Seen: Saturday, April 12, 2008
The Gene Siskel Film Center had a wonderful, rare series of Japanese Nikkatsu action movies screening back in April. All of them were shown with "soft" subtitles in which a translator advances each English translation by hand for the entire duration of the movie (no small feat); and none had been previously screened on film in the United States (perhaps, even, North America, though my memory can't confirm that). The first I caught was Koreyoshi Kurahara's The Warped Ones (1960), a story of the highly distressed emotions of its characters, teenagers, giving a veritable middle finger to Japanese societal norms. While on the other side of the globe Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello where playing Beach Blanket Bingo (1965) with a soda-pop sugar buzz, The Warped Ones were less covert about sexual tensions--a sublimation of Japan's post-war disillusionment at large--showing one of the most terrifying and graphic rape scenes to date. The girl lays helpless on the ground in the openness of the noontime sun, while her predator surveys her body, gloating with power. Though the movie is not something you'll return to again and again for fun (it is certainly not a "fun" movie to experience), it has a solid set of merits: its sharply contrasted black and white photography and raw performances from its actors, both of which work together to illustrate the bigger talking point of the film, the quiet frustration of Japan's strength nearly twenty years out from the end of the war. It shares the moodiness and look of American B-noir films from the '40s, and even something more artistically conscious, like Orson Welles' Touch of Evil (1958). It was a lucky peek at one of the rarest pictures to tour through Chicago.
No comments:
Post a Comment