The black river is the road running out from the gates of an American military base, specifically identified as the Atsugi Naval Air Base outside Yokohama, then as now the largest naval air base in Japan itself and, perhaps not coincidentally, the place where MacArthur first landed on his way to accept the surrender. Like any other river, it provides the living for the people on its shores, in this case sex, booze, and black market material. The Americans, though without any lines, are everywhere, a presence neatly summarized by an opening shot following a plane flying overhead while the bottom of the frame reveals the signs of bar after bar. Trucks and jeeps rush by constantly, and hardly an exterior of the street goes by without a woman and an American in civies negotiating the price in the background.
Eventually, we settle on a tenement inhabited by a bunch of prostitutes and grifters. Nishida, a student of some kind, moves into one of the rooms, and the waitress Shizuko in a nearby restaurant (she is really just a waitress) falls for him when she sees him dragging his cart full of books along the road. Unfortunately, she has also caught the eye of Nakadai,
“Killer Joe” in full “cool” mode
leader of a group of local punks, who styles himself “Killer Joe” and wears sunglasses and wildly colored shirts that we have come to see as the signal of the Sun tribe wanna-be, very often with the white sports jacket over it.
Joe gets his gang to stage an attack on Shizuko from which he rescues her. When she is not properly thankful he goes ahead and rapes her. She falls apart, thinking that she is now soiled for life, and moves in with Joe while still yearning for Nishida.
The outline suggests another tortured love triangle, but that is only the framework for Kobayashi’s real interest, which is the corruption of modern Japan. The sex and booze are not the problem for Kobayashi so much as a collapse in community cohesion. After all, such “entertainment” districts had long been an open part of Japanese life in almost any town of significant size, so the presence of one here is hardly a surprise (though technically, the brothels had been outlawed only recently). And similar districts were outside the gates of any American base even in the US when I was in the military (and presumably still are), where the bars, strip joints, fast food diners, pawn shops, and cheap motels announced the main gate of a base without any need for military signage.
Thus, we spend a lot of time in the tenement itself. Joe is acting as a go-between for a man who wants to buy the tenement and erect another “love hotel” that will better service the Americans. When the landlady can’t evict everyone, she gets Joe to use gangster tactics to try to bring this off. There is also a sick old man who desperately needs a blood transfusion, but no one will admit to having his blood type. This is especially significant because Nishida has the right blood type and despite his noble principles still refuses, just as he refuses to contribute anything to the community around him, exposing the venality and hypocrisy of the educated upper classes from which he comes. Even the virginal Shizuko is corrupted, not so much sexually as morally, eventually pushing a drunken Joe under a passing truck in the night.
It is a fascinating, if highly unpleasant, movie. The people here rarely manage to cooperate, even on the question of paying to clean the latrines. Only a night-time raid on a base warehouse for black market items produces any cooperation. They live in a dog-eat-dog world such as we would not see depicted again so intensely on film until Oshima’s The Sun’s Burial.
The movie is built around Ineko Arima as Shizuko, in what should have been a breakout role for her.
Ineko Arima
She had been a romantic leading lady at Shuchiko for several years but had rarely been offered roles of such complexity. Despite this and the subsequent Night Drum, she would mostly return to blander romantic leads and the dutiful daughter role in Ozu’s last two films. She is joined by Isuzu Yamada as the much detested landlady, unrecognizable due to a set of protruding false teeth that make her look like every cartoon stereotype Japanese from the war years.
Despite Arima’s complex performance, it is Nakadai who dominates the film. He seems to have stepped into the first scene fully formed, in the way very few screen stars ever manage to do. Perhaps this is because we look at this with his great body of work already in our minds, but I don’t think so. For example, we can see the seeds of Mifune’s authority and charisma in Drunken Angel, Stray Dog, or Wedding Ring, but not until Rashomon does he become the giant screen presence he would remain for the rest of his life. We can only wonder how Nakadai could have stayed around Shochiku without work for four years since his bit part in The Thick-Walled Room, and given the studio’s evident lack of faith or even interest in him, how Kobayashi managed to get him cast in this one.
For that matter, we can wonder how Black River ever got made at all. Shochiku Studio in the fifties was not known for its daring, either in subject matter or politics. It had sat on Thick-Walled Room for three years after Kobayashi made it, for fear of upsetting the Americans and/or Japanese politicians. Yet in those three years, Kobayashi had continued to work, albeit on more traditional Shochiku product. Then suddenly there is Black River, without stars, followed by the massive investment of time and money in the ten hours of The Human Condition, a savage and humorless indictment of the entire Japanese military and economic system of the war years.
Not only did Kobayashi manage to get Black River made, he managed to get the A Team from the studio to work with him. The jazz score is by Chuji Kinoshita, one of his most effectively integrated outings. The superb photography is by Yuharu Atsuta, Ozu’s regular cinematographer since the forties. It’s difficult to tell how much was shot at the real location, but the number of crane shots and the superbly lit night scenes suggest most was shot under the more controlled conditions of a back lot. One can only wonder how Atsuta felt to be given the chance to make one of the least Ozu-like films ever made by Shochiku.
- * Technically, Kobayashi had first cast him in a very small role in The Thick-Walled Room and he had been an extra in Seven Samurai, but this was his first featured role.