Attack at Noon / Attack on the Sun / Hakuchu no shugeki (1970)

The year is 1970, the last great burst of student protest in Japan, and Hakuchu no shugeki opens with a journalist interviewing a group of young people about what they really want. The camera, however, soon picks out two twenty-somethings outside the group, Yuri and a young man called Osamu. He follows her in his truck as she walks away, offers her a lift to work, and then later comes to see her at her club where she is a go-go-dancer and possible prostitute. Osamu there meets Sachio, who was his roommate in reform school but whom he hasn’t seen for four years. Sachio has an American friend Johnny who has given him a gun, which he passes on to Osamu because “the gun looks better on him.” This starts a spiral of accidents and confusions that eventually lead to tragedy.

Soon Yuri and Sachio have moved in together in Osamu’s tiny room – Sachio is homosexual, so he volunteers to leave the room when the others want sex. When the bar salaries aren’t enough, they pull some small-time robberies made easy by Osamu’s pistol. Osamu hates “students,” however, in part because they have the life he never had the opportunity to live while he sees them simply wasting Daddy’s money. That leads him to try to steal a car owned by just such a student when the gun goes off as he tries to prevent the theft. Osamu is also injured and helped away by Sachio onto a side lane, where Narumi drives by and decides to help them because a stranger once helped him when he was injured by a group of students who thought he was a police spy. As we have seen so often, no good deed goes unpunished in Japanese movies – Narumi is a yakuza and his offer of a job to Osamu is a double-edged sword that soon leads to Narumi’s death, Osamu’s revenge killings, and a shoot-out with the police.

All of this is accompanied by an improvised jazz music score by trumpeter Terumasa Hino that reminds us of Miles Davis. Hino had his own combo in Japan and in the mid-seventies would be among the busiest and most respected sidemen in the New York City jazz scene, so his jazz credentials are impeccable. The decision to have him do the score would have been as unusual and daring as Louis Malle asking Davis to do the score for Elevator to the Gallows was a decade earlier.

So much cultural information is packed into the story that it is hard to know where to start or to end. Perhaps the most striking is the power of the mere presence of a gun in a society where there are no guns. In a sense, none of Osamu’s story would have happened without the miraculous appearance of the gun. It is not the only time we have seen the assumption that any American must have a gun, so many, in fact, that Johnny can just freely give one away, but it is made at about the same time as Live Today, Die Tomorrow with its killing spree made possible by a stolen American gun. Admittedly many of the people Osamu eventually shoots are yakuza, so the shootings are not completely random. Nevertheless, the power of the gun introduced into modern Japan reminds us of Oshima’s Japanese Summer,

though with a more coherent storyline.

Nor is it the first time we have seen a male homosexual principal character in Japanese movies, but Sachio has none of the flamboyance of the transvestite boys in Funeral Parade of Roses or Black Line Zone. If Yuri didn’t comment about his “ perversion,” we would just assume he was a lost young man left behind by society. Once we know about Sachio, we assume his American friend must be homosexual, but Johnny soon picks up a regular girlfriend and turns out to be only a troubled teenager at odds with his father, a Navy officer who rejects Johnny’s dream of becoming a jazz musician. Sachio is just a nice, frail young man in a desperate search for friends. It is certainly possible that he is in love with Osamu, but Osamu is openly heterosexual, and it is clear that Sachio’s leanings bother him not at all. On the other hand, Yuri can’t stand him; eventually, as the group plan a big getaway, she demands Osamu choose between her and Sachio. He chooses friendship over sex, which leads to her informing the police, which in turn leads to the big shoot-out.

The car Osamu tries to steal is a Mustang, that American college-boy dream car that was apparently a dream across the world. Narumi’s bar offers only beer and women but caters completely to American servicemen, which we (and they) know because its sign is a Confederate flag.

For the first time I can recall, we hear Osamu voice a refrain heard in America after 1968: These college kids have everything, so what are they protesting about? They don’t know what it is to actually work or struggle and think they can get away with anything just because they’re in college. In Osamu’s case, there is also the longing for that life – he was smart enough, and if he hadn’t had the brutal father and tried to protect his mother, he would not have ended up in reform school with no chance to finish high school or go to college.

We never quite know what Yuri actually does at the go-go club. Sachio arranges assignations for her with male customers, but when we finally see her in a room with one, she resists seriously.

Narumi seems a side character, but he turns out to be the honorable character. Cast in the Koji Tsuruta role as the number two yakuza who is running the club while the boss is in prison, he is forced to assassinate the boss by the man who wants to take his place, a standard yakuza plot. Instead, he turns the tables and saves the boss, only to himself be killed because he had been skimming money to arm a revolutionary leftist group, a most unexpected turn for a man who was almost beaten to death by student protestors.

Kiyoshi Nishimura only directed movies for about three years before being forced by various circumstances into TV, so it is difficult to discuss his career or style. This particular movie apparently had a major effect on young movie goers: The critics missed it at the time, but as young writers grew older and themselves became critics, they pushed it onto the Kinema Junpo top 200. It is a curious mix of film noir, yakuza film, and tormented youth picture with especially strong performances from Toshio Kurosawa as Osamu, Noriko Takahashi as Yuri, and Shin Kishida as Narumi. It holds the interest, but perhaps has too many things going on to make it especially powerful at this distance. Still, it makes a fascinating companion to Live Today and If You Were Young: Rage, made at the same time about youth who had been left behind by Japan’s sudden return to prosperity and slightly preceding a similar onslaught in America initiated by the success of Easy Rider, also in 1970.