Flickers in Time

The Most Beautiful (Ichiban utsukushiku)
Directed by Akira Kurosawa
Written by Akira Kurosawa
1944/Japan
Toho Company
First viewing/Hulu Plus

[box] Being an artist means not having to avert one’s eyes. — Akira Kurosawa[/box]

Kurosawa makes a propaganda movie with a 90% female cast.

A factory making precision optics for the military relies on teams of female workers that live in dormitories, supervised by house mothers and urged on by shrines to their far off parents and patriotic marching band rehearsals.  The story starts when the government imposes a new emergency quota.  The factory director (Takashi Shimura, Seven Samurai, Ikiru) makes an impassioned speech telling the workers that productivity is only achieved through personal spiritual perfection.

The ladies are assigned 50% of the output required by the men.  They feel slighted and vow to produce 2/3 of what the men do.  It’s not easy as one girl after another is waylaid by illness, injury, or death in the family and exhaustion and cold saps their stength.  For dramatic tension we get the ongoing saga of one girl who disguises her nightly fever so she can continue to work and the frantic search of the team leader for a bomb sight she failed to calibrate when she was called off to settle an argument between two of the girls.

Kurosawa is definitely not at his best when working under the direction of others nor has he ever been particularly adept at female characterizations.  It was not much of a surprise, therefore, that this is a pretty weak effort.  The director himself retained a special fondness for the film, though, as it was here that he met his wife of 40 years Yoko Yuguchi, who plays the house mother.

Army (Rikugun)
Directed by Keisuke Kinoshita
Shôhei Hino and Tadao Ikeda
1944/Japan
Shochiku Ofuna
First viewing/Hulu Plus

[box] “Summer grasses,

All that remains

Of soldiers’ dreams”

― Matsuo Bashō[/box]

A film about soldiers without killing, a film about war without fighting, and propaganda undercut by the most profound sadness.

The Takagis have an ancient history as warriors.  However, starting with the Russo-Japanese war, its soldiers have not seen combat for one reason or another.  Tomosuke Takagi (Chishu Ryu) was too sick to see action.  He is determined that his son Tomonogo will redeem the family honor.  The boy has the teachings of the Emperor (basically the samurai code of bushido) drummed into him since childhood.  Initially, however, the boy is a gentle child with rather effeminate traits.  He is the despair of his father and his mother Waka (Kinuyu Tanaka, Oharu, Ugetsu, Sansho the Baliff),  Eventually his parent’s careful training results in a fine young man who distinguishes himself in the army.  When he finally goes to war, his mother declines to see him off, saying she has already given him to the emperor.

Then a remarkable thing happens.  After an hour of propaganda stressing the nobility of war, the duty of Japan’s warriors and people, evil of the Americans, British, and Chinese, and the glory of dying on the field of battle, the mood suddenly shifts.  Waka cannot resist getting one final glimpse of her boy,  We follow Waka as she struggles with her emotions and then takes off running in search of her son among the great mass of marching soldiers.  This is a lovely long wordless tracking shot and heartbreakingly acted.  It is worth watching the movie just for this beautiful sequence.

Clip (final sequence – music not in original)

A Canterbury Tale
Written and Directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger
1944/UK
The Archers/Independent Producers
First viewing/Netflix rental

Thomas Colpeper, JP: Well, there are more ways than one of getting close to your ancestors. Follow the old road, and as you walk, think of them and of the old England. They climbed Chillingbourne Hill, just as you. They sweated and paused for breath just as you did today. And when you see the bluebells in the spring and the wild thyme, and the broom and the heather, you’re only seeing what their eyes saw. 

Powell and Pressburger made a haunting and magical film about young people starting out life in wartime from a very odd detective story involving the identity of the “Glue Man”.

The film begins with a short prelude featuring pilgrims to Canterbury in Chaucer’s time.

Three young people get off a train at Chillingbourne, a small Kentish town which is the stop before Canterbury.  Two of them intended to – Sgt. Peter Gibbs (Dennis Price, Kind Hearts and Coronets), who is getting ready to be shipped overseas from the local military base, and Alison Smith (Sheila Sim), who has come as part of the Women’s Land Army to work on the farm of Thomas Colpeper (oft-time Nazi Eric Portman, The 49th Parallel).  Sgt. Bob Johnson (non-actor Sgt. John Sweet) of the American Army was actually headed for Canterbury on leave but jumped the gun at the wrong stop.  He is now stuck in Chillingbourne until the next morning.  They are told that they must report to Colpeper, the local magistrate, before going to a local inn for the night.

In the darkness, Alison is almost immediately attacked by a man in uniform who pours glue on her hair.  He is the notorious Glue Man, and has struck ten times before.  When they arrive to meet Culpeper, he is affable but refuses to keep Alison to work on his farm, not considering a woman to be farm labor.  Peter is off to the base but Bob stays on in a room in which Elizabeth I once slept and Alison is boarded at the same inn.  Alison is hired for the farm of the manageress of the inn.  Having nothing a lot better to do, Bob agrees to stay on for the day and help Alison with her investigation of the Glue Man.  He proves to be a dogged detective.  The investigation runs through the length of the film.

The actual theme develops from the back stories of these people and their interaction with the beautiful and ancient landscape.  Alison camped in a caravan near the village with her archeologist fiancé three years earlier.  He became a pilot and went missing with his airplane.  Alison has an almost mystical connection to the place.  Bob is a fish out of water, who is heartbroken over his failure to get any mail from his girl, but is like a sponge absorbing everything about his surroundings.  Peter is a sophisticated Londoner who has little use for the countryside.  He was an academically trained organist who could find work only in a cinema before the war.  Thomas Culpeper is also the town magistrate and rides circuit trying cases.  He is also a history buff, outdoor enthusiast, and philosopher who lectures servicemen about the area. Culpeper and Alison have a natural sympathy.  It is not spoiling anything to say he is the prime suspect in the “Glue Man” case.

One day, the trajectory of all these people puts them on the train to Canterbury.  Peter is on the way to turn Culpeper in to the police.  The three share a compartment with Culpeper.  He tells them pilgrims went to Canterbury to get blessings or do penance.  All our young people are profoundly changed by their brief stay in the cathedral town.

It is incredibly refreshing to see a film involving young men and women who have an agenda outside their love lives.  They are all struggling in a some way to come to grips with the war and with their own coming of age.

This is like a love letter to Britain.  It is exquisitely filmed.  The shots of the interior of the cathedral, which were all made in the studio, are breathtaking.  The countryside scenes are also achingly beautiful.  With the exception of John Sweet, who can charitably be described as earnest but somehow moving, the acting is superb.  Most of all I appreciated the mood of the thing.  The ending sequence gave me the chills.

Sweet’s acting is one of this films few drawbacks, though I came to like him.  (Burgess Meredith had been picked for the part but was injured.)  Some viewers might also have a problem with the very strange resolution of the detective story.  At any rate, I urge anyone who has not seen this to give it a chance.

Clip