LIKE SOMEONE IN LOVE (WITH JAPAN) – Part 1

Prior to the films analysed in part 1 of this blog there was, principally but not exclusively in the post-WWII era, a number of Hollywood works made in and about Japan, often revolving around Japanese characters alongside characters from the US. These were generally both commercially and critically acclaimed. They were largely genre works, ones in which the desire, the need, to capitalise on a curiosity about Japan to a foreign populace seemed paramount; and it became so at a time when this country had aroused both fear and fascination but, importantly, when its threat had been neutered following defeat in August 1945. Studies in anthropology (Ruth Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and The Sword in 1946), in history (George Sansom’s A History of Japan to 1334) and cultural specificity (Sansom’s The Western World and Japan) fed a curiosity about a perceived inscrutable enemy and ‘Other’, something the famous film critic Donald Richie amplified with his humanistic writing about Japan, covering food, film, architecture and other subjects shortly, produced after the Pacific conflict when he first moved to the country. Newsreels, as they had during the War, remained pre-eminent at this time in order to propagandise US efforts to offer aid to stricken Axis Powers, whilst at the same time feeding a curiosity about and to a certain extent feelings of superiority over said powers. As a previously exoticized oriental nation this curiosity was peaked much more about Japan than any European foe. The films considered below attempted to variously address, facilitate, feed and/or exploit this curiosity.  

Tokyo Joe (1949)

Made and set during the US post-WWII occupation of Japan, this makeover of Casablanca (1942) stars Humphrey Bogart as Joseph – Tokyo Joe – Sharrett. He is an ex-GI who returns to Japan during said Occupation to take over the bar he used to run until Pearl Harbour and America’s entry into the Pacific conflict. Whilst there he finds his sometime wife who he believed had died but who has now re-married, which results in his fervent desire to remain in Tokyo and to begin, as he does, an air freight business, his partner in which venture has some nefarious plans that land the protagonist, Sharrett’s former wife (prosecuted for working for the Japanese) and the young daughter he has just discovered is likely his own, in danger. 

Tokyo Joe was the first American film to be shot (in part) in Japan following the end of WWII. Hollywood studios at this time were attempting a kind of bespoke verisimilitude, and films like The Search (1948) The Big Lift (1950) and Judgement at Nuremberg (1961) featured location footage of war-devastated Italy and Germany for perceived realism and as a means of addressing the role of the US as a benevolent presence helping in the reconstruction of these nations. Here location footage – shot by the film’s second unit – lends a certain air of authenticity on the one hand and, given Bogart is obviously not present in these shots and has to appear in matched rear-projected studio material, of textual tension and studio artifice on the other. The echoes of arguably Bogart’s most famous and iconic role, that of Rick Blaine, are writ large throughout. We have Bogart as proprietor (almost) of a bar, engaged in a romantic triangle with a politically compromised ex-partner and her current husband who he then attempts to help whilst evading problematic local police and criminals alike. Add in the foreign location, a song that bridges the gap between the protagonists and speaks of their romance and a reflection through the protagonist on America’s role in and after the War and the recipe for what Bogie himself called ‘a Japanese Casablanca’ seems secure.

However, rather than any sustained cynicism being engendered by these commonalities, they in fact serve to underline difference as much as direct replication. Like Curtis Bernhardt’s similarly Casablanca-inspired Syrian-set noir thriller Sirocco (1951), the sense here is of a dialogue with as much as a facsimile of the earlier film. Consequently, Joe Sharrett’s decision to help out his ex-partner and daughter have little of the altruism that ultimately informs Rick Blaine’s attitudes and actions. He chases his own desires but puts himself in the way of physical danger; and is thus at once more selfless and selfish than Blaine, his receptivity to risking his life more pronounced and immediate yet at the same time more tailored to his own gain. Just as Casablanca may be read in the light of US isolationism and their belated entry into WWII, Japan here reflects statuesque defeat, and though Sharrett’s ultimate actions are taken in defence of it is nonetheless the case that his attachment to Japan is only as deep as is beneficial to himself. He is even opportunistic and almost exploitative in his actions in his apparently adopted homeland. His setting up of an air freight company with someone he knows to be a criminal merely to remain in Japan to reconnect with his ex-wife makes him at least partly culpable in what happens to his family and friends. It demonstrates in part a use of the black market (prevalent in the country during the immediate Post-War years) for his own ends, and he himself thus opens up the can of worms that goes on to drive the conflicts of the narrative. From this point of view the discrepancy between film and contemporary context is telling, a film about representing Japan rather than about Japan per se.

