Pigs and Battleships

Typical high school relationship turmoil pales in comparison to this. A young couple are looking for a more prosperous life in early 60s Japan, however, the young man thinks that running with a gang will help him clear some financial debts quick along with selling swine on the black market in the grittier parts of Japan. His girlfriend wants him out of that stupid gang while her parents are far from model parents as they try to steer her into prostitution. The story follows Kinta as he wrestles with becoming a man and trying to find a way out of the gang world as his girlfriend would be happy if he had a traditional factory job; something he bristles at. Will they be able to detach themselves from bad influences or will they collapse under the pressures? This film had really nice shot framing and a few really innovative transitions, especially for the era. The acting was solid and the drama slowly increased built upon well-crafted characters. One key scene has similarities to Scarface but swap cocaine with pigs. Ha Ha.

There are some interesting faces in this flick. The head of gang Tetsuro Tanba, who thinks he is dying hits it big some years later as the Japanese male lead opposite Sean Connery in "You Only Live Twice" (1967). An old guy who defends the honor of the female lead ends up playing Admiral Nagumo in "Tora, Tora, Tora" (1970).

Beyond those interesting connections, this flick is fairly complex and has a bit of a fatalistic theme. Some the main characters have to break out of their environment to change their destiny. Only one is able to do that. There are a few comedic moments. It is worth the time to see the plot. :-)

"This film is entirely fictional" states the film in the very beginning, lingering purposefully on the faces of bawling drunk Americans wandering the nightly streets, some harassed by, others looking for company. You don't really have to know Imamura at all to recognize the delicious irony. The beginning is so full of impressions, smells and life only Welles' "Touch of Evil" (1958) bests this in how in just a few minutes we're completely in the place and breathe its air. The sweaty chaos of the close-leaning alleys, kisses beneath stairs.

Welles is also echoed in the beautifully fluent tracking shots. It's interesting to read Imamura's statements made during the sixties and later, when he recalls Ozu's intention of a highly aestheticized cinema, and his own, more anthropological, perhaps more real. These kinds of comments distracted me for a long time – I wasn't expecting visually strong films, which Imamura's are, neither was I prepared to see so many fresh ideas, of which there are many.

I'm not completely satisfied with the ending, but I'll have to wait and see whether it'll grow on me. It is, on one hand, a successful melange of both the sadistic and ironic, but on the other it brings the film to a close perhaps too neatly. Not that I have any idea as to how to make it better, but it's too much of a showdown, and although Imamura plays it to great comic effect with a tragic undersong, it's a bit too excessive to my liking.

The Criterion Collection has released this on DVD (Region 1) as part of the 'Pigs, Pimps & Prostitutes' boxset that also includes "Akasen satsui" ('Intentions of Murder', 1963) and "Nippin konchûki" ('The Insect Woman', 1963). Masters of Cinema have released this on a Region B Blu- ray that also includes an early Imamura film, his debut actually, "Nusumareta yokujô" ('Stolen Desire', 1958).

Shohei Imamura films continue to be showcased in the Japanese Film Festival, and Hogs and Warships is a tale of pimps, gangsters and prostitutes put together in a melting pot that is the streets of Yokosuka, a port town where US Navy personnel spend their R&R in postwar Japan. And I suppose you know that means painting the town red with drink and women, with the Japanese folk all eager to make a quick buck through the provision of services.

I think there is no love shown here in painting, through the course of the film, how the pigs can refer to both the American soldiers - where the rowdy rank and file chasing skirts to bed, and the officers portrayed as more than willing to keep mistresses - and the Japanese men themselves who are pimping their town/city/country, where everyone's thinking of making good money in the shortest possible time. As an outcome, there's a whole load of black comedy that Imamura crafts in the film, where gangsters are constantly scheming and looking to outwit rivals, and the women well, relegated to either the backlanes waiting for pimps to bring in business, or pandering to the notion of being a kept woman for a better life overseas.

