One of the most difficult aspects of Japanese movies in the fifties is their use of what seems to be utterly inappropriate music scores. Our Marriage, though released in the early sixties, provides us with one of the most egregious examples of this problem. In most earlier cases, the music simply seems to be thrown in at random, or repeated endlessly, but it gradually becomes ignorable because it is generally unmemorable. Here, if you are of a certain age, it simply can not be ignored. Every couple of minutes, the full symphony orchestra will swell up with another chorus of “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore.”
Many Euro/American songs were adapted into “Japanese folk songs” to be taught to schoolchildren in the Meiji era when the education system was nationalized. Chuji Kinoshita’s use of these all but overwhelm Twenty-Four Eyes, but at least there the idea was justifiable. It was, after all, a film about schoolchildren, so their songs made sense on the soundtrack to a Japanese audience who all knew the songs from their own schooldays, even though to western ears they are a distraction because we know them with entirely different lyrics that have nothing to do with the Japanese plot. But “Michael Row the Boat Ashore” here does not appear to be a similar usage, for the song was all but unknown even in America until it became a number one hit almost simultaneously with this film’s release. Its usage here is so inapt that it seems utterly inept.
Yet the music is credited to Naozumi Yamamoto and the film was directed by Shinoda, who took more care with the sound of his films than most Japanese directors. Yamamoto is most known for his edgy jazz scores, especially those for Suzuki’s movies like Underworld Beauty, Gate of Flesh, or Branded to Kill, and he had done Shinoda’s exceedingly weird Killers on Parade as well. And by the early sixties, the revolution in Japanese movie sound tracks was well underway, with swelling strings at every emotional moment pretty much a thing of the past already. So what is going on here? Why such a throw-back, so retrograde that it all but destroys the movie itself?
It is just conceivable that this is an act of rebellion by both Shinoda and Yamamoto. After Killers on Parade, Shochiku decided that their highly touted “New Wave” was over. Like Oshima and Yoshida, Shinoda was put on a very short leash and forced to take on more traditional examples of the Shochiku studio product if he wished to continue working.
Our Marriage is certainly typical Shochiku product. The teenaged daughter tries to set up her older sister with a romantic young man at the factory, while the elder sister also receives marriage offers from the “union manager’s” son, whom we never see but which would relieve her father’s debts in the seaweed business, and from a manager of a Tokyo cloth store who once knew her as a child. Sis opts for the Tokyo businessman, who seems a very nice guy and is not so rich that she can be charged with marrying purely for money, though the choice is independent enough to risk her father’s business. Teen sis is terribly disappointed until she realizes she herself is in love with the factory worker, though he hasn’t noticed her yet. An odd counterpoint is provided by the neighbor’s wife (Machiko Kyo) who believes that her love will glorify their poverty, until she becomes pregnant and has to abort the child because they are too poor to raise it.
You can almost feel Shinoda straining at the bit, yelling this is not the kind of movie I want to make. It is certainly possible that Yamamoto felt much the same; composers seemed to jump back and forth between studios in a way that Americans never could during the studio years, so it is unclear if he had been lured away from Nikkatsu to provide an edge to the “New Wave” films and now was ready to say “This is not what I signed on for” or if he was just freelancing and working as fast as he could. At any rate, after this, he was back at Nikkatsu for most of the rest of the sixties. It may well be that, in their frustration, together they decided to make the movie a parody of the old-style Shochiku movie. If so, it is a pity, because, as the plot summary indicates, the Japanese approach to the who-shall-sis-marry plot is much more realistic and fraught with social dangers than American versions. There are moments when Shinoda just can’t help himself, in which the black & white ‘scope comes to life with some lovely compositions and the good solid, if unexceptional, movie it could have been comes through. But other scenes seem to be simply phoned in. And whenever you begin to get emotionally involved, Michael starts rowing that boat again, and you start thinking about making a few s’mores around the campfire instead of about the movie.
