Cinematic Distractions...

[dulcedemon]

Street of Shame (Akasen chitai - 1956):
This one has been here before. I've seen it 4-5 times, but I think I've rented it only twice. It's part a group of movies directed by Kenji Mizoguchi referred to as the Fallen Women. In my opinion, it's the best of that group. My second choice would be Osaka Elegy (Naniwa erejî - 1936).
Street of Shame depicts the lives of several women who work in a brothel called Dreamland Salon. There is something subtle done with business names here. Pay close attention. During the day, it's referred to as the Asakusa Café. It's only at night that it becomes the Dreamland Salon. This is due to restrictions various laws aimed at curtailing prostitution have put upon the many brothels operating in the Yoshiwara district of Tokyo. Further legislative attempts, including a total ban on prostitution, provide a backdrop to the personal stories of the women.
Kicking it off is an overview of the Yoshiwara district not long before sunset and the neon signs being lit. This introduction is set to the wild and haunting score of a theremin accompanied by operatic singing. The women are introduced one by one as they arrive and prepare for opening. We learn their names and a quick but crucial snippet of each of their lives.
They are:
Yumeko (Aiko Mimasu) is the oldest of the group. She is a widow with a college student son whom she financially supports but hasn't seen in years. She hopes to live with him someday.
Yasumi (Ayako Wakao) is the number one ranking lady at Dreamland Salon. She is young, beautiful, and business savvy. She leverages her popularity with clients to amass a hefty bankroll. She also acts as a payday lender to the other women. She wants to leave the brothel but on her own terms.
Hanae (Michiyo Kogure) has a husband and a baby. Her husband is sickly and can't work. They are desperately poor and always on the verge of being evicted. Before her employ at the brothel, they had made a failed suicide attempt.
Yorie (Hiroko Machida) is getting too old for the business. She has a tough time bringing in clients and relies heavily on a few regulars to supply her income. She has a shoemaker boyfriend whom she hopes to marry.
Mickey (Machiko Kyô) is a delinquent young woman brought in by a recruiter. She is brash and beautiful. Her flashy attire and aggressive pursuit of clients causes quite a stir. It's all fun and games until her father comes looking for her.
All of these women are deeply in debt. Debt is what brought them there, and debt is what keeps them there. All but Mickey wish they could quit the business. A few of them try. Only one of them truly succeeds. Their bosses are both the solution and source of their problems. They are paid just enough to keep making payments on their bills, not enough to get comfortable, and nowhere near enough to leave. Yet without the brothel, some of them would be dead.
In the end, the proposed legislation to ban prostitution fails to pass. The movie closes out with the unbearably sad sequence of a much too young girl being prepared for her first night as a prostitute. Her name is Shizuko (Yasuko Kawakami). Her father was coal miner until he was injured too badly to work. In the final moments, she hides in the doorway afraid to go out into the street and hustle for clients. She timidly peeks around the corner. There is terror in her eyes and her voice trembles as she tries to get the attention of passersby.
An interesting thing about age in this movie is that although the characters display a wide range, a few of them are quite close in age. In fact, Machiko Kyô who plays Mickey, and Hiroko Machida who plays Yorie were both born in 1924. The plot skillfully switches back and forth from individual to ensemble in telling the personal stories of each of the women, the women as a group, and also the business as a whole.