Tokyo Joe is, then, a film of fractious bits and pieces that do not really cohere, but one whose lack of coherence is in fact among its chief points of interest. The narrative is about US interventions in Japan, and in this light the film may be said to be about Hollywood interventions in the same. It implicitly suggests itself as a documentary of its project, its attempt to craft a star vehicle, a genre thriller, a non-fictive peek at modern Japan and dramatized propaganda (Bogart has a short speech about the US helping to root out Japanese corruption and help everyday citizens stand up for a better Japan). These modalities jostle for position throughout the narrative, each fascinating as a snapshot of the cinematic and indeed socio-political climate of the times, all of which makes this a worthwhile film.

The Saga of Anatahan (1953/1958#)

The final film by Josef von Sternberg after his superb run of playing cinematic Svengali to Marlene Dietrich had inevitably run its course, The Saga of Anatahan followed the troubled Jet Pilot (1957) and in some ways sees the director apparently casting around for material that may offer an opportunity to recapture some of his earlier style and sensibility. It concerns a group of soldiers who, after coming under enemy fire in 1944, find themselves stranded on the remote Pacific Island of the title. There they come across a man and his wife – Japanese both – and over the course of seven years their various facades – of dutiful soldiers of Japan, as comrades, citizens, as a virtuous Japanese woman, even of civilized human beings – gradually erode, revealing self-interest, greed, sexual obsession and ultimately violence and murder as arbiters of personal behaviour. This is a Japanese film, made in Japan (in a converted studio in Kyoto) and starring Japanese actors speaking Japanese throughout, though with a prominent voiceover narration (spoken by Sternberg himself) that purports to be by one of the characters. The effect is strange, as though seen from both within and without. Indeed, the film was marketed as the first true international perspective on the Japanese people; yet there is a constant underlining of the limitations of the narrator, as when events that were not personally witnessed are said to be invented – confessed ‘fantasies’ that are based upon supposition alone.

The narration is thus as shifting and unstable as the mise-en-scène. Indeed, from this point of view the film is very much a return to older norms of Von Sternberg’s work in the 1930s when said mise-en-scène was developed and perfected. After the technicolour of Jet Pilot’s expansive skies of blue and the verdant greens of the Russian countryside, The Saga of Anatahan returns the director to the intimate, claustrophobic, complex patterns of light and shade redolent of the black and white cinematography of his studio-created recreations of exotic foreign climes like the Moroccan desert (Morocco [1931]), the Imperial palace of Tsarist Russia (The Scarlet Empress [1934]) or the parched landscapes of Mediterranean Spain (The Devil is a Woman [1935]). The tight compositions here, only sporadically offset by shots of crashing waves on a rocky shore, feature all manner of visual clutter, from dense foliage to obtrusive screens and, in particular, a seemingly perennially fleeting interplay of shadows. The import here, given how the characters’ identities shift and morph throughout, is to visualise uncertainty, instability, the ebb and flow of time and the transience of existence. This refers us back to Orientalist cliches about Japan; however, such cliches are nonetheless useful here in questioning the extent to which such precepts of nationhood retain any validity in the face of aggressive challenges such as are depicted throughout this narrative. The film is ultimately about how any façade, any veneer (of nationality, of civilization) can easily peel away in the face of what are presented as inexorable human characteristics. It is a particularly insightful film about Japan for this reason, both for its pre-WWII militarism and its post-WWII humanism.

These ruminations on the nature of the human animal are the chief distinguishing feature separating novel (based on a true story and published shortly after Sternberg’s film) and said film. It is a fascinating work for all that its sporadic purporting to some kind of almost ethnographic detail seems fallacious and unconvincing. It is perhaps because of the tension that emerges between observation and pontification that The Saga of Anatahan remains so fascinating, underlining the limitations of both approaches and facilitating a more complex, active relationship of viewer to text. Reflections about the characters intended to situate them with a recondite framework of human characteristics under specific conditions sit rather uneasily alongside what appears at times to be a wilful disregard of any sense of realism. For example, note how most characters remain unchanged as regards hair, weight, physiognomy after apparently seven years stranded on Anatahan. These issues could almost be the point of the film, open and ambiguous as it is, and it demands its audience make meaning for themselves – as so many Western films about Japan seem to do.      

