Three Films Make A Post: The picture that is the sum total of all human emotions!

Leave Her to Heaven (1945): Often, John M. Stahl’s noir melodrama is listed among the very best noirs ever made, if not declared the very best. I don’t really feel that way about the movie, to be frank. I appreciate elements of it – certainly Gene Tierney’s and Cornel Wilde’s performances – but its very mild deconstruction of the femme fatale trope seems neither fish nor fowl to me, with much of what it does having been handled with quite a bit more depth in what we’d now call domestic suspense novels of its time. Some of the melodramatic business is over the top in a way that just doesn’t work for me, personally, as well.

Leave Her to Heaven does also walk into another one of my personal landmines, where the supposed climax of a movie takes on the form of a judicial trial, which to my eyes has always been and will always be what the less capable writer will use when they can’t come up with an actual dramatic climax. Which, to be fair, is my problem as much as the film’s.

Tora-San’s Cherished Mother (1969) aka Zoku otoko wa tsurai yo: In his second movie outing, as usual directed by Yoji Yamada, eternal grown-up child with aspirations on dignified manliness Tora (as always Kiyoshi Atsumi), is stumbling, drinking and blustering his way into an encounter with the mother he never knew. There’s room for a look on the further developments in the life of the rest of his family – Sakura (Chieko Baisho) is now married and still the sane one in the family – scenes of awkward drunkenness that end in embarrassment, an ill-fated crush, sentimentality that often feels rather real, and all the other elements of the series’ formula.

It’s a nice, simply fun but not simple place to visit, really, where human emotions and their ridiculousness are treated with kindness, and I’m still not surprised that there was an audience for the series in Japan for decades.

Children of the Corn (2020/2023): Kurt Wimmer’s Children update took three years to come out anywhere, and while it is certainly not a great movie, it isn’t the complete train wreck one might expect either. For the first half an hour or so, this even seems to be a very clever update to the franchise formula, playing on the very specific anxieties caused by very contemporary, ecologically-fuelled generational conflicts. The cleverness slowly dissolves over the course of the rest of the film, mostly because the film increasingly just handwaves its own themes away, favouring increasingly stupid set pieces and one of the worst monster special effects you’ll see in a film with a decent budget. And don’t get me started on the particularly egregious horror movie bullshit ending.

In short: It’s Hard to be a Man (1969)

aka Tora-San, Our Lovable Tramp

Original title: Otoko wa tsurai yo

Twenty years after he left his family following a fight with this father, street peddler Torajiro Kuruma (Kiyoshi Atsumi), usually called Tora, returns to what’s left of it – his uncle and aunt and his half-sister Sakura (Chieko Baisho). After some moments of happiness, Tora begins to cause all kinds of chaos in the lives of the family, ruining a marriage meeting for Sakura by getting boorishly drunk, and typically showing all the emotional maturity of a child that loves to pretend a dignified grown-up; though, as his saving grace, also a lot of natural kindness and a lack of actual meanness. While he’s ruining Sakura’s love life, he’s also falling in love himself, unhappily and slightly ridiculously.

Having watched a movie right out of the middle of the series, I thought why not start of the beginning of Yoji Yamada’s long-running and much beloved Japanese comedy series and have a look at how its beginning played out. As it turns out, most of what I’ve said about the later movie fits this one as well, for the characters and their relations to one another are pretty much fully realized right from the start, details and elements of the background apparently shifting and growing over time in slow and organic ways. There’s a clear appeal in that, particularly when it is combined with Yamada’s gift for creating a sense of place and time (even if it is an idealized place and time), which also helps emphasize how much everyone here is part of a community, seen and unseen.

Many of the elements here will apparently repeat throughout the whole of the series, which might become a bit tiresome over time. Or not at all by virtue of the simple universality of some of these elements, like Tora’s inability to feel fully at home when he is at home but his sentimental longing for that very same home when he is away, the way side characters have fully developed life of quiet tragedy or happiness we only get glimpses into, and so on.

