Enlightened Selfishness

A regime based upon the ethic of “always enlightened selfishness” has the undeniable advantages of producing a more efficient and prosperous economy and a freer polity and society.  It is also, I would venture to say, more genuinely, as distinct from rhetorically, moral, because it requires no violation or transformation of human nature.  It takes people as they are and as they always have been, capable of being enlightened as well as selfish - enlightened precisely because they are selfish, because the “self” naturally embraces family and community, religion and tradition, interests and values.

     - Gertrude Himmelfarb, “Victorian Values, Jewish Values” (1989)

French Cinema Now: When Margaux Meets Margaux

Went to SIFF yesterday to see When Margaux Meets Margaux, which is playing as part of SIFF's French Cinema Now festival.  It was bad.  A 45-year old woman named Margaux (Sandrine Kiberlain) comes across a 20-year old woman also named Margaux (Agathe Bonitzer) at a party in Paris.  Ah, the viewer thinks, this is a pleasant little comedy about mistaken identities.  Alas, no.  Margaux the Elder is actually Margaux the Younger from a later period in her life.  Apparently some sort of time travel has occurred.  But how?  We’re not told.  However, there is also the possibility that Margaux the Elder is some sort of metal projection of Margaux the Younger when she contemplates what her future life might be.  So who's the real Margaux?  It's not clear.  And that’s the problem I had with this film: its main conceit is too baffling.  We’re never quite sure what we’re witnessing.  The ground beneath our feet is never secure.  Writer and director Sophie Fillières is attempting to create a romantic comedy but keeps throwing us so many metaphysical curveballs that one barely has time to care about the fate of Margaux (either one) or her (their?) love life.  I was busy looking for clues to determine what was the reality of the film - and (spoiler) I was left empty handed.  An entirely unsatisfying experience.  In fact, leaving this film my greatest regret was that an older version of myself hadn’t traveled back from the future to warn me not to waste my afternoon watching this disappointing movie.

Sandrine Kimberlain and Agathe Bonitzer

Unfinished Books

I try to finish every book I read.  In fact, I don’t regard a book as “read” by me unless I’ve gotten to the very last page.  But in reality that’s not always possible.  Most of the times I agonize over when to give up on a book.  I know the author worked hard on it; I want to make sure I’ve given them a chance.  But other times - and this is one of them (or two of them, actually) - the author manages to drive me away from their book either by poor writing or by being annoying.  That’s the case with the two volumes under consideration here.

I was very excited to start Alan Strauss-Schom’s The Shadow Emperor: A Biography of Napoléon III (2018).  This nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte ruled France from 1852 to 1870 and ultimately led his country to military defeat at the hands of Bismarck’s Germany.  He has indeed been something of a “shadow” historically, dwarfed by both his uncle and by the other major political figures of his era - Bismarck, Gladstone, Disraeli, Garibaldi, etc.  As the heir to the Napoleonic throne, little Louis Napoléon (his real name) and his mother, Hortense, were subjected to constant police oversight.  All their mail was read.  A grand coalition representing Europe’s major powers oversaw Hortense’s choice of tutors for Louis.  They were routinely kicked out of any country they tried to settle in.  It was a precarious life and Strauss-Schom does a fine job with all of this.  

But as Louis grows up Strauss-Schom strikes a new tone in the book.  Hortense, who up to this time appears as a normal aristocratic mother of the day, if a little more protective than most, is suddenly transformed into a domineering maternal bitch.  “Fed on honeyed pap and smothered in cotton wool by an emotional, overly protective, unhealthily possessive doting mother…[sic] her son’s future did not look hopeful.”  But not to worry.  Strauss-Schom assures us “only his [Louis’s] surprisingly strong character and personal will to achieve something worthy of his name, the chalice of empire, to be recognized and respected by the outside world, drove him on with force enough eventually to break away from this strangling silk web.”  

