In short: The Three Undelivered Letters (1979)

Original title: Haitatsu sarenai santsu no tegami

During the 70s the big Japanese studios produced a rather large number of mystery movies in the traditional style. On the written page and on screen, there seems to be a resurgence of golden age style mysteries in Japan every couple of decades or so. Japanese pop culture often demonstrates a particularly deep interest in genres working to strict rules and rigid structures, sometimes finding joy in subverting them, sometimes in following them, and sometimes in playing with them. It’s not only mysteries, but half of the anime and manga market seems to be nearly fixated on this sort of play with rules and regulations too. In this regard, it’s rather suspiring Japanese filmmakers never really went for the slasher.

Anyhow, in the last couple of years, quite a few of these movies have become available, either through the dedicated work of fansubbers (heroes to anyone with a broad interest in international cinema) or through some Western Bluray labels (heroes, too, perhaps even to filmmakers, also) actually letting one buy the stuff. Turns out – there is of course always the possibility that most films of the genre that don’t make their way over here from Japan are really bad – that quite a few of these films are rather great. The obvious posterchildren here are certainly Kon Ichikawa’s Kosuke Koichi movies, lovely mixes of the traditionally conservative, the playful and the progressive.

Yoshitaro Nomura’s (who also made a Kosuke Koichi film of his own, a version of Village of Eight Gravestones that is as different from the Ichikawa films as possible while staying in the same sub-genre) The Three Undelivered Letters, an Ellery Queen adaptation, is not at all on Ichikawa’s level, or even just one below. It’s a deeply conservative film in all the wrong ways, really doing its worst to sand down the implicit critique of the paternalism of traditional Japanese “old” families Kaneto Shindo’s script implies, instead emphasising some choice misogynist clichés and delighting in “honourable” suicide to spare the family name.

Aesthetically, this is still a Japanese studio (Shochiku, to be precise) movie from the late 70s, so it always looks slick, but Nomura’s too conservative a director to ever make much more out of the enormous technical talents of anyone involved than produce stiff melodrama. Shindo’s script, at least at is filmed, is slow to the point of stasis, without there ever being the sort of detail or depth that would need this slowness. As a mystery, the film suffers from being terribly obvious; as a melodramatic mystery, it lacks interest in the deeper emotions or motivations of its characters.