The humour here is generally gentle. The film pokes fun at Tora’s mix of foolishness and braggadocio, but clearly likes him and everyone else on screen as well. This is a film that smiles at foolishness and quietly shakes its head at it rather than shaking its fist, which feels absolutely right for what this tries to be. So I’m not at all surprised at the amount of love the series got in its time.

In short: I, the Executioner (1968)

aka Requiem for a Massacre

Original title: Minagoroshi no reika

A killer, a man going by the name of Kawashima (Makoto Sato) begins raping and murdering women belonging to a small clique of friends, for reasons which will turn out to make a lot of sense, at least to him.

In turns, we follow the exploits of Kawashima in his role as a killer, the police’s efforts at catching him – which means first realizing that the women he kills share a dark secret, and Kawashima’s romance with waitress Haruko (Chieko Baisho). Because this is not a Hollywood movie, that last part of the film will not collide with the first one in the most dramatically obvious way yet carry all the more dramatic heft and meaning for it.

I know that I, the Executioner’s director Tai Kato is well-loved as a filmmaker of various Yakuza and Samurai movie sub-genres; despite my interest in those genres, I haven’t seen many of Kato’s films, for some reason. Going by this film, I’m rather missing out.

At first, the I, the Executioner’s formal structure is somewhat confusing: the giallo-esque scenes of Kawashima as killer, the police procedural and the Japanese melodrama that takes over in the scenes with Haruko feel at the beginning only connected through Kato’s striking and individual-peculiar visual style. Kato nearly completely eschews long shots, prefers close-ups – sometimes of objects instead of people – and usually builds a frame within the frame of the screen by placing characters between or behind objects. He does this so intensely and continuedly, suddenly seeing a character’s whole body, or a shot that leaves space around characters takes on immense emotional weight. It’s a style so uncommon even in the world of brilliant stylists that was Japanese studio cinema of this era, it can’t help but suggest quite different ways our common filmic language might have developed and still be as emotionally affecting.

In the film at hand, this style at first causes a feeling of dislocation and claustrophobia, feelings Kawashima, his victims and the police share to various degrees. The longer the film goes on, the more it becomes clear that Kato also uses his style to connect the apparently disparate parts of the film, showing emotional connections nobody could tell; he’s also making subtle differences between the different strands – the murder scenes are the most claustrophobic whereas the scenes with Haruko suggest a larger, if not brighter world (that will of course eventually be drenched in rain).

Tora-san’s Dream of Spring (1979)

Original title: Otoko wa tsurai yo: Torajirô haru no yume

Having dipped a foot into the long-running, audience-favourite British comedy series of Carry On for one movie some months ago, I’ve now decided to also take a look at a film from a very different, and even longer series of Japanese movies who were just as pleasing to their local audiences. The “Otoko wa tsurai yo” (“It’s Hard to be a Man”) movies, typically just called the Tora-san films for their main character, the somewhat hapless, not particularly bright or emotionally adult, peddler Torajiro Kuruma (always played by Kiyoshi Atsumi), were a going concern between 1969 and 1995, usually with two films coming out each year. As I’ve been told, they are all not terribly different plot-wise, with Tora-san leaving home in a huff, nearly finding love, returning and having various encounters and misadventures, while his family’s life slowly develops and changes around him through the years. Thus, the films take on one of the joys of soap operas or the private lives of detectives in long running mystery series.

The film at hand, the 24th Tora-san movie, and like nearly all of them directed by Yoji Yamada (who somehow still managed to make more than a few other movies as well) concerns itself with a luckless American vitamin salesman (Herb Edelman) with no knowledge of the Japanese language taking (or really, stumbling into taking) a room in the household of Tora-san’s family, having various mishaps of cultural difference, and falling in love with our hero’s wonderful (and married) sister Sakura (Chieko Baisho). At first, relations to Tora-san, who turns out to be rather anti-American, are strained, but this being the kind of film it is, they don’t stay that way, particularly because both men are peddlers and fools in awkward love. For at the same time, when he’s not involved in innocent shenanigans, our hero does fall in love unhappily himself, which underlines how the film quietly makes rather a lot of the very different yet very comparable ways this sort of thing plays out for someone socialised in American or Japanese culture.