“Chalice of empire”?  The minute I read that it hit me “This isn’t a history; it’s a trashy historical novel.”  I had to check and make sure the cover wasn’t embossed.  This is the language a tenth-rate fiction writer would use - as, too, is the cliché of the suffocating mother.  What kind of legitimate historian would use a phrase like “chalice of empire”?  Frankly, I'm not even sure what that means.  How is an empire a chalice?  Is a drinking vessel really the appropriate imperial metaphor?  Could there be a “mug of empire”?  Or maybe a “red Solo cup of empire”?  I don’t know.  I do, though, think that “Chalice of Empire” may actually be the name of a multi-player video game, but I’m not sure.  Clearly, the only way for me to continue reading this book would be to regard it as camp - and that’s not really my thing.  So I close it and I'm done.

Right from the beginning I sensed that David Cannadine’s Victorious Century: The United Kingdom, 1800-1906 (2018) wasn’t going to make it.  He begins the book with two quotes.  One is Karl Marx’s classic observation from The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte that human beings make their own history but only under inherited historical conditions.  The other is Charles Dickens's even-more-classic opening from A Tale of Two Cities, “It was best of times, it was the worst of times...”  The Marx quote is bad enough; surely, Cannadine could have found a more original quote in the corpus of Marx’s work than the old chestnut he settled upon.  But the Dickens quote is worse.  The choice of it is trite, lazy, and not even relevant.  Dickens wrote it about the eighteenth century, not the nineteenth century.  So it’s not even á propos to the book at hand.  

On the first page of the Preface and Acknowledgements Cannadine writes “I was lucky enough to grow up in what were in many ways the final years of the ‘long’ nineteenth century - namely the 1950s.”  The 1950s?  Really?  On the next page he refers to “the first decade of the twentieth century - the 1960s”  Nine pages later you’ll find this: “In some ways, even today [2017], the British nineteenth century is still not over.”  Cannadine is playing much too fast and loose with his conception of the nineteenth century.  In fact, when your periodization of a “century” covers over 220 years you need to rethink your assumptions.

But intellectual sloppiness seems to be Cannadine’s forte.  To prove that the nineteenth century still is not over in Britain he points to the ongoing existence of photography, nursing, the bicycle, etc. but also matches, football, the old school tie, and bacon and eggs.  In the book’s Prologue (yeah, it’s one of those books with both a preface and a prologue) he writes of the UK that “uniquely among the great nations of the world, its boundaries remained unchanged and unchanging throughout the nineteenth century.”  Yes, that happens when you’re surrounded by water.  

But it was a sentence in the opening paragraph of the first chapter which sealed this book’s fate for me.  Here it is: “Accordingly, on the first day of January 1801, Ireland vanished as a separate nation, and the expanded and consolidated United Kingdom that came into being would endure, albeit with misgivings and challenges, disapproval and protest, for the whole of the nineteenth century and on, indeed, until the aftermath of the First World War.”  Ireland wasn’t “a separate nation” before 1801.  Period.  It became a separate nation in 1921.  Until then it was under British rule, directly or indirectly.  That’s the fact.  Just as today no intelligent person would refer to the Palestinians or the Tibetans or the Basque as “a separate nation” so, too, Ireland was not one in 1800. 

So why is Cannadine fudging this?  He could have called Ireland “a separate administrative unit” or said that Ireland “legally joined” the UK in 1801, but calling them “a separate nation” is entirely misleading.  Note, too, the cagey way in which he won’t even acknowledge that Irish independence occurred at the end of his chosen historical period.  In fact, the entire sentence from “albeit…” on is one big fustian evasion.  Why should I continue to read this book?  How do I know that what he writes is accurate?  I’d have to read a second book on this topic just to fact check his.  No, no, no.  To the trash with it. 

