Les géants et les jouets

Japan, 1958. As fierce competition goes on between the Giant, World, and Apollo candy companies, Nishi, an advertising executive for World, finds on the streets a cute hillbilly girl called Kyoko with rotted out teeth, bad clothes and tadpoles as pets. Sensing she possesses some sort of weird appeal, he immediately thinks she would make a great model for the next World campaign, selling candy in a space suit (Space themes, the execs reason, should score big as a new theme for advertising in Asia; let's remember this movie was made a year after the Sputnik). As she becomes more famous, of course, Kyoko develops a more independent streak, and resents more and more being manipulated around by the World people. So she tries to pursue the dream of being a singer in the new medium of television. It is amazing that this satire of advertising, capitalism and consumerism was made in 1958, since it is unlike any other movie from that time, including American movies. A film relatively (and undeservedly) unknown, it's full of pop imagery a decade before pop took over the world. It only shows once again that since the 1950s, Japan has been ahead of the rest of the world (including other rich countries) by decades. By the way, I saw it in a terrific color print, that makes the Japan of almost 50 years ago look as if it was shot yesterday.

I haven't seen any of Masumura's other films, but, if they are anything like "Giants and Toys," they are extremely strange. Think "Four Hundred Blows" crossed with "Greed is good" American-style capitalism in post-war Japan, and you've got a good idea of what the story is about. Wickedly on-target satire, good performances, and interesting visual ideas (including Warhol-esque shots of ads featuring World Caramel's poster girl) converge in a very good, if surreal, movie. It's not quite good enough to be a classic, but it is unpredictable and enjoyable to watch.

The themes of people working themselves to death in a desperate struggle for "success" is as relevant today as it was over 40 years ago. And the analysis of popular culture in US/Japan seems right on.

The young protagonists' choice between personal integrity and loyalty to the mainstream society continues to face us every day.

Three caramel companies compete with each other to dominate the market and each of three resorts to a ludicrous marketing campaign to attract the public's attention. Spacemen dancing in astronaut suits, savages dressed in leopard skins yelling through loudspeakers from the backs of buses, financial subsidies from birth to marriage, each company resorts to a kitschen-sink approach that's as good as the results it brings. There's nothing at all subtle about this movie. It's completely in your face from start to finish, a fast-paced riproaring cataract one part irreverent comedy twenty parts OTT scathing satire.

And therein lies the problem. GAT makes its point across with the same clarity and fierceness of a DR. STRANGELOVE, lacking the acerbic wit and terrific performances of Kubrick's anti-war film maybe, but the problem is that the point it beats over our heads is not as urgent, prophetic or insightful as it might have been in the context of the booming economy of postwar Japan. It's all a bit much to take in one sitting. Greedy PR managers yell stuff like "We need more sells!", neon signs flash, a painted girl does a dance number, advertising trucks, wheels moving, assembly line machines pumping out caramel boxes, executives telling each other the plot of the movie in front of sales diagrams, grotesque faces smile grimly in closeup, people point at camera yelling "we need more sales!" etc.

When the two principal characters, the honest exec who values integrity above money and the cut-throat exec who will stop at nothing to achieve the company's goals, clash in the film's climax yelling at each other stuff like "We must sell more caramels! We must win the prize!" / "No, I value my integrity!", the movie had long outstayed its welcome. Masumura backed himself into a corner that left him no other option but to beat the same dead horse for 90 minutes. As a piece of satire, GAT has lost some of its bite. As a piece of kitschen-sink camp, it's still as outrageous as it ever was. Combine the two and it's easy to see why it has a cult following. It just wasn't my thing.

