House of Bamboo (1955)

Here is a bonus post. The main feature today is about Bad Day at Black Rock (John Sturges 1955) but that same year Sam Fuller made House of Bamboo on location in Japan, and like Bad Day at Black Rock it was in CinemaScope and also with Robert Ryan as the main villain, so they have things in common. It is a very Fullerian film: violent, extravagantly shot (all over Tokyo) with a very mobile camera and alternating between the absurd and the profound, and, as always, there is a character named Griff. It is a thriller, a docudrama, while also a sweet love story between an American army man (played by Robert Stack) and a Japanese woman (played by Yoshiko Yamaguchi, credited as Shirley Yamaguchi). Sessue Hayakawa plays a Japanese police inspector. As a study in racial relations it is a companion piece to Fuller's later, and more aggressive, China Gate (1957), Run of the Arrow (1957) and White Dog (1982).

Here are some suggestive images.

Equinox Flower (1958)

What is said about directors, regarding their style or themes or message or some such, is frequently wrong, partly because most directors are a lot more eclectic and flexible than the popular view of them can account for. This is also true of course for Yasujiro Ozu, even though he might appear to be the most consistent and rigid filmmaker of them all. But too many seem to base their view of Ozu on just one film, Tokyo Story (1953), and suggesting that he was conservative, that there is no camera movements, that the camera is always placed at the height of somebody sitting down and that they are all about the family. But there is much more to Ozu's style and themes than this. Explicitly so if you consider both his pre-war films and his post-war films, and less obvious but still indubitably if you only consider the post-war films. And the post-war films should be considered, most of them. Those who have only seen Tokyo Story have but a partial view of Ozu. His humour, irony, visual wit, discussions about class and allusions to the war, and his exquisite use of colour; these are things that are not necessarily present in Tokyo Story, which, although a very fine film, should only be considered a starting point.

His first film in colour was Equinox Flower (1958), which is a contender for being his best work. It is about a family in which the father likes to see himself as a liberal, and with the times, but when his daughter wants to marry her boyfriend, and will not accept an arranged marriage, he forgets all about his enlightened talk and becomes implacable. He refuses to give his consent to this marriage, and the family becomes increasingly strained, or rather, he becomes estranged from the women, his wife and daughters.

But that is just the plot summary, and with Ozu plot summaries are usually beside the point. It is the style with which they are told that is the point, and the feelings expressed.

The father is played by Shin Saburi, who acted in many of Ozu's films. In the earlier The Flavour of Green Tea Over Rice (1952) he plays a man who is married without children but who is supporting his niece against her having to be forced into an arranged marriage. "Don't let her have the kind of marriage we are having." he says to his wife in a moment of heartbreaking honesty. That is really the theme of that film, the unhappy marriage between two people with nothing in common. In Equinox Flower the marriage is happy, the focus is elsewhere; on the gap between two different generations. And Ozu, despite the claim that he was conservative and backward looking, is clearly on the side of the younger ones, they are in the right and their ideas are where the future of Japan lies. Ozu is however also sympathetic to the father; he is not a villain, he is just struggling with the societal changes. Or maybe he just does not want to lose his daughter. Maybe he just cannot accept that she has grown up. In one scene he angrily asks the daughter "Have you slept with him?" which she refuses to answer. It is not clear whether he has problems with her wanting to marry a man of her own choosing, or if it is that he cannot accept that she has grown up and become a person who has sex. It is possibly both.

The alienated salaryman.

And then there is the style. It might be Ozu's most perfectly shot and designed film. Every frame a marvel of precision and clarity, yet simultaneously brimming with beauty and wit. Ozu's images talk to each other, one might counteract another, or a shot might appear which is almost identical to an earlier shot, there is just one slight alternation, or there might be an insignificant object which has a disproportionately strong presence in several shots. Like this red tea pot.

Just two examples.

So the richness of Equinox Flower is incredible. It is perhaps a little bit narrow, compared to its companion piece The Flavour of Green Tea Over Rice, which also has that class aspect which is rarely mentioned when discussing Ozu (it is for example suggested, in a few sweet and understated scenes, that the husband in the unhappy marriage would be happier if he had been married to their maid, but that was of course not an option), and there is more humour in Green Tea, but visually Equinox Flower is a work of perfection, and that helps balance the more streamlined plot. The warmth and humanity is equal in both. This brief scene below captures all of this. The wife is played by Kinuyo Tanaka and here she and her husband is contemplating life and the passing of time. 

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Two earlier posts about Ozu:

http://fredrikonfilm.blogspot.se/2013/09/a-few-words-about-tokyo-story-1953.html
http://fredrikonfilm.blogspot.se/2013/09/on-yasujiro-ozu-and-japaneseness.html

For those interested in Ozu and class, The Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family (1941) is good place to start.

Ozu followed Equinox Flower with the equally exquisite Good Morning (1959), which is also required viewing. The cinematographer on them was an Ozu regular, Yuharu Atsuta, who shot all films mentioned in this post.

Happy New Year!

It is only Thursday but it is also the last day of the year and let us end it in style, Vincente Minnelli style. I am grateful for all of you who have visited my blog in 2015, and I hope you will all come back in 2016. The next regular post will be up in two weeks, on a Friday as usual. See you then!

Bergman on Hitchcock

In March of 1949, Ingmar Bergman's new film Prison / Fängelse had its premiere and he wrote about one inspiration he had, Hitchcock's Rope (1948), in an article in the newspaper Stockholms-Tidningen. This is what he had to say, in my translation.

