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.