Yasuzo Masumura's GIANTS AND TOYS (1958) focuses on the antics behind a publicity campaign for a Japanese brand of caramel candy put out by a company, World Caramels, that's trying to wrest market share from two rivals, Giant and Apollo. Goda (Hideo Takamatsu), the ambitious publicity executive assigned to run the campaign, spots a teenage girl, Kyoko Shima (Hitomi Nozoe), on the street and recruits her to be the public face of the company, planning to put her in a space suit while promoting the candy. He hires Harukawa (Yunosuke Ito), a cynical, alcoholic photographer known for his work with young models, to take the pictures that will put Kyoko's face in popular magazines, and encourages a junior publicist, Nishi (Hiroshi Kawaguchi), to romance Kyoko since she seems to like him. Despite Kyoko's charms, Nishi wants no part of it and instead pursues the crafty Kurahashi (Michiko Ono), an attractive, slightly older counterpart working at the rival company, Apollo. Kyoko, an impetuous, gap-toothed wild child with a ready smile and a lack of inhibition, still has to be persuaded--even coerced--into posing for the initial set of photos, but she gradually comes to like the fame and, more importantly, the money, which enables her to leave her large family in a Tokyo slum district behind. Eventually, success goes to her head and she is soon mulling offers from the candy rivals, a testament to the power of Nishi's rejection of her. Goda, who is married to his department head's daughter, is under extraordinary pressure to increase sales, so he drives himself and everyone around him relentlessly. The satirical tone of the early scenes gives way to a very harsh critique of Japanese society in the postwar era on the verge of its highly-touted "economic miracle."

When the film focuses on Kyoko, it's very charming and often quite funny. She reminds me of a looney, working-class Audrey Hepburn. Her impulsive behavior around the male characters may not be the most ladylike but it's really cute and even a little sexy. The photographer, Harukawa, is also very funny. He's brutally frank, acerbic and full of thoughts on a wide range of subjects. When he's interviewed by a pack of reporters, he tells one of them, "Your magazine is full of crap," before launching into a rambling monologue on famous western poets and their writing and meditating habits ("Byron wrote poems while inflicting self-torture") before lamenting that "Japanese novelists meditate on the toilet." At one point, in a bar watching Japanese women dance with western men, he expounds on the reason for Japanese women's preference for western men, something to do with the difference in physiques between the two races. I could have listened to him for much longer. Unfortunately, the bulk of the film shifts from Kyoko and Harukawa to the two World publicity execs and they just aren't that interesting. Eventually, it comes down to a moral debate between Goda, who justifies every cutthroat tactic he can think of as part of some nationalist impulse, and Nishi, who questions the ethics of what they're doing, culminating in a bleak, unsatisfying ending.

There is lots of dialogue about the Japanese way in the postwar era and what's needed to survive and thrive, with Goda's position thought to be at odds with traditional Japanese values. Many on the staff side with Goda and when one character complains that what worked in America won't work in Japan, another executive declares, "America is Japan." Goda increasingly becomes a caricature as the film progresses. When Nishi objects to the way Kurahashi is trying to hire Kyoko away from World to work for Apollo, especially after he's revealed his company secrets to her during their affair, she dismisses it with this line: "Work is work and love is love. We love as we cheat. It's so thrilling. It's love that will last." Which struck me as a very odd thing to put in such a character's mouth, unless something was lost in the subtitled translation. The whole sales war between Giant and World becomes an unlikely media event, as if the public would even care about two caramel companies. The film hits us over the head with all these messages without really working them into the fabric of the story. They seem forced.

Other Japanese films from the postwar era managed to incorporate these kinds of criticisms in a much less heavy-handed way, making points through story and character. Akira Kurosawa's HIGH AND LOW (1963) examines the battle between a conscientious executive and the company directors' greed through the prism of a crime story involving a kidnapping. Keisuke Kinoshita's THUS ANOTHER DAY (1959) looks at the plight of a salaryman desperately trying to get ahead and the strain it puts on his family, but lays out its critique entirely through the way characters behave and the shifting of relationships. (I've also reviewed this film on IMDb.) Nagisa Oshima and Koreyoshi Kurahara, two directors who were even younger than Masumura, also managed to layer their films of the 1950s and '60s with incisive social critiques of Japan, but they did it without making Japan look foolish, which is what Masumura does here. GIANTS AND TOYS has been compared to such American counterparts as Frank Tashlin's WILL SUCCESS SPOIL ROCK HUNTER, Billy Wilder's THE APARTMENT, Alexander Mackendrick's SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS and Elia Kazan's A FACE IN THE CROWD, but those films managed to make their points without making America look foolish or hateful.