A local lord who wants a merchant’s daughter. A father so deeply in debt that he is prepared to sell his daughter to pay off his loans. A ronin down on his luck. It’s a situation we have seen hundreds of times in chanbara films. But instead of a tale of treachery and sword-play, Oshidori utagassen turns out to be one of the most charming and delightful musical comedies ever made anywhere.
This is even more remarkable because there are no particularly memorable songs and no Busby-Berkeleyish dance numbers. We have 70 minutes so jam-packed with music that it comes close to light opera but without large choruses or production numbers. Because it is set in the Tokugawa era with everyone in traditional dress, there are no dance numbers either (it’s pretty hard to high-kick in kimonos). But the lightness of touch and of performance more than compensate.
The music is 1930s Euro-American, with even a jokey band that plays traditional drums and shells but comes out on the soundtrack as a jazz band.
The local lord’s jazz band
There are stories that Masahiro Makino directed the whole thing in only two weeks, which is of course possible. After all, Makino was one of the kings of the “shoot ’em fast and get to the next one” school of film direction. But if the stories are true, it was a magical two weeks. The whole film looks spontaneous without being cheap, with just the right level of artificiality necessary for proper musical entertainments; the camera glides when it should glide, stays still when it should stay still, and provides plenty of variation of viewpoint. There are even some good sight gags thrown in to live up the proceedings and a nicely comic fight scene.
Giving the lovers a private moment
All the performances have a similar casual spontaneity and graceful balance between reality and cliché. The most surprising of these relaxed performances comes from Chiezo Kataoka as the singing ronin.
Kataoka was one of the greatest of all chanbara stars and about the very last person you would expect to find as the romantic lead in a musical comedy, rather like seeing John Wayne pop up in The Merry Widow. Even so, there is nothing clumsy or forced in his performance, and assuming it is his voice, he was a pleasant singer, though I can’t recall any later movies in which he sings even a little folk song. The other familiar face is Takashi Shimura in a rare comedic role as the young maid’s father.
There is no credit for costume or production designer in the subtitles, but whoever it may have been, they managed to get more variation than you could have thought possible out of umbrellas photographed in black and white.
Umbrellas drying in the yard
In the light of other ronin movies, it is interesting that Kataoka makes sticks for the umbrella man. The ronin, being of samurai caste, felt it beneath them to find jobs except as swordsmen or bodyguards (yojimbo was the typical term), nor could they run their own businesses. Somehow, the making of umbrellas was apparently the exception, at least in the movies.
Like most musicals, Singing Lovebirds was hardly noticed by the critics of the day, but video releases (and probably a lot of TV showings) has made more contemporary Japanese critics aware of its simple pleasures and it has begun showing up on historical “best” lists. It will be interesting to see the 2019 Kinema Junpo list when it appears.