A Dream Animal

Although there is still much that we do not understand, it is likely that the selective forces working upon the humanization of man lay essentially in the nature of the socio-cultural world itself.  Man, in other words, once he had “crossed over” into this new invisible environment, was being as rigorously selected for survival within it as the first fish that waddled up the shore on its fins.  I have said that this new world was “invisible.”  I do so advisedly.  It lay, not so much in his surroundings as in man’s brain, in his way of looking at the world around him and at the social environment he was beginning to create in his tiny human groupings. 

He was becoming something the world had never seen before - a dream animal - living at least partially within a secret universe of his own creations and sharing that secret universe in his head with other, similar heads.  Symbolic communication had begun.  Man had escaped out of the eternal present of the animal world into a knowledge of past and future.  The unseen gods, the powers behind the world of phenomenal appearance began to stalk through his dreams.

     - Loren Eiseley, The Immense Journey (1957)

ACT: Skylight

This weekend I went to see David Hare’s Skylight at ACT.  It’s a superb production - moving, riveting, engrossing.  It pulled me in so strongly that when the lights came up at the end I got that brief jolt of being returned from the play’s reality to my own.  It’s not often that you walk out of a theater and tell yourself “That production could not have been better” but that’s the case with this one. 

Hare’s play (first produced in London in 1995) concerns the reuniting of two former lovers after a few years apart.  The woman, Kyra, is a school teacher in her late thirties living in a run-down and very cold apartment in a desolate area of North London.  The man is Tom, a wealthy and successful restauranteur about twenty years her senior.  They come together for the night but are driven apart the next day by both their differences and their shared past.  There is also Edward, Tom’s son by his wife Alice.  Alice is not a character in this play, but she is a presence in it.  The events onstage take place a year after her death from cancer and a few years after her discovery of Tom and Kyra’s affair.  It’s out of this mundane, even trite, material that Hare has fashioned his magnificent play.  

Although Hare is mostly thought of as a political playwright, Skylight is more intimate and personal than much of his other work.  Unlike his more epic plays (Fanshen, A Map of the World) this is a chamber piece, a duet.  The two ex-lovers take center stage; Edward appears only at the beginning and briefly at the end.  At the root of every decent playwright - no matter how inspired by politics or current events or religion or, even, just the desire for money - is the commitment to and love of the brute facticity of theater: a live actor before an audience creating an entirely new reality.  There’s magic in that, and one senses that the sparseness of the material may very well have been inspiring to Hare.  Love, death, grief, anger, betrayal, hope, rage - the gamut of human emotions pass between these two characters.  They contain the world.

Still, the political is there.  Kyra is a teacher at a school in one of London’s poorer and more violent neighborhoods.  She first met Tom when she was hired to work in one of his restaurants, soon Tom and Alice take her into their home, and Tom, ultimately, to his bed.  Kyra’s life became one of ease and affluence, only the finest things.  Her breakup with Tom led her into a hard scrabble existence but one of which she is defiantly proud.  At one point she goes on a glorious rant about “those right-wing fuckers” in parliament and the media who chatter about what the poor need to do to improve their lot but never actually do anything to help them.  After almost a quarter century its power, relevance, and contempt are still fresh.  Elinor Gunn’s performance Kyra is flawless.  She is both deeply vulnerable and yet hard as steel at the core.  Kyra is a woman who says “yes” to the world (Tom reproaches her for this) but she’s at the age in life when events and experience begin to persuade one of the wisdom of saying “no.”  Tom loves her and she almost can’t help but respond to that love; not because he’s so wonderful, but because love is.  

David Hare

On a side note, I couldn’t help but notice that if Kyra had been played a little colder and more archly (and I’m glad Gunn didn't play her that way) it would have brought out the influence on this play, conscious or not, of Noël Coward.  Now I don’t know if Hare would acknowledge that influence or if he even likes Coward’s work, but despite the politics and coarse language of Skylight there are some distinctly Coward-esque aspects to the story - old lovers meet, verbal sparring, potential reuniting, bittersweet endings, etc.  Several times I couldn't help thinking of Elyot and Amanda in Coward's Private Lives (1930) - but that may just be me. 

