Express Train (1967)

Aoki (Kiyoshi Atsumi) is the proud, veteran conductor of an express sleeper train. At the time, this didn’t mean he’d just be checking tickets, but is actually commanding the small army of personnel on the train and shooting all kinds of trouble.

Aoki does so with a mixture of warmth, sternness, and the everyman awkwardness Atsumi is so good at portraying. He’s too self-serious not to be always at least a little ridiculous but he’s also kind and compassionate to a fault, so it’s impossible not to be kindly disposed towards him even if he’s being silly or mildly embarrassing.

In this first of four Train movies with Atsumi produced by Toei, he has to take care of passengers like a child with a dangerous heart problem, a somewhat rowdy drunk ladies’ party, as well as a pregnant passenger who will of course give birth on board of the train.

He’s also going to fall in love again with a woman (Yoshiko Sakuma) he developed a crush on when she was just a late teenage passenger on another line – this being a Japanese move from the 60s, that’s not to be read as anything creepy in the world of the movie. Now very much grown up, her marriage is on the skids, and Aoki’s own marriage isn’t terribly satisfying. Of course, she’s also completely unreachable as a realistic romantic prospect for Aoki.

And if all of this sounds rather a lot like a train-based predecessor to the long, long, very long-running Tora-san/It’s Hard to be a Man series Atsumi would star in for Shochiku starting some years later, apparently every single person watching this – including me – agrees. This is the absolute blueprint of the sort of thing Atsumi would go on to play and be on screen in the future. There are of course some differences here – despite being a bit of a fool sometimes, Aoki is actually pretty good at his job, and feels at least more grown up than Tora will do. He also doesn’t have episodes of lashing out at everyone around him.

Masaharu Segawa directs with an appropriate sense of gentleness – the tone is gentle, the humour is gentle, and there’s an air of day-to-day kindness here that does smile at human folly more than damn it, using the train and its conductor as a model of a late 60s Japan that never quite was but that looks like a place I’d rather like to live.

Three Films Make A Post: The World Has Come To An End The World Calls Upon The Hunter

Badland Hunters aka 황야 (2024): Hei Myeong-haeng’s post-apocalyptic action movie is good fun, with Ma Dong-seok (or Don Lee, if you prefer) and Ahn Jiy-hye making pretty great action heroes – the latter really throws herself into her action scenes while looking totally focussed – a hissable villain of the highest degree, and often very effective action choreography. It also has quite a few elements that remind me of the abandon of good, classical post-apocalyptic exploitation cinema, which isn’t as good for it as that may sound. This way, it becomes rather more obvious how much the film pulls its punches, how nice it feels at its core when it could use a bit of nastiness there to go with the theoretically nasty things it features.

Tora-san, His Tender Love aka Otoko wa tsurai yo: Fûten no Tora (1970): There’s a certain, well, a big, actually, be-there done that quality to much of the Tora-san/It’s Hard to be a Man film series as far as I know them, even this early in the cycle. However, this isn’t really to the detriment of the films when watched responsibly (Tora-san is only to be binged in the most dire of circumstances), but provides the films a comfortable shoe kind of quality. You know the characters, the kind of jokes the film’s going to make, Tora’s faults and foibles, and so on and so forth, but there’s something comforting and kind to the knowledge that fits its main character’s fits of – often badly applied – kindness beyond the fool’s bluster curiously well.

Last Night at Terrace Lanes (2024): Speaking of cinematic comfort food, sometimes you just want to be comforted by the tale of an estranged father and daughter bonding again through the fight against math-based cultists who are attacking the bowling alley they once bonded in, slaughtering all and sundry there.

Because this is 2024, there’s also a bit of Lesbian teen romance in here.

Jamie Nash’s film is never original or deep, but it does the classic low budget movie thing of telling a simple story taking place in a confined space effectively rather well. There’s really nothing at all wrong with that.

Three Films Make A Post: The picture that is the sum total of all human emotions!

Leave Her to Heaven (1945): Often, John M. Stahl’s noir melodrama is listed among the very best noirs ever made, if not declared the very best. I don’t really feel that way about the movie, to be frank. I appreciate elements of it – certainly Gene Tierney’s and Cornel Wilde’s performances – but its very mild deconstruction of the femme fatale trope seems neither fish nor fowl to me, with much of what it does having been handled with quite a bit more depth in what we’d now call domestic suspense novels of its time. Some of the melodramatic business is over the top in a way that just doesn’t work for me, personally, as well.

Leave Her to Heaven does also walk into another one of my personal landmines, where the supposed climax of a movie takes on the form of a judicial trial, which to my eyes has always been and will always be what the less capable writer will use when they can’t come up with an actual dramatic climax. Which, to be fair, is my problem as much as the film’s.

Tora-San’s Cherished Mother (1969) aka Zoku otoko wa tsurai yo: In his second movie outing, as usual directed by Yoji Yamada, eternal grown-up child with aspirations on dignified manliness Tora (as always Kiyoshi Atsumi), is stumbling, drinking and blustering his way into an encounter with the mother he never knew. There’s room for a look on the further developments in the life of the rest of his family – Sakura (Chieko Baisho) is now married and still the sane one in the family – scenes of awkward drunkenness that end in embarrassment, an ill-fated crush, sentimentality that often feels rather real, and all the other elements of the series’ formula.

It’s a nice, simply fun but not simple place to visit, really, where human emotions and their ridiculousness are treated with kindness, and I’m still not surprised that there was an audience for the series in Japan for decades.

