I recently watched Crazed Fruit, a 1956 film from Japan directed by Ko Nakahira. Think Rebel Without A Cause, but with water skiing, skimpy bathing suits, and bad, bad attitudes.
A hothouse drama about wayward Japanese youth, Crazed Fruit concerns two brothers spending a summer at the beach and competing for the same girl - with tragic consequences. As reviewer Michael Buening (allmovie.com) notes, the film...
"...helped establish a post-World War II cultural template of first-world pampered, aimless, casually self-destructive youth - where the young women dangle their sexuality like a plaything and the boys store up puberty-driven reserves of testosterone until they explode with frustrated violence."
Like other classic youth films, Crazed Fruit caused outrage and hysteria among Japanese housewives, teachers, and politicians. The film may seem relatively tame by today's standards, but the finale still packs a dramatic punch. Crazed Fruit remains notable (and watchable) for its sharp cinemtography, its depiction of affluent Japanese youth just ten years after the war, a haunting jazzy-Hawaiian-esque score, and for being the break-out role for Ishihara Yujiro - as a long-legged bad boy in trunks.
I went to see Elia Kazan's Wild River (1960) last night as part of the NZ film festival. I'd seen it on the small screen and knew it as a highly-watchable tale about forced land sales along the Tennesee River in the 1930s. Montgomery Clift plays the liberal government man sent to get hard-bitten matriarch Jo Van Fleet off her family's island plantation before its flooded by a new hydro dam. So I couldn't miss the opportunity to see this under-appreciated film on the big screen. The brochure described it succinctly: "Glorious new restoration of a neglected 1960 masterpiece by Elia Kazan (On the Waterfront) with legendary performances by Jo Van Fleet and Lee Remick and Hollywood icon Montgomery Clift".
It looked wonderful on the big screen, the restored print showing the autumnal colours in Cinemascope. The silent raft trip across the river to the mysterious island is captivating, as are the confrontations with Van Fleet who simply won't budge, and the skill of Clift in subtlely mixing some bemused light humour with the drama. It's great to see that Wild River has been re-screened at film festivals around the world. It deserves more recognition, not only for the fine performances of the three leads and the quirky character actors, but for telling an entertaining story that touches on some big themes - the tension between progress and tradition, civil rights in the American South, and fear of committing to a relationship.
I recently watched Akira Kurosawa's Stray Dog (野良犬, 1949), a classic film noir set in Tokyo just after the war. Filmed in the sweltering Japanese summer, the heat and humidity pervades every frame, as sweat drips from the characters, slowly adding to the building tensions and frustrations.
The legendary Toshiro Mifune, of Rashomon and Seven Samurai fame, plays a headstrong, yet naive, young detective whose gun is stolen on a crowded bus. As his missing gun starts to be used in crimes, he desperately searches Tokyo's seedy underworld to track down the killer before more murders are committed. AllMovie.com notes that "Mifune, young and hungry, is tightly coiled in Stray Dog, a complicated mass of insecurity and bravado".
Stray Dog has classic noir elements, including shadowy lighting, urban crime, a man trapped in a living nightmare and an increasingly blurred sense of what is right or wrong. More than just a psychological crime thriller, it also contains a nine-minute montage that wordlessly captures post-war Tokyo's crowded streets and alleys, with real-life blackmarket figures, hawkers and drifters. All were filmed surreptitiously by Kurosawa as Mifune wandered the streets in Tokyo's sweltering summer.
I re-watched Wong Kar Wai's 2046 last night. I remember waiting for this film. Rumours swirled. It would be set in 1960s Hong Kong, as a companion piece to In the Mood for Love. It would be set in the year 2046 and feature robots. It would star Tony Leung and and feature Maggie Cheung, Gong Li, and Carina Lau, and Faye Wong and Zhang Zi Yi. Chang Chen (Taiwan) and Kimura Takuya (Japan) had roles. I wondered how these leading actors would fit into one film, and how their different languages of Cantonese, Mandarin, and Japanese could fit together.
Somehow, it does contain all those elements and more, as it explores key WKW themes of memory, loss, and reflections on failed romance. For me, the look of 2046 is just stunningly beautiful... combining saturated colours, muted lighting, elegant costumes and sexual desire within tight, enclosed interiors. Intriguingly, 2046 references earlier films in which some characters appear, revealing more about their background and motivations. Also intriguing is the way that scenes between actors who speak different languages are integrated - without much apparent difficulty. That use of language, and the fact that it is set in Hong Kong and Singapore, with characters from Japan and Cambodia (including the mysterious 'black widow' gambler Su Lizhen from Phnom Penh) gives it a pan-Asian quality. 2046 is a complex and often puzzling fim, but one that rewards a repeat viewing.
