return and a car pulls up only to deliver his army comrade come to say he’s in hospital, injured. Glass’ recovery is hindered by his fear, which makes it impossible for him to play, but when he has to reach out to stop Alma from falling, he overcomes this and finds his skill (immediately) restored. Gordon has been praying again. This wind up is rapid and unconvincing.

Today Borzage’s film  hasn’t lasted well into the era of concern over race stereotypes and  “getting an operation so I can play the violin again” jokes  Dramatically unremarkable, the weak ending pretty much does in any conviction but in its day Humoresque was a whopping success for producer William Randolph Hearst and it’s WW1 and concert hall subject matter indicate directions Borzage will take in his more mature work. 

Humoresque - Ann Wallack, Vera Gordon, Alma Rubens, Gaston Glass, Sidney Carlyle.

The film is the root of two major Hollywood ventures - Borzage’s Seventh Heaven with it’s lovers divided by WW1 and the forties supposed re-make to which Clifford Oddets added elements of his “Golden Boy” in his adaptation for Joan Crawford and John Garfield. 

William S. Hart in 1920's The Cradle of Courage seemed a better prospect. Not without interest, this turned out to be one of the lesser Hart films.  Take Hart out of his westerner character and turn him into into a cloth cap workman, an Aztec Indian or a city cop, and he loses his legendary status.

Doughboys, “men who had faced Boche steel” are  disembarking at San Francisco after WW1 and among them we spot Hart as Sgt. Square Kelly of the 91st, one time burglar, and his officer friend who happens to be the son of the Police Lieutenant who had encountered our hero in his professional capacity. Bill hurries back to his white haired mother. She (switch)  happens to be a cop hating Irish criminal matriarch. She’s saved his burglar tools for his return. He puts them with the Luger he captured grenading a German dug out in a flashback.

While he’s celebrating with his old gang, including his brother, at Tom Santschi’s Tierney’s Bar, Bill gets a call from his war buddy inviting him to diner with the folks. Soon our hero is faced with a choice - go back to crime or joining the force now that the Policeman father has made him an offer on the strength of his distinguished military service. “As a Bull?” “As a police officer!” Santschi’s ward Anne Little (co-star of Broncho Billy Anderson and the second De Mille Squaw Man) slips him a note saying the stripes on his sleeve are better than the ones he’ll get from a judge.

Sgt. Hart with captured Luger.

A convincing punch out with Santschi (also duking it out in the 1914 Colin Campbell The Spoilers) resolves the matter and mum throws Bill out of the family home.

The gang has their eye on a mansion in his patrolman beat and Little goes there to alert him but he thinks she’s casing the joint for them and their kiss in the bar's family entrance was an idle gesture.

He interrupts the robbery and in the exchange of gun fire his brother is killed with Hart’s old pistol. Bill prizes the name of the heavy his mum sold it to out of her, though told “A Kelly never squeals to a cop.” Out of uniform, he confronts the dastard. Getting shot with the under the counter pistol lands our hero in hospital and, sunning himself on the roof,  he resolves his romance and family dilemmas which is kind of a lame ending.

When the tension between Hart’s up bringing and his new righteous way of life has been settled, Cradle of Courage is less involving. Instead of an Old Testament God, it’s the hallowed US Army that stirs his reverence here. The San Francisco setting, also featured in Hart’s The Narrow Trail, is an effective background, an intriguing comparison to the same locales used a quarter century later in Dark Passage.

I hate to say it, because his B films made up a slice of my movie education, but Hart’s old associate Lambert Hillyer was never a major talent and his script and direction don’t make this one of his star’s best efforts. Cameraman Joe August (later to shoot The Informer and  the Laughton Hunchback of Notre Dame), on the other hand, covers himself with glory, capturing Hart in the Bay City panoramas and filming the shoot-out in the dark room illuminated by muzzle flashes - is this the first time? We get that again in George Bancroft’s  superior The Mighty ten years later, which this film intriguingly anticipates and - among many others - the Hopalong Cassidy Mystery Man eg.