Children of the Corn (2020/2023): Kurt Wimmer’s Children update took three years to come out anywhere, and while it is certainly not a great movie, it isn’t the complete train wreck one might expect either. For the first half an hour or so, this even seems to be a very clever update to the franchise formula, playing on the very specific anxieties caused by very contemporary, ecologically-fuelled generational conflicts. The cleverness slowly dissolves over the course of the rest of the film, mostly because the film increasingly just handwaves its own themes away, favouring increasingly stupid set pieces and one of the worst monster special effects you’ll see in a film with a decent budget. And don’t get me started on the particularly egregious horror movie bullshit ending.

In short: It’s Hard to be a Man (1969)

aka Tora-San, Our Lovable Tramp

Original title: Otoko wa tsurai yo

Twenty years after he left his family following a fight with this father, street peddler Torajiro Kuruma (Kiyoshi Atsumi), usually called Tora, returns to what’s left of it – his uncle and aunt and his half-sister Sakura (Chieko Baisho). After some moments of happiness, Tora begins to cause all kinds of chaos in the lives of the family, ruining a marriage meeting for Sakura by getting boorishly drunk, and typically showing all the emotional maturity of a child that loves to pretend a dignified grown-up; though, as his saving grace, also a lot of natural kindness and a lack of actual meanness. While he’s ruining Sakura’s love life, he’s also falling in love himself, unhappily and slightly ridiculously.

Having watched a movie right out of the middle of the series, I thought why not start of the beginning of Yoji Yamada’s long-running and much beloved Japanese comedy series and have a look at how its beginning played out. As it turns out, most of what I’ve said about the later movie fits this one as well, for the characters and their relations to one another are pretty much fully realized right from the start, details and elements of the background apparently shifting and growing over time in slow and organic ways. There’s a clear appeal in that, particularly when it is combined with Yamada’s gift for creating a sense of place and time (even if it is an idealized place and time), which also helps emphasize how much everyone here is part of a community, seen and unseen.

Many of the elements here will apparently repeat throughout the whole of the series, which might become a bit tiresome over time. Or not at all by virtue of the simple universality of some of these elements, like Tora’s inability to feel fully at home when he is at home but his sentimental longing for that very same home when he is away, the way side characters have fully developed life of quiet tragedy or happiness we only get glimpses into, and so on.

The humour here is generally gentle. The film pokes fun at Tora’s mix of foolishness and braggadocio, but clearly likes him and everyone else on screen as well. This is a film that smiles at foolishness and quietly shakes its head at it rather than shaking its fist, which feels absolutely right for what this tries to be. So I’m not at all surprised at the amount of love the series got in its time.

Tora-san’s Dream of Spring (1979)

Original title: Otoko wa tsurai yo: Torajirô haru no yume

Having dipped a foot into the long-running, audience-favourite British comedy series of Carry On for one movie some months ago, I’ve now decided to also take a look at a film from a very different, and even longer series of Japanese movies who were just as pleasing to their local audiences. The “Otoko wa tsurai yo” (“It’s Hard to be a Man”) movies, typically just called the Tora-san films for their main character, the somewhat hapless, not particularly bright or emotionally adult, peddler Torajiro Kuruma (always played by Kiyoshi Atsumi), were a going concern between 1969 and 1995, usually with two films coming out each year. As I’ve been told, they are all not terribly different plot-wise, with Tora-san leaving home in a huff, nearly finding love, returning and having various encounters and misadventures, while his family’s life slowly develops and changes around him through the years. Thus, the films take on one of the joys of soap operas or the private lives of detectives in long running mystery series.

The film at hand, the 24th Tora-san movie, and like nearly all of them directed by Yoji Yamada (who somehow still managed to make more than a few other movies as well) concerns itself with a luckless American vitamin salesman (Herb Edelman) with no knowledge of the Japanese language taking (or really, stumbling into taking) a room in the household of Tora-san’s family, having various mishaps of cultural difference, and falling in love with our hero’s wonderful (and married) sister Sakura (Chieko Baisho). At first, relations to Tora-san, who turns out to be rather anti-American, are strained, but this being the kind of film it is, they don’t stay that way, particularly because both men are peddlers and fools in awkward love. For at the same time, when he’s not involved in innocent shenanigans, our hero does fall in love unhappily himself, which underlines how the film quietly makes rather a lot of the very different yet very comparable ways this sort of thing plays out for someone socialised in American or Japanese culture.

All of this is generally told in a quiet, sometimes quite melancholic way. Throughout, there’s the feeling of looking at people living a way of life that’s not quite in tune with that of the audience watching their adventures anymore, made to produce a feeling of nostalgia – not the angry kind that believes that the past was simply a better place, but the one that carries with it the acceptance of change as well as the knowledge that the past never was quite as happy as we want it to be.

The film’s humour is generally gentle and dominated by a kindness and generosity of spirit. Small human foibles, particularly as shown via Tora-san as well as his American counterpart, are treated as reasons for mirth, but a mirth lacking cruelty; rather, even if we’re laughing at them, we’re laughing at those parts of them we also know to belong to ourselves. This may sound or feel somewhat harmless to some sensibilities, but I find a film that’s at once trying to be honest about the fallibility of human nature but also kind about it rather refreshing in our highly judgmental present.

Particularly these days, it’s also genuinely lovely to watch a film that insists on kindness, the importance of understanding the flaws in others and oneself with kindness, as well as the importance of accepting certain differences as much as this one does.

Add the fine performances – Atsumi pretty much lives the role, Edelman is the perfect foil for him, and Baisho’s turn is often surprisingly emotionally complex for the sort of film this is – and the quiet assuredness of Yamada’s direction, and you have quite the film.