A volatile love triangle emerges between a student, a waitress, and a yakuza boss in 1956's Black River (黒い河). It was directed by Masaki Kobayashi, not one of my favourite directors of the period and I found this film to be a little weak. The characters aren't explored to the minimum depths necessary for the story and its messages about sex and poverty are pretty trite and romantic. Still, the film has nice performances from Ineko Arima and Tatsuya Nakadai.
The film is set during the American occupation of Japan following World War II. Events take place in a dusty shanty town near an American base. Prostitutes who service the Americans lounge about the streets and bars. Among them walks one virgin, her purity symbolised by her white parasol, Shizuko (Arima).
Kobayashi is far from subtle about that symbolism. She draws the eyes of all kinds of men in town but two in particular--a quiet young university student who's just arrived in town, Nishida (Fumio Watanabe), an the fiery young local yakuza boss, Joe (Nakadai). This was during the period when Japan's government infrastructure was so weak that areas of Tokyo like this were effectively governed by gangs. So Joe's position is much bigger than just a street thug and it's up to him whether or not someone's home gets demolished. In one amusing scene, a character asks another yakuza just who he thinks he is that he can tear down buildings at a whim. The yakuza replies simply, "Godzilla." A bit confusing since the film is set at least two years before the first Godzilla movie but still funny.
Joe obsessively watches Shizuko walk to work every day and has his men tip him off whenever she walks by. He decides he must take her virginity. So he has his men kidnap her and blindfold her and then, in an absurd scene, he pretends to fight them all off and "rescue" her. He tries to play nice but quickly gets too rough and rapes her anyway. He takes custody of her parasol then and keeps it in his apartment. Shizuko's response, surprisingly, is to beg Joe to marry her. It seems she's a very traditional girl.
Or one assumes. One of the frustrating things about the film is that we learn almost nothing about Shizuko. We don't know why she came to town, we don't know if her parents are alive or where they live. We don't even know where she lives, a strangely absent detail considering the film spends so much time commenting on Nishida's home.
He'd been harbouring a crush on Shizuko as well and becomes angry when she suddenly seems to give him the cold shoulder. The movie has a series of that annoying kind of melodramatic scene where Shizuko is just about to explain everything to Nishida but . . . just can't and arranges to meet with him later to tell him everything. And of course something always prevents her from showing up and Nishida starts to feel more and more bitter towards her. Meanwhile, there's a subplot about Nishida and his neighbours being evicted by Joe, who wants the building torn down to build a love hotel. This subplot is actually a little more interesting than the main plot. Many of the tenants are Kurosawa regulars, including Seiji Miyaguchi and Eijiro Tono. Tono is particularly interesting as a pimp with whom Nishida tags along to the American base one evening, a little adventure that indicates some hypocrisy in his condemnation of Shizuko's apparent love for Joe.
Kobayashi seems to be trying to say something about the folly of men's preoccupation with female purity but the ideas are too muddled and the characters too weak to make any kind of point. But the attempt gets in the way of the film being enjoyable as an exploitation film.
Black River is available on The Criterion Channel.
Twitter Sonnet #1464
A glance diverts the cutting damp from leaf.
Assumptions sink beyond the surface sand.
The crinkled cards collect around the chief.
A drifting rain consoles a desert land.
The problem solved was long beyond the range.
A ribbon cut was measured first to size.
A book's return to hand is nothing strange.
It's odd to watch it cheat a thousand eyes.
An extra hand was added later on.
In post production limbs were pasted back.
Across the board a queen became a pawn.
A spoon replaced the knife in ev'ry rack.
The running night has carried bills to hell.
Confusing tables hold a silent bell.
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