Back in 2013 Criterion put out a DVD boxed set as part of their Eclipse series called “Masaki Kobayashi Against the System” featuring four films which the famous director made for Shochiku Studios both before and after the release of Kobayashi’s magnum opus trilogy The Human Condition as a fan of Kobayashi I picked this set up sometime in the late 2010s and was planning to make a production of watching them all at some point after doing a “crash course” on the Kenji Mizoguchi’s Fallen Women boxed set, but other stuff kept coming out to distract me. Finally I think it’s time to buckle down and watch these allegedly “minor” works from this major director.
The Thick Walled Room (1956)
If you look at Masaki Kobayashi’s filmography it will tell you he made at least two movies in 1956 but that is largely a function of the fact that what was actually his third film, The Thick Walled Room, was considered to be so potentially explosive that it was put on the shelf for three years before actually being released. The film tackles the issue of what is to happen to “class B and C” war criminals imprisoned after World War II. The movie isn’t oblivious to these men’s sins and shows them wrestling with guilt over what they did but it is ultimately at least somewhat arguing that these people should be release as they were “just following orders” and that many of their commanders were punished less harshly. That whole argument strikes me as… rather dubious. Similar pleas to show mercy towards German Nazis who helped to commit atrocities in that theater would be viewed as rather offensive and I don’t think it’s all that different here, but there is some nuance to be found. I am not, however, unsympathetic to why there would be complicated feelings about this in Japan and in the mind of someone like Kobayashi. The film focuses specifically on a guy named Yokota who seems to have been constructed to be an ideally sympathetic example of a war criminal as he only took part of his crime on the instructions of a commanding officer and was then ratted out by that commanding officer as he weaseled his way out of his own culpability. I’m not sure about the morality of that argument: a hitman doesn’t suddenly become innocent just because the person who hired him had a better lawyer and managed to avoid punishment themselves. Still, Yokota’s personal journey remains interesting and a late scene where he confronts that commanding officer is a really well shot and tense piece of filmmaking and Kobayashi also includes some cool dream sequence type things in the movie. Whereever you come down on the movie’s arguments about war criminal amnesty, the mere fact that Kobayashi was willing to tackle such a hot button issue this quickly after the end of the occupation is impressively ballsy and he does find plenty of humanity to examine along the way.
***1/2 out of Five
I Will Buy You (1956)
I Will Buy You was Masaki Kobayashi’s follow-up to The Thick Walled Room in terms of release chronology but not in terms of production chronology as a result of that latter film’s having sat on a shelf for a while. I don’t know a whole lot about the films he made between the two of those but from what I’ve ready they appear to have been relatively safe and cozy projects for Shochiku but he decided to go a bit more “against the system” with this one. This is part of the tradition of sports movies that don’t actually have a lot of sports footage in them like Moneyball or High Flying Bird and instead focuses on the at times cutthroat wheeling and dealing involved in getting players signed to various teams within the world of mid-1950s Japanese baseball. The film looks at the bargains that are being made to sign a skilled player named Kurita and the various scouts and coaches involved in bartering for his services. The idea is supposed to be that sports is a business and like any business the money corrupts people and leads them to make less than moral choices for profit and that is a message that seems… wildly naïve today. Like, we now have twenty four hour sports networks in which talking heads argue about every known detail of every contract negotiation in detail and while you’ll occasionally see fans acting surprised or indignant when their favorite player isn’t “loyal” to their team it’s not like people don’t know how these things usually work. In fact at this point it’s almost come out the other end with people now actively encouraging players to go for the bag instead of being exploited out of some misplaced loyalty to a team that’s likely to be owned by a rich asshole. So that aspect maybe doesn’t hold up but still, looking at this through a modern cynical lens probably isn’t fair and the movie likely felt like something of an eye opening exposé at the time and more than likely the real point here isn’t just that sports corrupt so much as money corrupts and that point is made pretty clearly.
*** out of Five
Black River (1957)
If you go off the dates listed on the Eclipse boxed set three Masaki Kobayashi came out in 1956. The Thick-Walled Room came out that year after sitting on the shelf for three years, and allegedly I Will Buy You and Black River also came out that year but most of the other sources online tell me Black River actually came out in 1957. There’s a whole footnote about this on the film’s Wikipedia page and the sources it lists for 1957 strike me as being more persuasive. Not that it matters particularly. The film is closer in theme to The Thick-Walled Room as it’s a film that broadly looks at the theme of lasting American influence in Japan during the post-war years, this time by looking at a U.S. military base and the community of Japanese workers that has emerged around it which the film posits as a rather rootless and ramshackle asembleage living in something of a makeshift slum, specifically in a flophouse run by a questionable landlord. The film doesn’t necessarily seem to blam the U.S. soldiers for this or even top brass or Japanese politicians so much as it views this as something of an expected environmental consequence of the stuation and it’s actually not unlike the dynamic seen in the vicinity of a domestic American base around the same time in the 1955 hollywood film The Phenix City Story. The movie does a pretty good job of painting a picture of what these kind of chaotic communities are like but maybe a less good job finding a particularly interesting story to tell there and instead makes something of a hangout film focusing on a whole ensemble of characters some of them more interesting than others. The movie as a whole didn’t really grab me but it’s another interesting snapshot of the times and how Kobayashi sees them and it’s worth a look for those into Japanese cinema of the era and are looking for more of a deep cut.
***1/2 out of Five
The Inheritance (1962)
The Inheritance is the odd man out in this “Masaki Kobayashi Against the System” eclipse set as it would seem to be the most obscure of the four films as evidence by the fact that it’s the only one without a Wikipedia page which is paradoxical because it’s in may ways the biggest, moset recent, and arguably the most mature of the films here. The other three films reflect the movies released before Kobayashi’s magnum opus The Human Condition while this is the first one made after it. In a lot of ways it kind of feels like his equivalent to Akira Kurosawa’s The Bad Sleep Well in that both are looking at the cutthroat world of high finance and the general greediness that’s starting to pervade Japanese society. The film looks at a scenario in which a rich executive learns he is dying and decides at the last minute announces that he’s had three secret illegitimate children over the course of his life who he’s lost track of and is thinking about putting them in his will if they can be found. Rather than taking this task in earnest, his wife along with most of his staff instantly start exploiting the situation to find various angles for this to benefit themselves instead of these kids who’ve been discarded by a millionaire deadbeat dad. Kobayashi’s visual style evolved a bit over the course of The Human Condition and he’s now filming in widescreen and has a slightly higher budget he’s working with. If a complaint can be registered against the movie it’s that it’s arguably a bit one-note; we get pretty early that these people are amoral backstabbers and the film plays out accordingly, but otherwise it’s pretty solid work if not quite up to the level of the movies it’s sandwitched between as he’d go from this to even more impressive works like Harakiri, Kwaidan, and Samurai Rebellion.
**** out of Five
In Conclusion
Overall I was happy to have watched all of these movies but I would say that overall the boxed set might have been a little bit of a disappointment for me, but perhaps only because my expectations were a bit out of line. Before this I’d only seen the most major of Kobayashi’s works and they set a standard that was likely unrealistic given that movies that are placed in an Eclipse set are almost certainly going to be relatively minor works in the grand scheme of things. Don’t get me wrong, these are still pretty high quality Japanese classics but none of them really felt like masterpieces and it kind of makes me suspect that there will be further dips in quality if I look too much deeper into Kobayashi’s filmography.
The Movie Vampire 