Pale Flower (1964)

Yakuza Muraki (Ryo Ikebe) has just been released from prison after a three year stint for a gang war killing. He quickly gets back into his old life of crime, spiced with a lot of existential ennui. Little in life appears to interest him, and even yakuza fun isn’t actually any fun to him. He’s going through the motions of the life, of course, for what else is there? Muraki is ignoring the clan politics around him as well, which, as not just the later jitsuroku eiga have taught us, is always a problem for a yakuza on the lower rungs of the ladder.

Muraki develops something like an actual interest when he meets Saeko (Mariko Kaga), an at least moderately rich girl slumming it in the low life, obsessed with gambling. Saeko carries herself with the same emotional detachment as Muraki, with the excitement of ever higher gambling stakes about the only thing that seems to bring her to life. Clearly, these two are made for each other, or made to make each others’ lives all the shorter.

Masahiro Shinoda’s Pale Flower is a venerated classic of Japanese new wave cinema, by a director who would often tend to work within genre pushing its boundaries outward from the inside. As far as I understand it – I’ve not seen as much Shinoda as I probably should have – this is Shinoda’s first really artistically out there movie, made for Shochiku but not really inside of its production machine. So there’s freedom for Shinoda not to make a typical ninkyo eiga and also fewer of the studio constraints someone like Seijun Suzuki had to fight against even with a more pop minded studio as Nikkatsu.

The result is an often icily cool movie, driven by a strangely nightmarish score by Toru Takemitsu and a visual style that’s a perfect early 60s interpretation of noir. It takes place in an archetypal Tokyo of night people, populated with characters who have lost all drive for change, and probably all belief in even wanting something like change and thus just drift along, desperately grasping for any sensation that might actually make them feel again, even though this is the clearest road to their own destruction.

The acting here is just as icy and minimal as you’d expect, big expressive gestures buried under the characters’ internal ice. However, even though their characters are frozen inside and out, Ikebe and Kaga project this lack of emotion with great intensity which seems to nearly explode in the gambling scenes. Consequently, these sequences are incredibly sexually loaded, even more so than usual with gambling scenes.

Pale Flower is a perfect film of its kind, dominated by a sense of hopelessness that it’s hard for me not to call exquisite, beautiful in the way of flowers just about to die, something its protagonists would very much approve of.

Vampire Moth (1956)

Original title: Kyuketsuga

Fashion designer Asaji Fumiyo (Asami Kuji) and her stable of in-house models come under dire threat. A shadowy man with a badly disfigured face and a very characteristic set of teeth whom the film will call the “wolf man” (with a good understanding of the European conception of the werewolf as interpreted by Hollywood) because of these strange and creepy biters blackmails Fumiyo for something. He’s also not at all against committing a peculiar murder or two, especially when it means he gets to play with the legs of models. He’s apparently only interested in the legs, too, for the rest of the body of his first victim is returned to sender in a packing crate, with a big moth positioned over one nipple. And hey, he’s also sending moth-themed cake, so he can’t be all bad, right?

Given the moth-obsession, one might suggest our wolf man could somehow be connected with an elderly moth specialist who has the habit of visiting fashion shows to glare at the models and sneer at the fashion. That guy even lives in a moth-themed creepy mansion. For the first half of the film, a fashion company man (the film seems to dislike actually using character names, so your guess is as good as mine) and model Yumi (Kyoko Anzai) are trying to understand what the heck is going on the amateur detective way. Pretty much at the movie’s halfway mark, their job is taken over by legendary consulting detective Kosuke Kindaichi (Ryo Ikebe). He’s obviously got his work cut out for him.

About half the sources on the English language net I’ve seen seem to mix up this adaptation of one of Seishi Yokomizo’s Kozuke Kindaichi detective novels with The Ghost Man, a different 50s Kindaichi movie. It’s an easy mistake to make when you can only go by secondary sources, for the plots of both films do have rather similar set-ups. As with The Ghost Man, I can’t say if the different tone and style of the film to the Kindaichi books which have been translated into English is actually coming from the adaption or Yokomizo’s source. I can at least say that I find the film’s suave version of Kindaichi a bit bland compared to later movie versions of the character as well as the books in the series I have been able to read.

While they start out somewhat similarly, Vampire Moth does become increasingly different from the other movie. While they share a pulpiness in plotting and their approach to the mystery genre, the film at hand does contain no relevant nudity apart from a couple not quite bared breasts, and director Noboru Nakagawa downplays the proto ero guro elements he could have used.

Instead, Nakagawa – well-known for some brilliant kaidan movies in those parts of the West who care about old Japanese horror films – does dial up the spookiness whenever possible, using all the tricks of the creepy trade that stand him so well in his ghost movies. As usually, these are very much of a kin with the techniques of gothic horror used in Italian black and white movies of the same era, while also keeping to the slick visual standards of Japanese studio films of this and later times. There’s an absolutely incredible sequence where we follow our amateur detectives and the moth fan’s servant through a series of creaking doors through a mansion that’s all shadows and moth-fixated art, as if we were walking through a mind that becomes increasingly decrepit and weird, until our protagonists and we find another corpse. There are also fine macabre set-pieces concerning a pair of dancing legs, as well as a highly improbable and confusing plot to enjoy, where counting the number of villains and their actual identities can become too much for the armchair detective in front of the screen, and so adds to the strangeness of the film as well.

The Japanese gothic is only half of the film, however, for it seems highly interested in contrasts between the gothic and the high fashion modern (quite clearly following a parallel development to the giallo in another of these regular parallels between Japanese and Italian genre film). To my eyes, Nakagawa’s style often suggests the gothic, the macabre and the strange as the repressed underside of the glitter and the light, embodying all the ugly, unpleasant and nasty things the high modern won’t admit into their world. Until the repressed violently drags them into its world, of course.

Which isn’t at all a bad impression to achieve for a pulpy pot boiler of a macabre mystery movie that’s twenty years older than the guy watching it.