#Released in an edited version in 1953, there was a full, uncensored release of The Saga of Anatahan five years later. The cuts were made to scenes of the woman, Keiko, appearing naked (purely when bathing).

The Crimson Kimono (1959)

If Tokyo Joe is concerned with an American in Japan, then Sam Fuller’s The Crimson Kimono offers a precise mirror image, featuring as it does a Japanese in America. Or should that be a Japanese American in America? Or an American Japanese in America? The crux of the film’s drama, despite a nominal plot involving the murder of a stripper and subsequent investigation, is this oriental detective’s clash with his Caucasian partner over their burgeoning romantic interest in the same girl. It is a triangle that brings to the surface several tensions and anxieties that, for the Japanese in the US, have been festering just below the surface but which he has managed to suppress. James Shigeta plays said Japanese American, Joe Kojaku (again echoing Bogart’s film). He and his partner, Charlie (like Joe an ex-Korean War veteran and a soldier with the protagonist during that conflict), investigate the case of the murdered stripper, a key figure in which case is an artist who painted the crimson kimono as part of an idea for a striptease that the deceased was developing. First Charlie and then Joe develops a love for this woman, Chris, and it is her rejection of the former in favour of the latter that ignites their clash and a love triangle that permeates the thematic heart of the narrative, central to which is the object of the title. The kimono is symbolic of the exoticism and spectacle of Japanese culture, one to be paraded alongside samurai and karate demonstrations as a spectacle of Japanese otherness. The film, however, refutes this spectacle. It is a sleazy act of cultural annihilation, and the black and white cinematography de-emphasizes thus lurid dimension, negates colour in a world (as signified by the allusive title) in which colour is bound both to the spectacular and to the cheap. This politicization is further reinforced when Joe and Charlie’s clash results in Joe talking about the colour of his skin when he believes, mistakenly, that Charlie’s treatment of him reflects a latent racism.

Typically for its director, The Crimson Kimono is a hard-nosed, rapid-fire immersion in a microcosmic world, a noir-like urban underbelly (LA’s Little Tokyo) in which racial tensions and social conflicts abound. It is tabloid cinema – something Fuller had literalised in several films concerning the press (after himself being a reporter) – and the sensationalism suggested by this description begins with the chief poster advertising the film. In this not entirely representative image Shigeta is pictured in a passionate embrace with a girl, accompanied by the line ‘YES, this is a beautiful American girl in the arms of a Japanese boy!’, whilst another poster, similarly promoting a ‘startling frankness’, asked: ‘What was his strange appeal for American Girls?’

Given yet another promotional line (hinted at in the theatrical trailer) about the film being the first to depict a romance between an American girl and a Japanese boy, it is clear that the sense of sensationalism and spectacle that Fuller obfuscates was in fact central to its perceived saleability. Indeed, Joe’s irresistibility is not to American girls but merely to an American Girl, to Chris, and hers is a deep emotional connection. Ironically enough, she responds to the part of him (his sensitivity) that Joe himself is wary of and perceives racist reactions thereto in others. Ultimately there is a thematic interest in reconciling hitherto diverse and discrete traits, something embodied within Joe as much as between Joe and Chris. This is a film about identity and about perceptions thereof, about the extent to which this is inimical as opposed to constructed by context (social, political, national) and circumstance, and it is fascinating throughout.

