Another entry in the fifties teen delinguent movies, Jun’ai monogatari is unusual in part because it pays little attention to the delinquency itself.
Kantoro wanders into what the subtitles call the “back gate of Tokyo,” having been out of town for some unnamed crime for a couple of years. He returns to the shop of an old man who had befriended him, where he falls into a “gang” who invite him along to their rape of Mitsuko, a girl who had been picking pockets for them and now wants to leave. He declines and in the ensuing scuffles, the leader is pushed off a balcony and Kantaro and Mitsuko run into the woods where he has been sleeping rough since he returned. They decide to be partners, with him providing the distraction while she steals wallets in department stores, but they are soon caught.
They are sent to reformatories, where Kantoro actually thrives and learns a trade, just like reformatories are supposed to work. Mitsuko, however, makes life hard for herself first by an assault on a counselor and then by persistent “illness,” which most of the staff believe is faked. Eventually the kindly counselor takes her to an outside doctor, where they discover that she and her aunt had been in Hiroshima three days after the bomb and the aunt had died of radiation sickness. Then follows the predictable scenes in which he sneaks out of his job (on probation, he has to sleep there) to visit her, finds money to help pay for her treatment, and their discovery that they are in love. But he is unable to get to her deathbed, saving us the extensive sob scene that we would expect.
The love is in fact pure as promised in the title and absolutely chaste, with only a single spontaneous kiss on their one picnic together. This is no teen-aged Bonnie and Clyde. The reform schools are perfect, full of considerate staff and without any signs of cruelty. Aside from Mitsuko’s attempted escape, we don’t even see any of the fights among the inmates so common to other prison or reformatory pictures in America. You almost expect a priestly Bing Crosby to pop into song at dinner time.
There is none of the anger and frustration of The Rose on his Arm, for example, nor any of the sexual tease of the Sun Tribe movies.
So the question arises: Why was this made at all? And more particularly, why was it made by Tadashi Imai, one of the most respected directors of the fifties, and why in color and an immensely wide screen process? Anderson and Richie say it was intended as a communist propaganda film,¹ but if so, it failed so miserably the possibility would have never occurred to me. It is not an exposé of the terrible criminal system. It is not one of those films where the hero just can’t catch a break, no matter how hard he tries to go straight. There is an opening scene in a homeless camp, but the poor are immediately forgotten as soon as Kantoro walks into town, where it becomes a teen love story.
It was based on a popular novel and, again according to Anderson and Richie, the one variation was to change her disease from the traditional tuberculosis popular in almost all tearful romances to radiation poisoning. This may have been an anti-American intention, but, if so, it is underplayed to the point of non-existence.
This is one of Japan’s earliest widescreen movies, and it is easy to see that the photographers were not yet comfortable with the process. The anamorphic bulge is actually unnerving when the camera pans and buildings seem to surge forward as they approach midscreen. And the color seems to completely negate the “realism” of the subject matter. If nothing else, it indicates that movie studio decisions were made in Japan just as in America for reasons that had nothing to do with esthetics; Toei had converted many of its theaters to widescreen in 1957, so they were going to make widescreen movies no matter what. Imai’s Rice, released only a few months earlier, would have been a more plausible, even ideal, subject for his introduction to widescreen format, but apparently it went into production before Toho made the decision to convert its theater equipment.
But perhaps the greatest question of all is: What did the critics of the time see that we don’t see today? This is an exceedingly dull movie. There is no other way to say this. Every bit of dramatic energy seems to have been drained out of it, in part perhaps by the problems of the new technology but also by the decision to treat it as an event movie of some kind, running almost two and a half hours, when the story could have been handled neatly in about seventy minutes. And it can’t seem to make up its mind whether it is a love story or a delinquency story. Yet Imai won the Mainichi Concours and the Blue Ribbon Best Director awards and Kinema Junpo‘s Best Picture list placed it second only to Imai’s Rice of the same year. Nor were the Japanese alone in this acclaim — Imai was chosen Best Director at the Berlin festival where the film was shown. By just about any measure, it is one of the worst of his films available on DVD and often looks like he was asleep or at home when the scenes were actually shot. A look at American Academy Awards and critics’ awards in the fifties would raise similar “What were they thinking?” issues, of course,* but still, this is inexplicable. We can wonder why Japanese critics thought Till We Meet Again was better than Rashomon, or Nigorie better than Ugetsu, but we can still see that Till We Meet Again and Nigorie were very good movies in their own right. Jun’ai monogatari was not, whether we even mention Throne of Blood was released in the same year.
One sidelight illustrates the strange cross-cultural currents at work in fifties Japan. The kindly counselor (female) tries to teach Mitsuko to dance, and the records she plays are foxtrot versions of “Swanee River” and “Old Folks at Home,” played by a Hawaiian guitar band.
* Have you looked at Around the World in Eighty Days lately?
¹ Joseph Anderson and Donald Richie, The Japanese Film: Art and Industry (expanded edition), 1982, p. 388.
How odd that we now think black and white is more “realistic” than color, but I know what you mean. I stated awake through all 2 1/2 hours of “Pure Love,” mostly imagining how much worse it would have been if it were an American film of the same era. The actors playing Kantoro and Mitsuko had the advantage of not being Frankie Avalon and Sandra Dee.
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