Hogs and Warships, or Pigs and Battleships, begins with showing the bleak picture of the impoverished in Yokosuka out to make a living through all means possible, despite the clamp down on bars and establishments by the Shore Patrol, that seems more symbolic and hence hypocritical in nature even, where a prostitute lashes out at a SP personnel for visiting her brothel just before the closure. After a quick introduction we're introduced to the protagonists in the lovebird couple Kinta (Hiroyuki Nagato) and Haruko (Jitsuko Yoshimura, who followed up this film with Onibaba, also featured in last year's JFF), one on each side of the sexes to touch on their respective strategies to better their lives.

Kinta's the quintessential easy-going, happy go lucky and unlikely gangster, where he thinks the money is with running with the gangsters, although he soon finds out his recruitment besides helping to operate the black market hog business, is to become the fall guy for practically everything that goes wrong for the gang, from the comical disposal of a corpse, to taking the rap for the gangster chief should it come down to that. With that comes the promise of riches beyond his imagination, with which he can pursue his dream of becoming a band manager.

Haruko is that steely lady that we've come accustomed to with Imamura's characterization of the fairer sex. Like the other romantic leading ladies in films like A Flame at the Pier and Good for Nothing, they possess this inexplicable hope that they are able to change their man through love. Here, Haruko persuades quite unsuccessfully for Kinta to give up his life of crime, wanting him to work in a factory, which to Kinta is a dead end job. The story of Haruko serves to be more interesting than the rest, especially through Jitsuko Yoshimura's performance where in the finale you can feel her resolve jumping right out of the screen in her determination to create a new life away from the old one where mistakes have been made and old hopes shattered.

It's the life and times of the working class during the era, and comes with a scene that's much talked about when all hell breaks loose on the streets of Yokosuka, where everything, including hundreds of pigs, comes together for that literal big bang finale complete with action, comedy and that tinge of poignancy even. With cinematography at its inventive best (the continuous spin from an eye in the sky angle when Haruko finds herself trapped in trouble was totally unexpected and made quite an impact on the passage of time), I found myself more interested with how the pachinko machine was manually operated at the backend by a number of hostesses working to feed those ball bearings into the player's machines!

Hiroyuki Nagato and Jitsuko Yoshimura (in her first onscreen appearance) are very much in love. She wants them to flee to another city; her family has just sold her to be a mistress. He wants to hang around. He's a low-level Yakuza member who's in charge of their new operation; they have a contract to get the scraps off an American destroyer, which will fatten pigs, and he's in charge of the pigs. Much better than moving to another town and being a salaryman! However his gang is in upheaval. Someone has run away with the money for the pigs, the boss thinks he's dying of stomach cancer, and the other gang members are plotting on how to split up the boodle, once they've eliminated the old leader.

It's an expert mixture of farce and drama in the midst of chaos from Shôhei Imamura. He had run with similar gangs during Japan's Black Market era. Then he had gone to work in the movies and his earliest known movies were as an uncredited assistant director of three of Ozu's comedies of life among the upper middle class. It's hard to say what Imamura learned from Ozu, except to do exactly the opposite. Ozu's people love each other and gently guide their family towards socially acceptable goals. Money is never mentioned. the set design is impeccable in that simple Japanese style that Ozu seems to have helped define, and the camera is placed humbly on a tatami mat adoringly to gaze up at the actors in long takes. Imamura sets his story in the docklands outside a US Naval base, where cheap and gaudy bars sit cheek-by-jowl with cheap and gaudy brothels. Everyone talks about money, They're deep in debt, they value other people solely for what they can be hustled into doing for them, and the camera occasionally spirals up in a crane shot to spin around during a gang rape.

The only way to make this a comedy is to despise the characters in the movie, and Imamura does so in the most heartless manner. He pauses occasionally to offer an anthropologist's view of the people of this Pandemonium for his audience. He can afford to; he got out. Are any of the people in this movie smart enough to?