The moment Daniel Gerroll walks onstage as Tom he dominates the play.  Brash, complaining, needy, charming, undeniably fun, pushy - Tom is all those things and we are fascinated by him.  He’s in many ways the quintessentially successful businessman of Thatcher’s era - and ours, too.  He’s completely unpretentious, hard working, sympathetic and yet possessed of a disturbing callousness and indifference to others.  Though even that he manages to make charming.  When Kyra tells him that he needs to listen to women if he hopes to bed them, he groans and retorts that listening “is halfway to begging.”  Tom is not a larger-than-life character such as Falstaff or Cyrano de Bergerac but there is an abundance to him - perhaps it’s merely the energy and élan vital of the successful entrepreneur - that makes him an irresistible figure.  Gerroll's performance is fantastic.  This is a role that isn’t just played - it needs to be filled, the actor needs to possess a certain heft to pull it off.  And Gerroll does that to perfection.  He’s so convincing that at one point, while watching Tom walking around Kyra’s apartment, I thought to myself “Yeah, you know that guy’s got another piece of ass on the side” and then realized “Oh, wait, he doesn’t actually exist.”

Michael Monicatti, in his professional stage debut, brings a wonderful energy and appeal to the role of Edward.  My one gripe: I wish he wouldn’t rush his lines.  There’s a music to Hare’s language (yet another similarity with Coward) and slowing the delivery down a bit will bring it out.  Julia Hayes Welch did an excellent job with the set; she uses thin copper piping to frame the stage as well as remind us of the gritty nature of the neighborhood Kyra lives in.  And, finally, John Langs is to be commended for his outstanding direction of this play.  Everything seems to come off effortlessly - which we all know usually requires a back-breaking amount of work to achieve.  

Skylight will play at ACT until September 30, so you all have plenty of time to go get tickets.  

Alberto Manguel: Packing My Library

Packing My Library: An Elegy and Ten Digressions by Alberto Manguel is an enjoyable and entertaining account of the author’s experience packing up his library of some 36,000 volumes when he and his partner left France in 2015.  Interspersed with that narrative are ten digressions about books, libraries, words, and the literary life in general.  Manguel is a born raconteur and incapable of being boring.  At 146 pages, this is a quick and pleasurable read.    

The one weak spot in this book, however, is Manguel’s account of the circumstances under which he had to leave France and, hence, pack up his library.  He refuses to tell us why.  He cryptically refers to “reasons I don’t wish to recall because they belong to the realm of sordid bureaucracy” but that will not do.  As readers we need to know what happened.  He claims that the packing of the library was emotionally painful to him and even compares it several times to his own burial.  If we’re to sympathize with his suffering it doesn’t help that he’s being so evasive.  It inevitably raises suspicions.  Maybe there’s more to this story than he’s telling us.  Perhaps he’s not the helpless victim he claims to be.  One fancies that if the sordid French bureaucrats could give their side of the story (and they can’t) Manguel might look a little silly in the sackcloth and ashes he’s donned for his readers. 

But despite that flaw Packing My Library is an outstanding book.  It's everything we mean when we call a book "a good read" - pleasurable, informative, engaging, the author's vivid personality coming through on every page.  It's the kind of book you want to go on for another hundred pages.  I thought the digressions were the best part.  They cover a variety of topics: the library of Alexandria, dreams, artists and suffering, dictionaries, etc.  It’s in these pieces that the author shines.  His immense learning comes into play, as well as his undiminished enthusiasm for whatever the subject at hand.  Yet he never comes across as a showoff or a know-it-all (which is probably the greatest accomplishment that a showoff or know-it-all can have).  Manguel believes in books; he is their evangelist.  

