User reviews

"Kabe atsuki heya" (or "The Thick-Walled Room") was the third film of director Masaki Kobayashi, who would go on to make such masterworks as "The Human Condition", "Hara-kiri", and "Samurai Rebellion". In "The Thick-Walled Room", one can see many of the elements Kobayashi would use to greater effect in those later films – the sense of political consciousness, the criticism of corruption within society, and the focus on human failings.

The film takes place four years after the end of World War II, and concerns a group of low-ranking Japanese soldiers imprisoned by the Americans for war crimes. It soon becomes clear that these people are small fry, forced into their actions by their superiors and doomed to take the fall for the actions of the army. Meanwhile, their superiors, who are shown to be brutal and actually bear most of the guilt, manage to escape unscathed.

As you can imagine, this subject matter was considered most controversial during the time the film was being made. The studio, afraid the film would offend Americans, demanded the film be severely cut. Kobayashi refused to do this, and so the film was shelved for three years. Although completed in 1953, it did not come out until 1956. Then it was lost in obscurity once again – that is, until the Criterion Collection finally released it on DVD as part of its Eclipse Series. At last, as of April 2013, "The Thick-Walled Room" can be widely seen.

Of course, the film isn't as polished as Kobayashi's greatest work, and it is clear that at this point he was still maturing as a filmmaker. But there is, nevertheless, a lot that is very good about this film. The prisoners are not depicted as wronged saints but as fallible human beings. They can be arrogant, deluded. They have tempers. They can be cruel to one another. The backstories and histories of these characters are also quite well-handled. Through these histories, Kobayashi is able to broaden his scope and analyze the after-effects of the war all across Japan, and not just focus on the goings-on inside the prison. One example of how Kobayashi does this is when one of the prisoners recollects a girl he met during the war. He is infatuated with the memory of her, idealizing her innocence and purity, and has hopes of settling down with her if he ever is set free. But the prisoner's brother, who comes sometimes to visit him, knows the hollowness of these fantasies. That innocent girl has grown into a cynical prostitute. Her character makes a bitter remark on the state of the nation that rings throughout the film: "The war made us insane. And we're still insane."

"The Thick-Walled Room" is an interesting study of degradation and corruption in postwar Japan. It is also compelling for what it shows about Masaki Kobayashi's early career. Hopefully, now that the film is more readily available, more people will have the chance to see it.

One of the few films to deal with one of the twentieth century's most overlooked atrocities: the imprisonment and mass killing of Japanese foot soldiers during the post-war American occupation. After the genocides of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the US conspired with the Japanese monarchy and political establishment to blame the crimes of Japanese fascism on the lowest ranked soldiers who were acting under orders from their now-accusers.

The film does a nice job of naturally switching from a collective protagonist of various imprisoned "war criminals" to a more conventional, individually focused narrative of revenge. It's slightly sentimental notion that the worst of humanity is punished simply for having to be itself is made more palatable by its hauntingly wretched presentation of the real war criminals. These are characters who hate themselves, each other, and yet laugh at anyone taking a higher path.

On an unintentionally funny note, the actors playing the American guards have such thick EurAsian accents that their "English" is just about indecipherable. Every once in a while, it's healthy to see your own nationality poorly stereotyped.

It's easy to see why Japanese authorities would have wanted cuts from Masaki Kobayashi's first attempt at his hard-hitting style of story about the individual against an oppressive system. Not only did it highlight some smaller forms of the war crimes of the Japanese army during World War II, but it was an obviously political piece meant to attack the Japanese government for, what Kobayashi saw as, injustices against minor war criminals when more guilty ones were let off with lighter sentences. He dramatizes it well, the movie ending extraordinarily well, but a lot of details about the situation that seem necessary to understand what's going on get left out (I had to look up what Class-A, B, and C war criminals were, for instance, despite the film mentioning them repeatedly), probably because 1953 Japan was marinating in the details, and he was making the film for a 1953 Japanese audience.

One thing should be known about Kobayashi. He was a pacificist who rejected the militarism of 1930s Japan and, when he was conscripted into the Japanese army, he refused every promotion, remaining a private and was captured as a prisoner of war near the end, serving a year in a prison camp on Okinawa. He was not a man out to excuse Japanese crimes in Manchuria, which he witnessed with his own eyes. He was a man with sympathy for the lowest rung of the Japanese military and society that had been unjustly treated by their superior officers and government.

The film is about a handful of war criminals in an American controlled prison in Tokyo as they wait until either their sentence is over or, for most of them, Japan becomes independent again and can determine what it wants to do with its prisoners without American input. All of these prisoners are B and C-Class war criminals, and what's interesting is that they are all guilty. Not just in the minds of the law, but we see flashbacks to their individual crimes. Yes, they did the deeds. Yamashita (Torahiko Hamada) was ordered by his superior officer Hamada (Eitaro Ozawa) to kill a native who housed them because he might have been part of a guerilla movement. Yamashita killed the native. Yokota (Ko Mishima) was an English translator at a POW camp that housed American soldiers, and he was ordered by his superior officer to whip a prisoner who had stolen some rice. The soldier died of his wounds from the whipping. These are guilty men, but the superior officers have gotten off with lighter sentences, most particularly Hamada who was released from prison before Yamashita and has returned to their hometown to undermine Yamashita's mother and sister.

The topical nature of the film dominates for a while, and it becomes about the details of the handover of the prison from formal American control to de jure Japanese control but remaining de facto American control all while the Japanese constitution included an article disallowing the Japanese government from freeing the war criminals. This detail is here not for the story but because Kobayashi was making a contemporary political point and trying to influence his audience's outlook on the treatment of the war criminals still under arrest in their own country.