Hart - Cradle of Courage

 

 

Barbara Bedford, Cora of the Tourneur-Brown Last of the Mohicans, debuts briefly as the officer’s sister.

There’s some bad matching on the cuts closer to medium shots of the leads, almost certainly not the fault of  Mr. Le Roy Stone who gets an editor credit, still unusual at this period. The Grapevine disk is passable. 

This pair of movies confirm my view that, while some outstanding films were made before the twenties, it took a couple more years before presentable entertainment became the norm.

 

Barrie Pattison - 2021

Prey to the Wind.

 
It’s sixty years since I saw Renè Clair’s 1927 La Proie du vent in a 9.5 mm print lovingly assembled by some British enthusiasts. I enjoyed it then so I was looking forward to seeing the much better copy on the Cinémathèque Française’ “Henri” site where you can still catch it if you hurry. I guess it’s like encountering an old friend after many years - welcome and agreeable though the things that irritated you way back re-assert themselves.

This one was made for the Producer Kamenka’s Russian expatriot Albatross group which put out films with Ivan Mozjoukine. It comes at the end of the silent period and shows European film technique at it’s most developed. Quite perversely it inverts our expectation of the principals. It’s not a comedy, the form to which Clair devoted himself, though it’s not too far away from And Then There Were None come to think of it. Burly Charles Vanel is not the heavy but the aviator hero and Jim Gerald (Clair's Un chapeau de paille d'Italie, Asquith's French Without Tears) plays a serious role. Well he did do Comissionaire Lohman in the Le testament du docteur Mabuse. The elegant, tragic Lillian Hall-Davies and the always touching Sandra Milovanoff  however do not disappoint the justified anticipations of their their admirers.

René Clair

The film kicks off with a bi-plane landing on a grass air strip, one of its several nicely cut passages. (no editor is credited and it may have been the work of the director) The airfield staff are discussing the unrest in Lebanon. (Russia in Armand Mercier’s original novel "L'aventure amoureuse de Pierre Vignal") Shifting there we find ourselves in the women’s prison cells where Milovanoff is tending her dying mother while her husband Jean Murat (La kermesse héroïque) is released and the crones around her accuse Sandra of being a married to a traitor - close up of the mother’s crucifix in her hands.

Flier Vanel takes off but is engulfed in a cloud bank and can find nowhere to land but in the grounds of a picturesque castle. His wing clips a statue and the resulting crash leaves him unable to walk. He is cared for by Hall-Davis, (Hitchcock's 1927The Ring and1928 The Farmer's Wife)  the sister in law of owner Murat. There's by-play between Charles and Lillian exchanging cigarettes and hand contact. We get a quite arresting dream sequence triggered by his suspicions.

Castle & car.

The distraught figure of Milovanoff appears at Vanel’s window and she warns him about her husband and sister in law. “They want me dead.” He soon manages to stagger round the grounds using a stick and contrives to conceal his picking up the note Sandtra throws him by dropping his cane on it and gathering up the two together. Lillian has put off their proposed chess game and when Sandra comes to his room at night he locks the door - ah but there is a secret entrance! One of the film’s several effective shock moments.

 There follows another nicely edited sequence, a car chase down the road through the forest which develops to an impressively delirious climax. Murat produces a pistol determined to resolve things.

Coming back from Paris, Vanel goes to the village inn where a letter of explanation has been left for him by shaven-headed Dr. Gerald. Notice we see Charles' reaction before the inset showing the contents. We get a coda on the Place de la Concorde which rounds out the film nicely.

Vanel

His Albatross films are the most flamboyant of Clair’s work. As well as the Russian fascination with montage, also evident in Clair’s La Tour the following year, we get the occasional Germanic dark foreground action - the unseen airport typist’s hands, the aged woman guardian at the bedside or the final embracing couple. The design co-credited to Lazar Meerson also registers, providing the striking  twisted pillar corridor to go with the imposing real castle exteriors. All this virtuoso trimming suits the melodramatic subject matter and La Proie du vent makes an entertaining viewing even though it remains a minor piece from an often over-rated director.