Hitchcock has made a weighty contribution when it comes to revolutionising film technology towards a rational and more compressed process. For my part I think that his performance in this area will eventually be recognised by film theorists and they will rank him as being among the greatest of pioneers, which he rightfully deserves.
   Thus has he recently finished a movie called Rope that of itself concentrates the sum of a long time of patiently doing technical experimentations. (Which those who are interested can see develop from film to film.)
   The procedure does not sound so remarkable in itself: He does long takes. But: He does long takes where the length is not noticeable.

(Bergman's language is somewhat ornate but I did my best to stay true to his rhythm yet make it comprehensible.)



There are times when I think this is my favourite Hitchcock.

They Were Expendable (1945)

They Were Expendable (John Ford 1945) is an unique achievement, but also a quintessential Ford film. It is a war film, but slow, meandering, understated, mellow and open-ended, and is structured around various social events and special moments as is typical for Ford's kind of narration. (Ford usually structures his films this way rather than have a strong forward drive and a focused story. He is very different from Raoul Walsh.) In a post last year, about Robert Warshow, I wrote:

If you watched They Were Expendable (1945), Ford's film about the war in the Pacific and possibly his greatest achievement, and did not know who won the war, you would probably think that the US lost it. Such is the mood of the film. In Peter Bogdanovich book-length interview with John Ford (from 1967) he suggested that Ford's films are about "the glory of defeat" but you could also say that they are about the desolation of victory. 

This is one of the many things that make it both so moving and so exceptional. There is true beauty in They Were Expendable, or several different kinds of beauty.

It tells about a squadron of PT boats in the Pacific stationed outside Manila, on the Philippines, when Pearl Harbor is attacked by the Japanese in 1941. The high command do not think much of these boats and the men who serve on them, they are treated off-handedly and given degrading tasks. The war is not going well either, the Japanese are beating the Americans and taking over one island after another, so the PT boats and their men have to keep moving, evacuating, hiding, escaping. One boat after another is lost, until none remains, and the men are killed off, by bullets or by bombs. But the Japanese themselves are never seen, they are always out of sight, and there is no hostility towards them, not racist talk, even though their ships and their planes bring death and destruction.

Robert Montgomery plays the lead, John Brickley, and John Wayne plays Rusty Ryan. Both are based on two actual sailors, lieutenants John D. Bulkeley and Robert Kelly. There is also Sandy, played by Donna Reed. She is a nurse, and after treating Ryan, suffering from a bullet in the hand and blood poisoning, they become romantically involved, as much as you can in wartime and do not know where you will go next or when you will be killed. But they do manage to go to a dance, and have a dinner, and the occasional phone call, until the inevitable.

Among many outstanding sequences there is a particular one at a hospital during an air raid with the off-screen sound of the bombs the only thing heard. The camera is focused on Sandy's face during an operation, and it captures the fear, the anxiety and the perseverance of the moment, and a claustrophobic counterpoint to the sequences on the open seas. But there are not many of those, they are mostly on land or in the makeshift harbours.

It is not just death and disappointments though; whenever a chance to have a laugh or a drink arises it is taken, however briefly. But the overall mood is downcast.

The setting is various tropical islands in the Pacific, and it looks like it was shot on location, but it was actually shot closer to home, in south Florida, which looked similar enough but was considerably safer. It feels real though, genuine. Robert Montgomery, who plays the lead, had himself been in the navy during the war, and been given a Bronze Star, and he had at one point been on a PT boat with Bulkeley (the man his character is based on) so he knew what he was doing on set. Bulkeley himself did not want to be involved in the making of the film as he disliked jingoism and heroics, but the film has none of that and when he actually saw the film he was pleasantly surprised, feeling that it was "very authentic". Frank Wead, who wrote the script, had also been in the Pacific with the navy during the war (until 1944). Ford himself had spent the war making documentaries in the Pacific, including one about Pearl Harbor and one about the battle of Midway. Joseph H. August, the cinematographer, was a friend of Ford's and they had worked together for a long time, including on the documentary about Midway, so the film was made by people who had, in various ways, been involved themselves in this part of the war. This might account for the powerful feeling of accuracy. Ford obviously meant it as his tribute to these underdog soldiers, and he put all of his considerable skills and idiosyncrasies to make it both true to these men and true to his own poetic sensibility. Whether it is the narrative structure, the use of music, the general mood, the character-behaviour and interactions, it is unmistakeably "a film by John Ford", and one of his very best, on that perennial theme of his: of the forward march of time and history, and of the ordinary people swept away by these forces over which they have little control

Ford directing in the water.

In the end of the film all boats are gone and the remaining sailors are scattered around the islands, some transferred to the infantry. A few manage to get on the last plane out, but those that remain will in all likelihood be killed by the Japanese. We do not know what will happen to them, or to any of the other characters we have met, some briefly, some for a long time. It is war, and you know very little. What will your next assignment be? When will you get food the next time? What happened to your friend, did he survive and will show up later or was he killed? Will you ever see your loved ones again? It is a hard life, so we cry, we bury our dead, and then we move on. What else is there?

The essence of Ford.

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The film was based on a non-fiction book about Bulkeley, also called They Were Expendable, and written by W.L. White.

The Bulkeley quote above about finding the film "very authentic" is from Joseph McBride's book Searching for John Ford.

I have seen They Were Expendable many times, like most of Ford's films, and I have written about several of them before. I could easily write about them all.