The final half of the film concentrates on Yamashita's problem. Yokota has a brother out of prison who works for a leftist newspaper. After getting him to track down the innocent young girl he had known during the war (who has since become a prostitute, another attack on nostalgia from Kobayashi), he tells Yamashita's story to his brother who then publishes it in the newspaper. This causes a row within the prison. The Class-A prisoners (sitting on a stage above all of the Class-B and C prisoners) demand that the one who wrote the story give himself up, but no one will give up Yokota. At the news of Yamashita's mother's sudden death, the prisoners gather together to convince the authorities to give him one day to go back home to mourn before returning (he's followed by an official, so it makes this believable enough within the context of the film, meaning that I have no idea if they actually allowed this sort of thing). He's already tried to escape once, but the public opinion in his favor brought on by article seems to have enough influence over the authorities to allow him out for this one day of mourning.

Of course, he tried to escape because he wants to kill Hamada. Hamada, who ordered him to kill the native and then testified against Yamashita in court, is living well on the outside while Yamashita sits in prison. The emotional reality of Yamashita finding Hamada and suddenly feeling no need to kill him, especially how Kobayashi lays out the scene with wonderfully dark shadows in the middle of the night, was what pushed me from appreciation to real affection for the film. There's real drama here about men who did bad things but are definitely being treated unjustly in comparison to others, and I feel for Yamashita.

Kobayashi obviously chose to highlight stories (taken from real prisoners, it seems) that stack the deck in his favor. These are good men who were ordered by superior officers to do terrible things. He chose to not highlight any B or C-Class criminals who willingly or joyfully committed atrocities, and I think that undermines his contemporary political point. It's really the political angle that holds me back slightly, but the human stuff he does bring to the fore through his characters ends up so strong that I forgive a lot of it.

It's the work of a young filmmaker, which makes the release date of the film interesting because, by watching his films in release order, we see him regress technically (while Fountainhead is a lesser film, it's more polished). At the same time, there's some wonderful visual stuff on display as well. There's a minor character who ends up in a nightmare where bullet holes start forming in his cell, and peeking through he sees the crimes he committed, driving him to suicide. It's not only gorgeous to look at but there's real sadness at the emotional reality of the man driven to take his own life in the face of his sins. Kobayashi brought everything he could to this, and really the main thing holding him back at all was that he was trying to be topical. Otherwise, he made a passionate film about men he obviously cared for.

Very few films, if any, tackle the subject of the mostly innocent "war criminals" from the war in Japan with the subject of Accountabilty being the focus. As with others on here, yes you can definitely see the makings of a great director here and what he worked on to become that. Does this mean that the director's style in progress take away from what's here? Absolutely not.

Kobayashi Masaki was not afraid to speak his mind as a filmmaker. 'The human condition' was blistering in its anti-war sentiments; 'Harakiri' and 'Samurai rebellion' were fiercely critical of the feudal Japanese society that is commonly romanticized, and of any society or group that would mirror it. Who else would we expect to make a film that speaks to the experiences of Japanese soldiers who were convicted as war criminals, and the notions of accountability that one way or another were central to all such legal proceedings? With this in mind, even as its release was delayed for three years, I don't think 'The thick-walled room' is entirely as strident or emphatic as some of Kobayashi's other works, but make no mistake that it still speaks very plainly to its particular interests. In some measure the picture impugns prisons at large for their inhumanity, but directly depicts mistreatment of prisoners by U. S. military police and courts; reflects the inconsistency with which Japanese war criminals were treated, with pointed differences for those in positions of authority compared to the soldiers below them; addresses the unilateral, conditional circumstances by which the Allies eased off their punishment of Japan, ironically including persecution of pacifist leftists at the same time that the agents of a fascist government remained imprisoned; touches upon the farce of war profiteers not only not being punished, but being celebrated; and so on.

As would be the case with 'Inn of evil' in 1971, I think the focus is broader here than in the other mentioned features as Kobayashi scrutinizes Japan's history and in turn our own. Still the intent is unmistakable, and even with a slightly different feel, the title is just as deliberate and thoughtful in laying out its narrative and its core substance. We also see the filmmaker's eye as an artist in how this is crafted, if perhaps less refined here compared to his later endeavors, for no few shots and scenes are striking in how they were composed, a credit as well to cinematographer Kusuda HIroyuki and all those operating behind the scenes. His vision as director is strong in realizing Abe Kobo's rich screenplay with its compelling narrative, strong scene writing, and complicated characters, and if the result is to any degree specifically lesser than his most esteemed movies, the difference is not a significant one. Between all the combined efforts of the excellent production design and art direction, stunts and effects, costume design, hair and makeup, and editing, some moments are especially brilliant, to say nothing of the vivid performances of everyone in the cast. Truthfully, 'The thick-walled room' doesn't necessarily leave as substantial an impression as Kobayashi has elsewhere, but it really is just as worthy when all is said and done, a testament to the endurance of the human spirit even in the most extreme contexts and the contemptible smallness of those who would willfully do harm to others, and dodge responsibility.

Discuss the details as we may, this holds up splendidly well, and the skill and intelligence that went into it is undeniable. I'd expect no less of Kobayashi, really. I might stop short of saying it wholly demands viewership on the same level as the man's absolute best, but all things considered, the distinction doesn't mean that much. Suffice to say that if you have the opportunity to watch then this is well worth checking out, and still easily stands very tall above vast swaths of too many other flicks. 'The thick-walled room' is a solid classic, and I'm pleased to give it my high recommendation.