Onibaba (1964):
Ah! Lust and squalor in the susuki grass. This one of two movies that I received as a gift back in December.
Susuki Grass: AKA: Eulalia; Maiden Grass: Miscanthus sinensis: https://plants.ces.ncsu.edu/plants/miscanthus-sinensis/
One way to describe Onibaba would be mother-in-law from Hell. Civil war ravages the land in fourteenth century Japan. A mother (Nobuko Otowa) and her daughter-in-law (Jitsuko Yoshimura) await the return of their loved one, Kichi, from battle only to receive news of his death.
The unhappy news is delivered by his friend and fellow conscripted soldier, Hachi (Kei Satô), who has had the good fortune of returning home alive. His account of how he escaped death while Kichi was killed is a bit sketchy, but the truth is never known. Famished and exhausted Hachi takes notice that the two women have food and seem to be surviving comfortably in spite of the harsh circumstances and dangers that come with living in proximity to a battlefield. He guesses, quite correctly, that they've been stealing, but he doesn't guess how or what.
The field of Susuki grass where their huts are located is tall and thick. It rustles in the slightest breeze. Its restless murmuring permeates the surroundings. It stirs. It beckons. It obscures both love and death.
Errant samurai whose battles spill over into the grass sometimes disappear never to be seen again. The two women have been surviving by selling the weapons and armor of those samurai. They use the items to purchase millet and other provisions from an old man in a nearby cave.
That old man, Ushi (Taiji Tonoyama), runs a sort of blacksmith and general store operation out of a cave. He propositions Kichi's mother, offering her extra provisions in exchange. She refuses his offer. It's made clear that other women from the area have been obliging him.
Hachi steadily works at ingratiating himself with the two women. He propositions Kichi's widow. Initially, she turns him down, but later changes her mind, which upsets her mother-in-law.
The mother-in-law tries to persuade the young widow to ignore him. When that fails, she pays Hachi a visit at his hut, where she threatens him in more ways than one. It comes very close to being a rape scene. Hachi rejects her aggressive advance and insults her. It's an unfortunate choice. She storms off more determined than ever to keep her daughter-in-law away from him. It does and doesn't work. The young woman sneaks out after her mother-in-law falls asleep.
One night, while the lovers are away together, Kichi's mother is surprised by a samurai in a demon mask. His armor is very fine. He is lost and needs someone to guide him across the field. It goes well until Kichi's mother asks to see his face. He refuses and insults her. His armor fetches a good price, but she keeps the mask for herself. She uses the ill-gotten mask to disguise herself as a demon in order to scare her daughter-in-law. Without giving away the ending, I'll just say that she really grows into the role.
The interesting thing about the styling of the mother-in-law character is that her make-up gets more and more dramatic as the story progresses. She starts out completely normal. By the time she obtains the mask, she is already pretty demonic looking.
In the DVD extras, there is an interview with director Kaneto Shindô. I can't help but wonder if there was a mistranslation when he described the mother-in-law as an old woman losing her sexual desire. Her age? 45! If not, then perhaps he was trying to politely avoid saying that she had lost her desirability. It makes no sense to say that she has lost her desire for sex, when she practically pounces on poor Hachi, and in another scene, she humps a dead tree. Her desire seemed pretty strong to me.