 

Barrie Pattison 2021

Shimizu

Hiroshi Shimizu

 Long serving director Hiroshi Shimizu (1903–1966) has become the man of the moment. The Paris Cinémathêque has finally mounted it’s three times postponed retrospective.  All my French chums are writing saying they are unimpressed. I felt left out as the only Shimizu film I’m aware of having seen is the 1936  Arigatô-san / Mr. Thank You with Ken Uehara playing a good natured bus driver doing favors for his passengers and the locals along his route through poor mountain villages - so, I dived into You Tube where I found Shimizu’s Kanzashi / The Ornamental Hairpin from 1941.

This one has more curiosity value than anything else. The opening is OK with a couple of young women, star Kinuyo Tanaka who was married to Shimizu and friend Hiroko Kawasaki, walking along the forest road with the parade of pilgrims paced by the drum beater women whose rhythm is underlined by a passage of the sparse score.

They are staying at the local mountain resort where visitor groups prove to have got the services of the twelve of eighteen blind masseurs management has recruited, leaving the existing long term, reduced price customers out of luck. Grouchy professor Tatsuo Saitô complains. While sharing the hot spring, an unrecognisably young Chishû  Ryû (later regularly with Ozu and Torasan) injures his foot on a coral hair pin that has been lost in the water, seeing a near poetic significance in the event. A letter from Tanaka arrives indicating that she is looking for her missing pin. 

Kawahara, Ryo and Saitô.

Tanaka feels compelled to return and assist in Ryo’s recovery and she and the tree climbing grandsons of old man guest Kanji Kawahara, who Saito is reduced to playing Go with, barrack Ryo’s attempts to go further each day. The plank walk across the river proves too much for him and Tanaka has to piggy back him the last section. Romance between the pair seems likely.

When a noisy pilgrim group arrives - shorter repeat of the early tracking through the interior - the hotel guests, under the grumpy tutelage of the professor, have to double up in their cut price rooms with his snoring worse than old Kawahara’s, about which he has been complaining.

Recovered to the point where he is able to get up the forest stone stairs, Ryo leaves and  Tanaka repeats his climb sheltered by her parasol from the rain (traveling close up of feet on steps) having expressed dissatisfaction with the sheltered Tokyo life she has been living.

Tanaka

The film making is not conventional with particularly the first interiors often single,  vertical line emphasising, static takes where changing the performers’ position rather than edits  is used to vary the image. Only the leads seem to merit medium shot singles. Close-ups of documents punctuate the action. Moving camera shots are rare but striking and the piece uses murky chemical fades. The blind masseurs and kid performers recognisable from other Shimizu films turn up again - to little effect.

The support cast tend to merge and the setting contributes more than they do - the inn with it’s the sliding screen doors and tatami mat shared rooms and management advising “It is a great dishonor to have a guest hurt”, the spring where the men relax naked, the woods and river.

This one is short on information. No one mentions the war and the sub-titles don’t make clear that Ryo is a soldlier on leave (immediately before “The day that will live in infamy”) and we have to deduce Tanaka’s life style from the opening line about sweat washing the powder out of her skin and her later pondering having all her needs met.

The film’s picture of forties Japan is its major point of interest and often it’s not all that convincing or involving enough to ward off tedium. The film goes into the basket of pedestrian contemporary-set shomin geki melos like Kinoshita's Nijûshi no hitomi / 24 Eyes or Mizoguchi's Gion no shimai / Sisters of the Gion Quarter.

 

Barrie Pattison 2021.

Japme with Trains & a Tiger.

 Used to be that  the problem was getting to see all the material showing in the theatres. Right now it's finding something that's worth the effort to go out in the cold. The new Japanese animated Josee to Tora to Sakana-tachi /Josee, the Tiger and the Fish meets that need nicely.

