Ishiro Honda. Steve Ryfle

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ and the threat to it (newsreel-style shots of trees falling) in stunning black and white.

      The three main protagonists are all flawless and therefore rather dull. Izu, the nominal leading man, plays Ono as a single-minded square, passionate about soil and little else. However, Kosugi, a great and prolific character actor for Honda, Kurosawa, and others, steals every scene as the gap-toothed, intimidating thug Nonaka. The only A-lister among the cast is Shimura, making a cameo. “Around this time,” Honda remembered, “my films were not so much about the kind of human drama that veteran actors liked to do, so I tended to use new people.”¹³

      Eiji Tsuburaya had left Toho in 1948, ostensibly because of his involvement in national policy films. According to Tsuburaya biographer August Ragone, Occupation authorities concluded that Tsuburaya’s realistic Pearl Harbor miniatures could have been created with only classified information; therefore, they erroneously believed Tsuburaya “must have been part of an espionage ring.”¹⁴ Undaunted, Tsuburaya formed an independent company, Tsuburaya Visual Effects Laboratory, and worked for various studios on a freelance basis. He received no screen credit for his work during this period, but several projects are known to bear his handiwork, notably Daiei’s Invisible Man Appears (Tomei ningen arawaru, 1949), one of Japan’s first significant science fiction films. The Skin of the South was produced in the last days of the Occupation, but before those people banished from the studios were allowed to return openly; Tsuburaya’s uncredited involvement has been documented by film historian Hiroshi Takeuchi and others. The landslides during the film’s climax are a preview of the more ambitious disaster scenes Tsuburaya would create in science fiction films years later. There are several brief cutaways to the villagers watching their land wash away, and these appear to be the first-ever scenes combining Tsuburaya’s effects and Honda’s live-action footage.

      ———

      No one influenced the trajectory of Ishiro Honda’s career more than producer Tomoyuki Tanaka. Born into a wealthy Osaka family, Tanaka came from a far different background than Honda; but the two men were close in age and had certain things in common, including the tutelage of studio head Iwao Mori, who had pulled Tanaka from Toho’s literature department and groomed him to be a producer. Tanaka produced a handful of Toho movies before the end of World War II; then, during the Occupation he made the controversial Those Who Make Tomorrow; Senkichi Taniguchi’s debut, Snow Trail; and other projects. In 1948 Tanaka left Toho in protest of the communist purge and spent four years working with the Film Art Association, where he produced the aforementioned Escape at Dawn and other projects. In 1952 Iwao Mori’s banishment by Occupation authorities was over, and Mori returned to Toho, inviting Tanaka to join him. Although in his early forties, Tanaka was still viewed as an up-and-comer. In the years ahead, Tanaka would become one of the studio’s most commercially successful producers through a close alliance with Honda and Tsuburaya, the foundation of which was inconspicuously laid in The Man Who Came to Port (Minato e kita otoko), a film that proved far less than the sum of its substantial parts, including starring turns by Takashi Shimura and Toshiro Mifune.

      “This was the film where I met Tomoyuki Tanaka,” Honda later recalled. “We both had the same type of goal … At this time [he] was really a beginner; many of the producers were much older then. [Projects with] big stars were done more by the upper echelon, but younger producers had to explore new genres. Because of this, younger producers and directors and staff were all working together [and] people started noticing the kinds of things I wanted to do.”¹⁵

      Honda was earning a reputation for his semi-nonfiction style and skill at capturing natural, nonurban settings; so when Tanaka approached the director with a drama about whalers, it seemed an ideal fit. Toho had acquired the book Dance of the Surging Waves (Odore yo Doto) by Shinzo Kajino, a popular writer of maritime fiction, and it had access to more than twenty thousand feet of documentary footage shot by cameramen Hiromitsu Karasawa and Taichi Kankura on actual Japanese whaling expeditions at sea, including a trip to Antarctica.