And he covers a lot of ground in a short space. In the sixth digression, for instance, Manguel (who is of both Jewish and Argentinian descent) writes about the concerns within the Jewish tradition about the power of words, the legend of the Golem (who is created and destroyed by words), and Jorge Luis Borges’s life-long fascination with the Golem figure, as well as his critique of Dante’s Commedia (that's Borges's critique of Dante, not the Golem's - though if there was such a text, Manguel would have read it).  And along the way, of course, there are many fascinating anecdotes.  My favorite from this digression: “When the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot, Israel, built its first computer, Gershom Scholem [the scholar of Jewish mysticism] suggested that it be named Golem I.”  I could easily fill my review with many similarly entertaining quotes and anecdotes from this brief book but I won’t; I will leave them for you to discover. OK, one more:   Apparently Ralph Waldo Emerson took great pleasure in reading the dictionary. Why? "There is no cant in it," he observed.

Seijun Suzuki's Early Years: The Crime and Action Movies, Part 2

The second disc of Arrow Video's set of early Seijun Suzuki crime and action movies is largely hit or miss.  These films were made during Suzuki's  journeyman years at the Nikkatsu studio and the scripts he was given didn't always provide him with the opportunity to display his talents to the fullest. Nonetheless, there are some noteworthy moments even in the most poorly done of films.  Once again Jasper Short has provided informative commentary for this set (on the first disc), as well as an essay in the illustrated booklet which accompanies the box.  And there's a brief video essay with Tony Raynes putting each of the films into perspective.  I have relied upon both men for much of my information.

Eight Hours of Terror (1957)

A nice taut thriller.  When a typhoon closes down the night-train service to Tokyo a group of people board a rickety old bus to make the overnight journey through the perilous mountain passes.  Along the way the bus is hijacked by two sadistic criminals carrying twenty million yen of stolen money.  

As they’re boarding the bus one of the characters says “It’s like a western!”  And so it is.  In fact, it’s John Ford’s 1939 Stagecoach (which is itself, as one critic observed, just Edmund Goulding’s Grand Hotel (1932) on wheels) - throw a bunch of interesting people together in a vehicle and put them through hell.  Hitchcock’s Lifeboat works on the same principle.  And what a colorful, if predictable, crew Suzuki has assembled for us.  There’s the whore with the heart of gold.  The stuffy and obnoxious businessman with his wife.  The lingerie salesman who provides comic relief.  Also, a police officer hand-cuffed to a murderer who's being transported to prison, a pair from the communist-youth league who spout slogans for much of the trip, and a pretty slip of a girl going to Tokyo to break into movies, and others.  The outcasts will of course save the day while the respectable cower in fear.  

The bus encounters an obstacle

The two most interesting characters in the film, which were also the best performed, were Sumie, the prostitute, and the killer Kosaku.  Keiko Shima’s prostitute was elegant, savvy, cunning, devoid of innocence but not of decency.  And certainly not of courage.  During a bus stop she lures one of the criminals into the woods and his doom.  I won’t entirely give it away except to note that bear traps can be very nasty.  Later in the film, when the grateful passengers learn that her boyfriend is an African-American GI at a US Army base, they turn on her.  Refusing to be bullied by them, Shima's verbal berating of the group for hypocrisy is full of both dignity and hurt.   

Keiko Shima and Nobuo Kaneko

Nobuo Kaneko's killer is dark and moody - and ultimately sympathetic.  Apparently it’s not just the whores who have hearts of gold in this movie.  In the course of the film one of the passengers tries to kill herself and her baby.  She is stopped but her baby is harmed.  Kosuku, who turns out to be a doctor, will nurse it back to life.  We also find out that during the war he served in the medical corps.  One day he returned home to find his wife in bed with another man.  In a rage he killed them both. Soldiers serve an interesting role in this film.  Kosaku saved their lives during the war; hence he is sympathetic.  We learn about the black GI whom Sumie loves when someone goes through her purse and sees a photo of him in bed.  Even the soldiers of the occupier and former enemy are used to bring humanity to a character, so unlike the xenophobia on display in the later films on disc one.  At the time Nobuo Kaneko would play other roles in which Japanese film-goers came to grips with the post-war experience.  He was the bed-ridden son and head of the household in 1955’s A Hole of My Own Making, a domestic drama about a family’s disintegration in post-war Japan after their father’s death in the war.