House of Bamboo (1955)

Before The Crimson Kimono Sam Fuller had already been cinematically acquainted with Japan. In 1955 he made a film in and about the country, a similarly hard-boiled thriller about murder, retribution and perceived miscegenation and one similarly concerned with East/West tensions. House of Bamboo is an almost diagrammatic mirror image of the later film. Filmed (as a typically journalistic opening voiceover tells us) entirely in Japan on locations in and around Tokyo and Yokohama, the film was made at Fox, in colour and cinemascope, and features a complex triangular relationship comparable to the later film. This time said triangle develops between a Japanese girl, an undercover army sergeant and the girl’s recent and now deceased husband. This sergeant, played by Robert Stack, is attempting to inveigle himself into a gang of racketeers and robbers (led by a calmly intense Robert Ryan) in order to solve the murder of one of their number after a recent heist. The dead criminal’s widow, Mariko, helps provide cover for the almost completely unnamed veteran, and in so doing becomes close to him in a union that remains interesting for the extent to which it raises a desire for a perceived Western masculinity as much as the reverse is true for Stack’s protagonist (for a Japanese woman, especially one already ‘taken’ by an American).

The sense of reciprocal curiosity and male hegemony here lies just beneath the surface and potentially complicates the otherwise tokenistic heterosexual relationship. Mariko is most certainly almost throughout here a token female presence, but her relationship with Stack sees any overt consummation entirely absent. This is perhaps a commentary on prevailing Japanese dictates pertaining to perceived miscegenation. However, seen as part of a triangular series of relations along with Sandy, it fits within a dialectic, a dichotomy between the emotional and the purely physical. From this point of view the implicit desire for Stack by Sandy is subtextual; yet in many ways this is the most pervasive and intense ‘coupling’ in the narrative. The heterosexual romance, such as it is, is more of a delicate dance around a mutual attraction and longing (in one scene Stack asks Marko what are Japanese women most attracted to in men), whilst the blunt force of Sandy’s corporeal desires, sublimated as they are into violence, are made almost explosively manifest in the manner of his attitudes and actions toward those around him, such as shooting anyone in his gang if they are injured in action.

Yet the simplicity of any nationalist imperative in representation here is, once again, complicated in the person of Sandy. This character resides in a traditional Japanese house (of bamboo) and delights in the specific features of this abode – its design, its décor, its view of Mt Fuji. It is his home as well as his base of criminal operations, a place of business, of pleasure, of form, function and aesthetic contemplation. It is an extension and a projection of the character himself, as though he embodied all the contradictions of contemporary Japan and its occupation by the US. And from this point of view issues of desire (desire of any persuasion) become displaced from the personal onto the social, the contextual. Heterosexual attraction and queer longing are mirrored to the extent that they may be regarded as coterminous factors of a culture of sublimation, of an anxiety over competing attitudes to sex and sexuality and to their expression. Homosexuality and heterosexuality are, from this point of view, two sides of one coin, complementary rather than contradictory, to the extent that both remain suggested, tied to the uncertain vicissitudes of the desiring subject rather than on any concrete, objective sense of social or political verisimilitude. Japan is an idea here, a set of practices, of attitudes and values, and they remain in flux throughout.

What materialises here, quite wonderfully, is the known and knowable climate of US genre cinema refracted through the opaque lens of a different system of knowledge and power. Fuller himself saw Sandy as the real protagonist of House of Bamboo, and by the film’s predictable but superbly staged climax this idea is made manifest through the use of both cinematic space and sound as a cat and mouse chase and stand-off high atop a building, on a child’s fairground ride, brings Stack and his nominal adversary together in violence and retribution. Truly here the characters could be almost anywhere as they stalk and shoot at one another. That they undertake this as it were in the skies above Tokyo is a marker of abstraction wherein nominal arbiters of nationhood become removed (just as the score is removed and ambient sounds predominate) and any firm sense of place is progressively undermined. From this point of view the question of nationhood is very subtly foregrounded, and contested space becomes text as much as subtext in this fascinating, deceptively simple film.

With all this in mind one can also posit a trans-Pacific culture clash here, one that remains as much at the heart of this film as in The Crimson Kimono. A key scene at a party features a traditional geisha dance suddenly turn into a Rock and Roll jive, whilst the generally rustic nature of Japan as filmed here (think of the title as replete with pre-modern connotations) is contrasted with and starkly offset by the bullish actions and attitudes of the Americans – most especially those of the protagonist, who evinces very little interest in his environment. Fuller’s style seems adapted to these ideas; and whilst it may be a stretch to compare it (as some have done) to the cinema of Mizoguchi Kenji – to whose style the scope frame was anathema – still there is a use of mobile long takes and compositions in deep focus here that remain distinct from many of Fuller’s earlier and even later features, even though his work at Fox is perennially marked by inventive use of the Cinemascope format.   

