Nishi Ginza Station
Director: Shohei Imamura
Year: 1958
Rating: 5.0
This is only the second film from Shohei
Imamura and there is no indication that I noticed that would foretell his
later experimental edgy films as part of the Japanese New Wave. Earlier he
has assisted Ozu on a few of his films but I don't see much of that here
either. This only runs 52 minutes produced by Nikkatsu and I expect it was
a second feature. It is clearly influenced by The Seven Year Itch (1955)
but it is a very mild version of it and has no one quite equivalent to Marilyn
Monroe. In neither case does the husband get laid. Moral values win out.
Happiness does not.
The narrator who pops up as different characters
from time to time is Frank Nagai, a very popular singer and he does a bit
here. He speaks to the camera and sets up the story. Oyama (Shin'ichi Yanagisawa)
is the mentally beaten down husband of a wife who controls his life - when
to take pills, when to do everything. She runs the pharmacy and has two children
- the young boy is played by Masahiko Shimazu, who managed to get himself
into a number of famous films as a child actor - Good Morning, Floating Weeds,
Late Autumn, Killers on Parade, The End of Summer and High and Low. The wife
goes off for two days with the children leaving Oyama on his own and his
friend (Ko Nishimura - the bad guy in so many samurai films) persuades him
to be foot loose and fancy free. He tries but fate and a typhoon keep him
from going where he wants to. Mildly amusing at times but hard to see the
point of the film. He does paint a bleak picture of the modern Japanese man
- either out chasing women in bars or under the foot of their wives - but
it has very little zip to it.