      At the time, Mori was just beginning to reestablish Toho’s special-effects capabilities, and the studio had recently acquired a rear-screen projection system. Shimura and Mifune play captains of competing whaling vessels, and the idea was to use the rear-screen process to combine the documentary footage in the background with shots of the actors firing a harpoon gun on a soundstage, creating the illusion they were on the bow deck of a whaling vessel. Tsuburaya hadn’t perfected the process yet, thus the results were unconvincing and used sparingly. Honda liberally incorporates actual footage of whales breaching, harpoon guns firing, whales flailing as they’re fatally struck, and cetacean carcasses being towed into harbor; he crosscuts these violent, graphic images of the animals being hunted with actors matter-of-factly pretending to hunt them. Compared to the reverence for the ocean and the view into the world of the ama in The Blue Pearl, this film’s surface treatment of the dangerous life of whalers, who spend most of their time on land, drinking sake, is uninspired. There is no romance of the sea, no worshipping of the mighty, godlike creatures pursued across the hemispheres and, aside from a fleeting reference to a “white whale,” no aspirations to Melvillean adventure. The Man Who Came to Port is a compact soap opera in which the two main rivals just happen to be whalers.

      Set in a small whaling town on Kinkasan Island in Miyagi Prefecture, the story centers on the gruff veteran Capt. Okabe (Shimura). An expert whale gunner and respected seaman, Okabe values tradition and experience above all, but his beliefs are challenged by the arrival of the outsider Ninuma (Mifune), a young, handsome sailor with an urban air, education, and top whale-gunning skills. Sensing his seafaring days waning, Okabe plans to buy the local inn and settle down for retirement, and hopes the innkeeper’s daughter, the much younger Sonoko (Asami Kuji), will marry him. Sonoko, however, is attracted to Ninuma, who suppresses his own feelings and, out of respect for his captain, encourages her to marry Okabe, creating a complicated triangle of hurt feelings. Soon Ninuma becomes captain of another whaling ship, infuriating Okabe, who feels pushed aside for the younger generation. Complicating matters is a rocky reconciliation between Okabe and his illegitimate son, Shingo (Hiroshi Koizumi). In the climax, Okabe foolishly tries to prove himself by hunting whales in a typhoon, but he goes adrift and Ninuma must rescue him. Now friends, the two former rivals leave for a six-month whaling expedition to Antarctica.

      This image has been redacted from the digital edition. Please refer to the print edition to see the image.

      The Man Who Came to Port. © Toho Co., Ltd.

      Though rarely seen today, The Man Who Came to Port was a significant movie for Toho, one of the first projects completed after the studio fully resumed production in 1952 and began to recover from the disastrous effects of the war, the strikes, and the communist purge. This was an A-class picture, evidenced by the personnel in front of and behind the camera. Shimura and Mifune were by now firmly ensconced in Kurosawa’s fold and committed to his projects first and foremost, sandwiching other films in between. Shimura had just finished starring in Kurosawa’s Ikiru (1952), while Mifune was busy working on a number of films after Kurosawa’s The Idiot (1951) and before Seven Samurai (1954), the film that would make both he and Shimura superstars.

      Honda’s direction of the leads is more nuanced than before, as Shimura and Mifune create believably flawed, yet likeable dueling protagonists. Capt. Okabe feels so threatened by young Ninuma’s arrival that he lashes out at his crew when things go wrong, but Shimura also shows the grizzled captain’s other side, a lonely and sensitive older man. While best known in the West for his animalistic fury in Rashomon and Seven Samurai, Mifune in The Man Who Came to Port is typical of the stoic, stalwart heroes he played in studio fare outside Kurosawa’s oeuvre during this phase of his career. As Ninuma hides his emotions, Mifune layers the character with simmering anger that surfaces in drunken outbursts.

      By now Toho had a stable of character actors populating the works of most all the studio’s СКАЧАТЬ