The terrain can be treacherous.

The Man With a Shotgun (1961)

Not good.  Hideaki Nitani plays Ryôji, a loner who goes off into the mountains to hunt.  Along the way, though, he stumbles into a mining town and soon he is embroiled with the town’s outlaws and gun-slingers as well as the scheming boss of a mining company.  And of course the sexy and dangerous madam who runs the saloon/brothel.

A western of sorts.  Fans of Suzuki’s genre-busting tendencies will enjoy this film because it’s something of a gangster movie, too.  The mining company, we discover, is just a front for an opium ring, and one of the outlaws is in fact an undercover cop.  For me, though, the story never quite came together.  Sometimes it’s a comedy, other times it’s an earnest, self-important tale about non-violence.  Mostly it's a muddle.  Parts of the story repeat themselves for no good reason, and the betrayals and alliances among all the characters are a challenge to keep up with (or to care about).  To my mind the most representative moment of this film’s general tenor is when Ryôji gets hurt after a fistfight so he goes to the general store and buys a salonpas patch for his wound.  OK.

Hideaki Nitani

Nevertheless, the acting is good in this film.  Hideaki Nitani has the rugged good looks of a cowboy actor (he plays one of the communist youths in Eight Hours of Terror) and Yoko Minamida is fetching as the town’s slinky, sexy, and cunning madam.  And it was shot in the Japanese countryside, which is quite lovely. 

Pretty

Tokyo Knights (1961)

Dissapointing.  Kôji Matsubara (Kôji Wada) returns from school in the US after his father, the head of a successful construction company, dies under mysterious circumstances. The company's No. 2, Mishima (Nobuo Kaneko, again), has taken over the firm and also has plans to marry Kôji's mother (Yoko Minamida, again), who seems scarcely older than her biological son (in reality the actors playing mother and son were separated by only eleven years).  Kôji soon figures out that his father was murdered and sets up revenge.  The problem?  He and classmate Yoriko Tokutake (Mayumi Shimizu) haven fallen in love and it looks like her dad (Zenpai Saga), also in the construction business, is the prime suspect in the murder of Kôji's father.  

Mayumi Shimizu and Kôji Wada

Although the opening section of this film is very good, once the Hamlet-esque main story takes hold it falls entirely flat.  Tokyo Knights becomes pedestrian, dull.  There are some wonderful visuals, to be sure, but Suzuki doesn't seem to have too much interest in the story.  Kôji takes a long time reaching the conclusion that his father was murdered and when he goes for proof/revenge it's rather disappointing. His vengeance involves putting on a mask and cape, grabbing a rapier, and frightening the so-called bad guys with his Nōh drama inspired ambushes and antics.  It is very silly. Tokyo Knights, like The Man With a Shotgun, seems reluctant to show actual violence.  Why this is so, I don't know.  Guns are brandished but rarely fired, and if a character does get shot it's more the result of accident than intention.  This unwillingness to depict violence creates major problems if you're telling a revenge story (or a western, too, for that matter).  It's not quite satisfying if the bad guys don't come to an appropriately brutal end.  Violence is inherent to the genre; it's Kill Bill, not Seriously Inconvenience Bill.

