Daily Archives: March 24, 2016

I Will Buy You (Anata kaimasu)
Directed by Masaki Kobayashi
Written by Zenzo Matsuyama; story by Mirnoru Ono
1956/Japan
Shochiku Eiga
First viewing/Hulu

[box] If you have a bad day in baseball, and start thinking about it, you will have 10 more. — Sammy Sosa [/box]

1956 seems to be a crossroads in Japanese cinema with more broadly socially conscious films being made.  Here Kobayashi progresses to the critical stance that would exemplify his later master works.

Goro Kurita is an extremely talented college home-run hitter.  Daisuke Kishimoto is a scout dead-set on sighing Kurita to the professional Tokyo Flowers team.  All the other teams in the league have the same idea.  Kurita is managed to within an inch of his life by the opportunistic Ippei Tamaki.  Tamaki has paid for Kurita’s college education and, at least in his opinion, made him the player he is.  Tamaki is now looking for a big pay off.

The story follows all the bribery and tricks employed by Kishimoto as he attempts to get the deal signed ahead of the other teams employing the same tactics. There are various twists and turns along the way.

If Kobayashi intended this to be a microcosm of Japanese society as a whole, he certainly took a very dim view of it.  I liked this one, especially the ending, which I was not expecting and which made the piece all the more scathing.

Federico Fellini’s La Strada was the winner of the first official Academy Award for Best Foreign-Language Film.  Bela Lugosi died at the age of 73. Grace Kelly married Prince Rainier III of Monaco on April 18 and retired from films.  Montgomery Clift suffered a life-changing incident  following a dinner party at the home of co-star Elizabeth Taylor, when he crashed his car into a telephone pole and incurred broken bones and facial injuries requiring plastic surgery. Afterwards his life slowly declined due to a destructive lifestyle and substance abuse.

Actor/director Dick Powell’s (and RKO’s) The Conqueror was released.  It was shot in Utah in 1954 near a nuclear weapons test site in the Nevada desert . Of The Conqueror’s 220 cast and crew members, 91 contracted cancer by 1980.  It was the last film produced by Howard Hughes and a flop at the box office and with the critics.

Rock Around the Clock featured disc jockey Alan Freed and was the first film entirely dedicated to rock ‘n’ roll.  The first commercially-feasible videotape recorders (with 2 inch tape reels) were sold for $50,000 in 1956. Videotape became a staple of TV productions.

In U.S. news, Dwight D. Eisenhower won a second term as U.S. President. 13-year-old Bobby Fischer beat Grand Master Donald Byrne in the NY Rosenwald chess tournament. “In God We Trust” was made the U.S. national motto.

Andersonville won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.  The Diary of Anne Frank won for drama.  Elvis Presley entered the U.S. charts for the first time with “Heartbreak Hotel”.  The song was the number one hit of the year, spending eight weeks atop the Billboard charts,

Momentarily triumphant Hungarian students

Nikita Khrushchev, then First Secretary of USSR Communist Party, denounced Stalin’s excesses.

October was a big month for international news. The Suez Crisis, also named the Tripartite Aggression and the Kadesh Operation, was an invasion of Egypt in late October 1956 by Israel, followed by the United Kingdom and France. The aims were to reopen the Suez canal, regain Western control of the canal and to remove Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser from power.  After the fighting had started, the United States, the Soviet Union, and the United Nations forced the three invaders to withdraw. The episode humiliated Great Britain and France and strengthened Nasser.

On October 23, the  Hungarian Revolution broke out against the pro-Soviet government, originating as a student demonstration in Budapest.  Hungarian forces drove Soviet troops from Budapest and Hungary attempted to leave the Warsaw Pact.  By the end of the month, Soviet troops had retaken Budapest and decisively put down the revolution.

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For 1956, I plan to organize my viewing a little differently.  To keep the best films spread out more, I will be viewing in a random order rather than starting off with the highest rated films and working roughly downward as currently.  The complete list of films I will select from can be found here.

I have previously reviewed and on this site.

Montage of stills from the Oscar winners

Montage of stills from nominees for major Oscars