Daily Archives: April 5, 2016

Izumi (Fountainhead)
Directed by Masaki Kobayashi
Written by Zenzô Matsuyama from a story by Kunio Kishida
1956/Japan
Shôchiku Eiga
First viewing/Hulu

Water is the driving force of all nature. — Leonardo da Vinci

This movie demonstrates that love triangles can be just as tedious in Japanese as they are in English.  Pity.

I don’t have the character names in front of me.  This botany student goes with his professor to study plants in the mountains.  While there he witnesses the water war going on between some farmers who would like to improve their rice fields and a villa owner on whose property lies the only reservoir.  The student decides he will search for an additional water source.

We spend almost all our time on a second story, however.  The student falls for the villa owner’s beautiful secretary.  The owner is also taken with her.  The secretary can’t make up her mind.  In the meantime, a waiflike girl who met the student one time in a garden two years ago can’t forget him.  His friends try to make a match between the pair but the student is not interested.  We fumble around inconclusively for the next one and a half hours.

Kobayashi is one of my favorite directors.  He had a dud script on his hands.  At no time did I care who the characters ended up with.  Most of the time I was baffled by their actions.  I kept waiting for the water feud and the corrupt businessmen who wanted to turn the villa into a hotel to come back into the picture.  That could have made an interesting movie.

Earth vs. the Flying Saucers
Directed by Fred Sears
Written by Curt Siodmak, George Worthing Yeats, and Bernard Gordon from a book by Donald E. Keyhoe
1956/USA
Columbia Pictures Corporation/Clover Productions
First viewing/Netflix rental

[box] Gen. Edmunds: When an armed and threatening power lands uninvited in our capitol, we don’t meet him with tea and cookies![/box]

Ray Harryhausen’s special effects lift this B space invasion movie over the average 50’s fair.

Dr. Russell A. Marvin (Hugh Marlowe) is a rocket scientist.  He has just married his secretary Carol, who happens to be the daughter of the General commanding the space program.  They are rushing to a rocket launch when they see flying saucers.  At the beginning, they can hardly convince anyone of this but then the General steps into say that all previous rockets launched by the program have either crash landed or disappeared into the sea.

It turns out that the aliens were trying to communicate with Marvin via a continuous motion translation machine but their timing was off so the words came out really fast and sounding like spaceship noise.  Anyway, they capture the General and finally persuade the Marvins to talk with them.  They drained all knowledge from the General’s brain and attempt to demonstrate the futility of trying to prevent the takeover of earth.  They instruct Russell to order the leaders of the world to gather in Washington DC.

The U.S. Army is not to take this challenge lying down and race to develop “magnitizers” and “solidified electricity” to defeat the enemy.

There is little to differentiate this movie from dozens of similarly themed movies of the 50’s. Little that is except for Ray Harryhausen’s awesome stop motion special effects.  The final scenes of the saucer attacks on Washington landmarks are pretty thrilling, especially when you think how many moving parts he had in play.  There’s also a  cool alien hidden under those blank robot looking shells.

Trailer