All of this is generally told in a quiet, sometimes quite melancholic way. Throughout, there’s the feeling of looking at people living a way of life that’s not quite in tune with that of the audience watching their adventures anymore, made to produce a feeling of nostalgia – not the angry kind that believes that the past was simply a better place, but the one that carries with it the acceptance of change as well as the knowledge that the past never was quite as happy as we want it to be.

The film’s humour is generally gentle and dominated by a kindness and generosity of spirit. Small human foibles, particularly as shown via Tora-san as well as his American counterpart, are treated as reasons for mirth, but a mirth lacking cruelty; rather, even if we’re laughing at them, we’re laughing at those parts of them we also know to belong to ourselves. This may sound or feel somewhat harmless to some sensibilities, but I find a film that’s at once trying to be honest about the fallibility of human nature but also kind about it rather refreshing in our highly judgmental present.

Particularly these days, it’s also genuinely lovely to watch a film that insists on kindness, the importance of understanding the flaws in others and oneself with kindness, as well as the importance of accepting certain differences as much as this one does.

Add the fine performances – Atsumi pretty much lives the role, Edelman is the perfect foil for him, and Baisho’s turn is often surprisingly emotionally complex for the sort of film this is – and the quiet assuredness of Yamada’s direction, and you have quite the film.

Station (1981)

Original title: Eki

The first half of the film portrays various occurrences in the life of policeman and sports shooter Eiji Mikami (Ken Takakura) that eventually come together to bring to a quiet crisis of conscience and grief.

In the second half, Mikami returns to his snowy home on Hokkaido for a family festival and to decide on quitting the police and finding some better way to live. Here, he also meets bar maid Kiriko (Chieko Baisho), another slightly lost and damaged soul with whom he might find a degree of peace and even love.

Yasuo Furuhata’s drama with mild crime movie elements Station (called so for reasons of metaphor, but also because train stations take on a central role in various decision points in Mikami’s life) is a film I found very difficult to get into. The first hour of this two hour plus movie often seems pointless, draggy, and confusingly edited. It’s not very easy to even grasp the form and structure of what’s going on – let’s not even speak of character relations and timeline – because the film jumps around in the chronological order of Mikami’s life from scene to scene, often without any visual markers suggesting that it does so; there are no attempts at making Takakura look different in any part of the timeline either. So, for quite some time, it’s rather difficult to figure out what’s even going on in the movie at all, so much so, there’s little space to understand where all of this is actually going. Many scenes only make sense in the hindsight of the second hour, when the timeline collides into a linear narrative thread and we can begin to appreciate what we’ve seen before, how it connects, and how it brought Mikami to the emotional low point he is at now.

And once he has brought his film into this calmer rhythm, Furuhata turns out to be rather great at exploring this middle-aged kind of quiet grief and regret for the things one has done and encountered in the past, for the roads not taken, for the unkindness towards others and oneself, in a manner that never becomes melodramatic or whiny but carries a depth of emotion and understanding (also of the fact that one can’t really escape oneself, ever) under the poise of small gestures and quietly spoken (or unspoken) words, and lots and lots of snow.

Takakura – one of Japan’s great actors of the small gesture in most cases – is absolutely fantastic in the role. He suggests much of the weight of the past, the small fire of awakening hope, and the depths of his sadness through tiny shifts in his body language, the telling small gesture, and the way he says his most important lines in the most incidental manner. Baisho meets him gesture by gesture, and even has to do him one better by having to also suggest an hour of backstory about her we don’t get to see, using the same methods by which Takakura shows the results of his past on his present state. It’s all wonderfully understated, yet also precise and clear (not simplistic, mind you).

This is very much a film that rewards re-watching, obviously, because once the viewer understands the whole of Station’s structure they can also appreciate all the emotional and incidental detail contained in its first half. Which to me seems to be rather a huge risk to take for a film, structurally, but it does work for Station, if you have some patience with it going in.