Bob le Flambeur (1956):
This is the fourth movie directed by Jean-Pierre Melville that I've seen. I liked it, but it's not a favorite. I thought it was kind of dry, and I found a certain crucial moment hard to believe.
The titular Bob (Roger Duchesne) says he works for the Ministry of Agriculture, but he seems to spend all his time gambling at various legal and illegal casinos in the Montmartre district of Paris, France. He keeps a fairly posh apartment above a café. His losses greatly outpace his wins, even the slot machine in his closet denies him satisfaction. When not gambling, he hangs out with his young protégé, Paulo (Daniel Cauchy).
One day, Bob is approached for a small loan by a local pimp who needs to get out of town to avoid arrest. Bob is amiable until he learns that the pimp is wanted by police for beating a woman so badly that she had to be hospitalized. Later, Bob tries to rescue another young woman from falling into that same pimp's clutches. This how we meet Anna (Isabelle Corey). Bob is clearly enamored with her even though he is easily old enough to be her father. Paulo takes an immediate liking to her too.
Bob lets her stay in his apartment from time to time. In her first scene in the apartment, the way it's filmed is very eyes at and on the level of her braless bosom. It's as if the world is revolving around her breasts. Anna and Paulo get romantically involved, but he is more into her than she is into him. Her fickle attitude causes problems later.
Awash in gambling debt, Bob and a few of his associates hatch a plan for a casino heist. They meticulously plan. They enlist help and a financial backer to payroll that help. They recruit insiders at the casino. They obtain the same model safe used in the casino, and they practice, practice, and practice cracking it open.
FYI: Safecracking practice begins at 55:11. I have picked a few locks, but I've never tried a safe. This scene left me with a lot of questions. The main one being: What does an oscilloscope have to do with it? I guess they're doing some kind of signal analysis. Anyway, it's an interesting scene, but I don't know enough about safecracking to vouch for its accuracy.
The time for the big heist arrives, and almost everyone and everything is in place. It all would have gone off without a hitch were it not for the following factors:
1) Loose lips in bed
2) A couple of snitches
3) Bob wins big
I liked how it showed the heist as it was supposed to go according to Bob's plan, then followed that with how it really went.
Extras on the DVD include an interview with Daniel Cauchy from 2002, and a radio interview with Melville himself from the 1961 Venice Film Fest. That latter interview was done for a program called "Film Art", which was broadcast on WBAI in New York. A good portion of the Daniel Cauchy interview is devoted to fondly reminiscing about how Melville was a huge slut who cheated on his wife with just about every actress he ever put in a movie, including Isabelle Corey.

Four Frightened People (1934):
"On a tramp steamer perspiring down the Malayan coast..."
(Actually, it was filmed in Hawaii.)
This relatively short action-adventure picture was directed by none other than Cecil B. DeMille.
It begins with cutesy introductions of the cast of characters. What follows is my version of that.
Starring William Gargan as Stewart Corder, a reporter and radio personality who thinks he is God's gift to everyone. Starring Mary Boland as Mrs. Mardick, a wealthy socialite with a white-savior complex fixated on the reproductive rates of native populations. Starring Herbert Marshall as Arnold Granger, a rubber industry chemist who is married to a woman who looks old enough to be his mother, and also, her mother. Starring Claudette Colbert as Judy Jones, a prim and proper geography teacher from the Midwest. With special guests: Claudette Colbert's ass-crack, that ever popular duo sexism and racism, Leo Carillo clad in not much more than a necktie, and a monkey wearing high heels.
Four people (but only three of them voluntarily) jump ship from an exotic pleasure cruise after learning of a bubonic plague outbreak onboard. They steal away in a lifeboat, taking their chances on the water and in the jungle as they try to make their way back to civilization. None of it goes as they had hoped.
They hook up with the whitest, "best English make", necktie wearing, native guide from the first village they encounter, which is in the process of being burned to the ground to stop a cholera outbreak. That guide is Montague played by Leo Carillo. He leads them into the jungle where they quickly get lost.
They are soon found by another native tribe which takes the socialite hostage. Their chief promises to release her unharmed if they receive the equivalent of her weight in rice within a month. The others trudge on through mishaps and perils until they begin to lose hope of ever getting home.
Along the way, the geography teacher loses her glasses, lets her hair down, and fashions herself some hot jungle-goddess garb. A romantic rivalry ensues with the more unlikely of the men coming out the winner. They finally make their way to a coastal town at the edge of the jungle only to find themselves conflicted about returning to the lives they had left behind.
While I haven't seen all of her movies, this is probably as close to seeing Claudette Colbert naked as it gets. One thing that bothered me was the lack of a sense of the passage of time. Going by Claudette Colbert's many outfit changes, it seems like they are lost and living in jungle for months, yet at the end, it's clear that they've made it back in time to rescue the socialite.
On an interesting side note, this could be the earliest on-screen instance of the adage, "It's not the heat; it's the humidity."
Also notable is the NRA logo and slogan "We do our part." at the top of the opening credits. NRA in this case stands for National Recovery Administration, not to be confused with National Rifle Association. Read more about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Recovery_Administration