Nobuo Kaneko and Zenpai Saga

There are, though, some good things about Tokyo Knights.  The opening scenes, in which Kôji returns to his private school, are very funny.  He's clearly - and comically so - a big man on campus.  For instance, all the clubs want him to join.  No sooner does he join the kendo club than he wins the kendo championship.  So he leaves it and goes off to the polo club.  He becomes champion there too, so he quits to join another club, and so on.  It's all done very briskly and with a light and sunny touch. In fact, the opening scenes have a distinctly Wes Anderson like feel to them.  The other noteworthy part of this film is the actor Zenpai Saga (spoilers ahead) who plays the head of a rival construction firm and is, in fact, the killer of Kôji's father.  What a magnificent face!  But it's more than a face; it's a mug.  If this man wasn't born to play the heavy in B movies, I don't know who was.  He fits this role perfectly, looking exactly like the type of big, vicious bastards who prosper in the construction industry. All the other actors do a fine job but every time Zenpai is onscreen you can feel the malevolence in the air.  It was a delight.

Mankind's Religious Life

Thus men’s terrors in face of the enigmatically dangerous universe led them to postulate the existence of angry gods; and, later, thinking about angry gods made them feel terror, even when the universe was giving them, for the moment, no cause of alarm.  Emotion, rationalization, emotion - the process is circular and continuous.  Man’s religious life works on the principle of a hot-water system.

     - Aldous Huxley, “Meditation on the Moon” (1931)

Seijun Suzuki's Early Years: The Crime and Action Movies, Part 1

In addition to their five-film set of early Seijun Suzuki movies dealing with the travails of youth, Arrow Video have also released a five-film four-disc (DVD and Blu-Ray) set of his early films in the genre of “crime and action”.  As with the previous set, these B films are not available on DVD or Blu-Ray in Japan but you can get them here in the US. 

The two films on this disc are very similar.  They’re both gritty crime dramas set in a morally corrupt post-war Japan.  The lead protagonist in each film is a journalist, both times played by the same actor, Hiroyuki Nagato.  They were made one right after the other.  And they both share the same world-view of fear, paranoia and disillusionment.  They ooze cynicism.  While not overtly political, both films are a sign of the anger and discontent present in Japan at the time.  In January of 1960, over popular opposition, the Japanese parliament renewed the Japan-US Security Treaty.  US occupation had officially ended ten years earlier but the treaty allowed the US to expand its military presence in Japan.  It was very unpopular.  There were massive student demonstrations against it, one of which resulted in the death of one of the student protesters.  The Prime Minister was forced to resign soon after.  It was in this milieu that these films were shot and released.

Although neither film deals with these events, both present a Japan threatened by infiltration from foreign sources, a Japan under seige.  Clearly, twenty-five years of war and occupation had taken their toll.  Americans - and English-speakers, in general - are a threat.  Their former enemy China, too, is a threat - especially Hong Kong, from where the heroin at the center of each films’ plot is being sent into Japan. And, of course, none of this could happen without the collusion of corrupt authorities in Japan.  

The Sleeping Beast Within (1960)

When Junpei Ueki (Shunsuke Ashida), a retiring businessman, returns home to Yokohama from a business trip to Hong Kong, his wife and daughter notice a change in his demeanor.  So too does his daughter’s boyfriend, Shôtarô (Hiroyuki Nagato) who just happens to be a reporter.  After Junpei suddenly disappears, the reporter starts to dig around.  He soon uncovers a seedy demimonde of drugs, corruption, and murder (doesn’t one always).

This is a very well-constructed and realistic thriller, it moves along briskly and always hold one’s attention.  It’s finale, involving a propane leak and lighter, is suitably explosive.  I did, though, have one problem with this film and it’s, frankly, the leading man, Hiroyuki Nagato.  He’s not much of an actor.  In fact, I found him to be something of a bore onscreen.  He doesn’t emote much.  And just standing there he has zero appeal.  He also stars in Smashing the 0-Line, where he delivers a similarly lifeless performance.  In fact, of all the main performances in the ten films in this Arrow Video release I found his the weakest. 