There is potentially another romantic triangle in House of Bamboo: that between Stack, Mariko and Ryan’s Sandy. Queer-coded ‘villains’ were not exceptional in film noir -something Richard Dyer among others has been at pains to point out – and here it festers beneath the surface, threatening to rupture the aesthetic precision of Fuller’s meticulous surfaces much as a traditional Kabuki performance is interrupted in one scene or, in another, a fight prefigures a traditional shoji (wood and paper door) being ruptured. Interestingly this latter moment of violence leads to the introduction of Sandy, who is sitting behind said door as Stack’s protagonist is knocked through it. The connection is made between the chief characters and a country that was at this time in a state of anxiety over its social and cultural identity and in particular the perceived censorial impositions on the part of the US occupation. Even kissing had been treated with discretion in Japanese cinema, and the occupying forces had been keen to undermine this facet of the country’s socio-cultural fabric as a means of promoting democracy and aiding in the Westernization of the country. There is little direct sense of an allegory of US relations with Japan here, a personification of post-war policy and practice. It is more that Fuller, who greatly admired Japan and its art, offers a reflection on the specific practices not simply of a culture clash but also a contrast of aesthetic sensibilities and their resonance within a divided nation.

The Teahouse of the August Moon (1956)

The first of two Japanese-set films in as many years starring Marlon Brando, The Teahouse of the August Moon features method acting’s poster boy and principal exponent as Sakini, an Okinawan translator who travels with Glenn Ford’s naive Army Captain Fisby to a village on the island, one at which a school is to be built. The locals, however, making use of the US occupation’s desire to instil a democratic imperative in their perceived antiquated society, leads to complications when the islanders desire a teahouse (often slang for a space for geisha performances) rather than a place of education. This is subsequently exacerbated when the league of women hastily banded together to promote gender equality ask that the Geisha gifted to Fisby (cue much misapprehension over perceptions of prostitution) help teach them all the rarefied ways of this refined Japanese art form. That said Geisha is played by Machiko Kyo, a formidable actress already enshrined on international screens in breakout successes by Kurosawa Akira (Rashomon [1951]) and Mizoguchi Kenji (Ugetsu monogatari [1954]) among others, helps cement a comparatively strong character here rather than a functional love interest, which she never in effect becomes. Her pride in her work and devotion to Frisby are equally strong, the latter sop to convention offset to a degree by the former and its attendant sense of Japanese-ness – as opposed to Okinawan people and culture – represented by a female presence.   

Opening with credits over which a camera incrementally moves through the typical screens common in traditional Japanese homes, the sense of theatricality here is articulated alongside the complementary horizontal design of the home and of the Cinemascope format. To this end, though the direction is generally cursory, there is space given to the actors to create more than one-dimensional characters. Brando in particular is actually rather good here. It helps that the necessities of shooting in scope demand (suggest, in fact, but director Daniel Mann was never one to push any cinematic envelopes) a retreat from close-ups and instead a predilection for long takes, both of which keep him (done up in yellow face) from being too prominent and give him the space to develop a real performance and a character. That Sakini is also a narrator here, offering a to-camera intro and outro, highlights his wisdom and wiles and suggests his sly performativity with regard to his superiors, how he manipulates and cajoles them. This the actor communicates without vying for attention with other key performers like Glenn Ford and Eddie Albert. He is content in the long takes and long shots to merely watch on as the more overt comic business (flustered and fumbling quasi-slapstick and exaggerated misunderstandings) takes place, and while key plot points and emotive scenes all play out around him.

There is also, perhaps surprisingly, a respect for Okinawa as a space, a culture and a people distinct from Japan (it was once a distinct country). Discussions of being occupied by different nations including the Japanese appear more than once, and there is a key scene at which traditional dancing and singing by the protagonists is presented in detail, to be followed by a celebratory sing song by the Americans. The politics of occupation linger throughout this film, then, with the Americans and Japanese as colonial forces both thrown together. It is implicit throughout, but the setting subtly foregrounds colonialism in different ways, not simply as a one-way dynamic, and the resistance offered by the Okinawans to US imperatives underlines this point and buttresses a more interesting work than is usually allowed.