I was a Japme enthusiast long before we all heard about Manga. MGM dubbing Akira Daikubara and Taiji Yabushita's 1959 Shônen Sarutobi Sasuke, to emerge Magic Boy, tipped the balance. I remember planting that one with film societies. Shortrly after Osama Tezuka's Tetsuwan Atomu made it onto local TV as Astro Boy and isolated features like Yûgo Serikawa's1963 Wanpaku ôji no orochi taiji / The Little Prince & the 8 Headed Dragon or Kimeo Yabuki's 1969 Nagagutsu o haita neko / Puss in Boots, with one Hayo Miyazaki as a supervising animator, preceded the flood. Movie enthusiasts used to be derisive when I talked these up. Now there are shops devoted to manga movies.

Of course the films and (comic books) aren't all given over to little boy samurai battling wizards and dragons. Tezuka adapted "Crime & Punishment" and Rintaro filmed his Metropolis script in 2001, not to mention items like Isao Takahata's 1988 A Bomb memorial Hotaru no haka / Grave for Fireflies, and there's a broad spectrum of girl toons.

More recently these have mutated into adaptations of stories that might have been done as live action like 2016's Kimi no na wa. / Your Name or Nakao Yamada's Koe no katachi /A Silent voice. In fact Josee, the Tiger and the Fish had been filmed by Isshin Inudou in 2003, a slight, agreeable movie.

The current film is a  ‘Scope girlie manga without Princesses, fairies, J-Pop girls or talking animals (they do run to a winningly hostile domestic cat).  This one blows away most other entries we’ve seen in this cycle.  

Tsuneo, the student lead is learning Spanish and saving for the scholarship to study marine life in Mexico. He works with friends in a Dive Shop and sure enough his professor gets to tell him that his Thesis has attracted a scholarship.

However embittered crippled girl Josee literally crashes into his life when her wheel chair gets away from the grannie who is pushing her and rolls down the hill into him. The outcome of this is that he gets hired on to look after her while gran is off at the arcade games parlor. He’s intrigued when he glimpses the marine world painting in her inner room and he starts to create things like a seated skate board for her to move about on when her chair gets bogged in sand at the beach. 

Her superficial hostility begins to melt and she attends to her appearance and, to her surprise, begins to makes outside friends. The girl librarian proves to share her admiration for François Sagan after one of whose characters Josee was named. Josee’s predictable try at reading the tinies there “The Little Mermaid” bores all but one of them. They wander away from her  circle but her drawing on the white board intrigues them. The dive shop staff join in searching when she goes missing - despite the fact that the bikini girl also has the hots for our hero. One of the many nice moments is when the two young women achieve a common end and double high five one another.

Of course we are spared nothing and it looks like all the dreams will come to a halt in the hospital but that’s not going to happen in this picture.

It has the usual Japme fascination with railways. Think Spirited Away.  A couple of El trains pass in the Osaka set up scenics before we get to the journey footage with the wheel chair ramps being laid out. Striking, unfamiliar animation effects include the car headlight beams behind the action at night, the leaded glass windows of the old woman’s house or the sun through tree patterns falling on walking characters. The leafy setting is one of the film’s pleasures and is played with a change to winter snow. Their zoo tiger is a striking drawn concept and its hint of menace gives the often damp eyed piece an edge. The characters’ shared fascination with sea creatures generates a whole range of striking visuals - the aqualung scenes, the visit to the aquarium, the Clarion Angel Fish lamp, Josee’s paintings and her final mermaid story.

It goes on a bit too long but the climaxing session with the library kids intercut with the back story is irrestistible and could carry a weaker film than this over the line. The film is TV animation series director Kôtarô Tamura's first feature and it appears to have been widely admired.  This one deserves its theatrical run. Even if it does make it into local small screen distribution, it's qualities will be diminished.

Barrie Pattison 2021