Kazuko Yoshiyuki, Shunsuke Ashida, and Hiroyuki Nagato

However, in The Sleeping Beast Within the character of Junpei Ueki, and Shunsuke Ashida’s performance in that role, make this film worth seeing.  Junpei is a normal Japanese salaryman but at the end of his career his company gives him a measly retirement pension and a shove out the door.  They don’t even show up to greet him when he gets off the boat from Hong Kong.  Hurt, broke, and feeling betrayed, he goes into the heroin business.  He breaks bad, in other words.  In fact, he’s sort of like a proto-Walter-White.  On the surface he’s a typical, almost stereotypical, Japanese businessman - dignified, quiet, respectable, sedate (maybe he’s a proto-Gus-Fring?), but underneath the “sleeping beast within”, as he puts it to his daughter, has awakened.  And also like Walter White he will ultimately do the right thing, but at a tremendous personal cost.  Ashida himself is perfect for this role.  Tall, stoic, solid (he played the headmaster of the military academy in The Incorrigible), one of his most intriguing features is a scar running down the right side of his face, hinting to the viewer that there’s a darker and more dangerous side to him than one would at first suspect.  

And, as always, there's Suzuki's acute visual sense.  In the shot above, Junpei's daughter Keiko (Kazuko Yoshiyuki) is inquiring with an official about her father's disappearance.  The fracturing of her image in the bevelled glass perfectly conveys her concern and anxiety.  Also remarkable are the flashback sequences in the film. Rather than a mere dissolve between shots - the normal way a flashback is handled - Suzuki uses a double exposure instead, so that the narrator of the flashback can remain onscreen to comment on unfolding events.  In the shot below, the call-girl Akemi (Yûko Chishiro) is recounting the night when Junpei (in the left of the shot) met up with the heroin cartel.  She appears both in the center of the shot pouring the drink and in the lower right corner recounting the evening a few days later.  It's a bold and dramatic technique.  

Shunsuke Ashida (far left) and Yûko Chishiro (center and lower right)

Smashing the 0-Line (1960)

Again Hiroyuki Nagato plays a reporter, but this time he’s a bad one.  Katori is a yellow journalist of the worst kind.  He schemes, betrays his sources to the police, sleeps around, colludes with criminals, etc.  Not surprisingly, he is highly successful.  His friend Nishina (Yûji Kodaka) is also a reporter but of the respectable variety, he never seems to get the story.  He's always getting scooped by Katori.  Again the plot involves heroin - this time the efforts by both reporters to uncover the shadowy “zero-line” which is bringing heroin into Japan.  Both men will clash over the course of the film, with Nishina delivering many a monologue about how one day Katori's bad actions will catch up with him.  Katori will be indifferent to him.  The translation of this film's title isn't quite accurate.  There's no "smashing" in the original title, which is Mikkô 0 Line.  Mikkô means "hidden", "secret", or "clandestine" which is much more in tune with this film's paranoia.

Hiroyuki Nagato and Emiko Azuma

A well-made, if slight, movie.  Yûji Kodaka puts in a serviceable performance as the ethical reporter.  And Nagato is typically inexpressive.  His idea of conveying Katori's evil is to make an occasional weak sneer.  The film's most interesting moments come towards the end (spoilers) when both men, hoping to expose the “zero-line”, stow away on a ship going to Hong Kong.  The ship’s crew is depicted by Suzuki as a surreal collection of foreign demons.  They’re dangerous, drugged-up, perverted, heavily-armed, and mostly non-Asian.  It's an intriguing instance of Japanese xenophobia at the time.  The other noteworthy moment is the conclusion itself.  The police raid the ship and arrest some of the top lieutenants of the “zero-line” but Suzuki makes very clear that the actual leaders of the drug cartel have gotten away.  Justice has not been done.  And Katori and Nishina don’t reconcile; the contempt of the former for the later is unabated at film’s end.  In their final confrontation Katori tells Nishina, and effectively us, that despite everything that’s happened nothing has changed or ever will change.  The heroin trade will continue.  And only a fool would think otherwise.  It's harsh, bitter, and unflinching.  Then the two men part.  Perfect.

Yûji Kodaka and Hiroyuki Nagato