The House of Hanging
Director: Kon Ichikawa
Year: 1979
Rating: 7.0
You get bonus points if you can watch this
film and then tell me the relationships between all the characters. This
is the fifth in the series of Kosuke Kindaichi films from director Kon Ichikawa
and starring Koji Ishizaka. These are all adaptations from the mysteries
of Seishi Yokomizo, who wrote over 70 of these Kindaichi novels. They are
hugely popular but only a couple have been translated into English. From
the two films I have now seen (The Inugami Family being the other) and the
one book I have (The Honjin Murders) it seems that he relishes complex plots
that involve a lot of characters, twists and turns and a family of privilege
that is waist deep in moral corruption tied to fate and the past. This one
is like trying to untangle a large plate of spaghetti with cheese on top
strand by strand. It is filled to the brim with incest, murder, bribery and
an array of characters all with secrets. If you watch this, you may want
to have a note pad handy.
There are shaggy dog stories - which at
135 minutes this inches towards - but here we have a shaggy dog detective
in Kindaichi who has a mop of unruly hair sitting on his head like a missing
bird's nest, an often blank zoned out expression and a nonchalant attitude
as he just strolls around listening in on conversations unless he is running
towards a clue. Somewhere inside his head though he is connecting all the
dots to solve a murder or in this case a few - I already forget how many.
And not just your run of the mill murders but ones that involve cutting their
heads off or setting deadly traps. Kindaichi is visiting an older author
friend who has used Kindaichi as the model in his detective books. He is
played by none other than Seishi Yokomizo, who had also been the inn keeper
in The Inugami Family. Kindaichi is planning to go to America and needs a
photo for his passport. This puts him in play for the murders that follow.
He goes to an old-fashioned photo shop
run by a father and son. The father says that he suspects someone is trying
to kill him and hires the detective to find out who. At the same time a lovely
girl (Junko Sakurada) asks the son that she needs him to take a photo of
a wedding. It turns out to be in a deserted house - what the town calls The
House of Hanging where a woman hung herself a few years before. There are
only two people at this wedding - a couple more than a little creepy but
he takes the photo and leaves. When he returns with the photo the next day
he finds the head of the man hanging from wind chimes. It gets very confusing
as Kindaichi digs into the past and uncovers all the secrets that people
want hid. It is a bit slow but the final declamation in which he reveals
everything is pretty good.
Kon Ichikawa covered a lot of turf. There
are of course the classics - The Burmese Harp, Fire on the Plains, An Actors
Revenge, Tokyo Olympiad - but he also made a number of comedies and seemed
to have a love for mysteries. Not only these but a number of his films were
mysteries. He even made two more Seishi Yokomizo novels into films - The
8-Tomb Village in 1998 (which had been made as well in 1977 as Village of
Eight Gravestones directed by Yoshitarô Nomura) and a remake of The
Inugami Family in 2006 - his final film and amazingly starring Koji Ishizaka,
some 30 years after his other portrayals of Kindaichi.
