Three Films Make A Post: Toei Triple Threat

Kingdom of Jirocho 2 (1963): For large swathes of its running time, this second of Masahiro Makino’s remakes of his own material leaves behind honourable yakuza Jirocho (still Koji Tsuruta) in favour of the misadventures of “comedic” stuttering yakuza Ishi, and really strained my patience there. Apart from how badly stuttering-based humour has aged – it’s about as funny as US 30s films’ “cowardly black people” humour, so very much not at all – there’s a meandering quality to these scenes, very much leaving one with the feeling that half of this film is filler. Which is particularly disappointing because the other half is perfectly entertaining light ninkyo eiga business with one hell of a cast.

Kingdom of Jirocho 3 (1964): That last bit is also what makes the entertaining part of this third film. While there’s decidedly less – but still too much - of Ishi going around the third film mostly suffers from a lack of focus. There are perfectly cromulent subplots and even a bit of actual dramatic tension in the main plot, but there’s also a lot of side business that mostly feels unimportant and typically not terribly interesting.

Consequently, instead of an actual climax – what would be the climax in less woozy movie comes about an hour into the ninety minute film – we get another to be continued ending. Sure, part of the reason for this is the TV show like format in which these movies were produced, but it often feels as if the scripts were written while shooting on the film was already on the way.

Case of Umon: Red Lizard (1962): The Umon films, with Ryutaro Otomo in the title role, were one of several shogunate era samurai detective series. I have more experience with the somewhat darker Bored Hatamoto films, but my first foray into the adventures of this less pretend-lazy detective – in a film directed by Sadatsugu Matsuda who directed his first feature in 1928 and his last one in 1969 – is certainly promising. There’s some of the moody, near-gothic staging you get in many a Japanese mystery on screen, pulpy ideas like Edgar Wallace on speed (a killer known as the Red Lizard who is accompanied by a raven is certainly keeping in the spirit), some decent swordplay, and an actually pretty interesting mystery. Even better, the final sequence during which our detective explains what has been going on takes place during a stage play he has had a playwright write for the occasion.

In short: Case of Umon: One-Eyed Wolf (1959)

aka Umon Torimonocho: Katame no okami

This is one among many movies concerning the adventures of Tokugawa shogunate era constable and master detective Kondo Umon (here played by Ryutaro Otomo). In this particular case, Umon and his annoying comic relief sidekick stumble upon the bodies of half a dozen men hanging from the same tree, which is a curious thing to encounter even in suicide-prone old Japan, so Kondo quickly deduces this is in fact a case of murder. From there, our hero follows leads to a conspiracy to murder the shogun himself. Only one man can save the reign of the cruel tyrant (waitaminute…)!

As expected, this is one of those slightly stiff and often somewhat hokey pieces of jidai geki made in the somewhat conservative style samurai movies were starting to move away from at the end of the 50’s, towards more morally and artistically complex endeavours. So expect rather larger than life melodramatic declamation as main acting style, a rather simple world view, and one-dimensional characters.

That doesn’t mean One-Eyed Wolf isn’t entertaining if you take it for what it is, at least from my historical point in time. It’s the kind of thing that probably was called the Japanese variant of “an entertainment”, perhaps comparable to series hero B-Western, though of course – Japanese studios had their pride and a deep talent pool -  made to a higher visual standard than the adventures of Hopalong Cassidy. This is, after all, a Toei production, and therefore graced with very pretty sets and sound stages of old Edo that just happen to look exactly like the ones I’ve seen in other Toei productions of this type.

If you can cope with the film’s lack of depth – and way too much comic relief, alas – you might just be like me and get to the point where you fall into the natural state of entertainment movies about detectives solving preposterous and needlessly complicated plots can’t help but provide, particularly those that find our detective ending up in one of those typical samurai movie battles of one man cutting through a veritable army of henchmen. Otomo is appropriately heroic, if not very exciting, the rest of the cast is full of faces I know from dozens of other Toei films.

Some of One-Eyed Wolf’s pulpier ideas are pleasantly weird, and director Tadashi Sawashima at the very least keeps things rolling along nicely and dynamically enough. From time to time Sawashima even shows a bit of visual brilliance: the first reveal of the corpses that bring Umon on the case is wonderfully creepy, there are quite a few shots reminding of very atmospheric paintings, and the film’s grand finale is dominated by very unsubtle yet also pretty effective and artful montages of the kind that always make me think “Eisenstein”.

Consequently, Case of Umon: The One-Eyed Wolf won’t be a film to rock anybody’s world, but it’s a nice time nonetheless.

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