Her husband, Ryokichi (Eitaro Ozawa), is a professor. He has married the beautiful and much-younger Ayako for sex and the thrill of domination; she in turn married him for money and security. Many Japanese movies are about wretched marriages, but this one is a standout. Ryo’s abuse increases as he sees he has failed to break his wife, though he keeps trying. When I was young, a friend’s mother liked to repeat an old saw: “Marry for money, and you’ll work for the rest of your life.” That fate is exactly what Ayako fears, as the ghastly Ryo taunts her that he’ll never give her children and never grant a divorce. By the movie’s midpoint, the audience (it couldn’t have been just me) is just about ready to cut the rope themselves.
The fact that she’s on trial for seizing a theoretically legal chance to get rid of this ogre is the point. Ayako, it seems, is really accused of failing to do the right thing in her society, which would be dying along with her husband. (The prosecutor says so in nearly so many words.) But as filmed by Masumura, she isn’t passive, isn’t a victim. Ayako can be angry, vindictive, even conniving. Masumura understands that you don’t have to be “nice” to be stuck in a terrible situation, and in particular, he understands that about women.
One of his earliest jobs was as an assistant to Mizoguchi on films including Princess Yang Kwei-fei and Street of Shame. The latter features Wakao as Yasumi, a sex worker who loan-sharks her brothel colleagues, and perhaps it was something in Yasumi’s proud ruthlessness that made Masumura realize Wakao fit right into his world. But Mizoguchi’s oppressed, virtuous women have little in common with those in a Masumura movie. He seems to relish his characters’ defects, their consistently lousy decisions.
Black Test Car (1962) is an even harsher look at deeply flawed people, with male competitiveness taken to warlike extremes in a corporate environment. The “Pioneer” prototype of the title shows up at the start covered in a literal black shroud, its design so secret that it’s covered even during an ultimately disastrous trial run. The Tiger Motorcar Company is staking its entire future on the Pioneer sports car, and its head of corporate security, Toru Onoda (Hideo Takamatsu), is maniacally focused on keeping the design away from rival Yamato Company, led by the even more unscrupulous Matawari (Ichiro Sugai), who learned his craft working for Japanese wartime intelligence. Onoda and his assistant Asahina (Jiro Tamiya) soon realize there is a mole at Tiger, and they must root out this “traitor” lest Yamato’s “MyPet” car conquer the market before the Pioneer can even gain a toehold.
Printers are bribed for blueprints, outsiders are paid to fake safety flaws, and Tiger even hires a lip-reader to camp out in a neighboring building and decode what’s said at Yamato’s meetings. Asahina goes so far as to ask his fiancée, bar hostess Masako (Junko Kano), to sleep with Matawari and steal the pricing formula for the MyPet. It’s not just to help his career, Asahina argues, in a scene that drew appreciative hoots at Karlovy Vary for the man’s sheer unbridled nerve. If he gets a promotion, Masako can quit her job and they can be married sooner. She’s appalled—but she still goes through with the scheme.
Masumura famously disliked close-ups, calling them a way for actors to preen and claiming he never used them, but otherwise his visual vocabulary was brilliantly flexible, able to vary as much as his stories. “Some believe more in the image, others believe in the story,” he stated in one interview. “Personally I believe in the story. Because images aren’t absolute, one can’t express everything with them.” So, for example, the stark melodrama A Wife Confesses is framed and blocked with a steely focus and precision, punctuated by emptiness that seems almost to push Ayako around as much as her hateful husband. But Black Test Car’s punchy, staccato scenes often unfold at an angle seemingly just to the side or over our heads, as though we’re craning our necks, crammed along with the characters into these bare, uniform spaces.
The connection between these corporate spy games and those played by opposing armies is made quite clear in Black Test Car; as Rosenbaum puts it, the director “sees a continuity between wartime madness and peacetime madness.” Masumura works in vivid strokes to convey the violence and conformity of Imperial Japan. His own feelings about this can be deduced from a 1969 Cahiers du cinémainterview, in which the director said he’d like to film Shusaku Endo’s 1957 novella The Sea and Poison—a horrifying tale involving medical experimentation on American POWs. But as with other postwar Japanese directors, there is little explicit depiction of the country’s war crimes. For example, in the brilliant Red Angel (1966), Ayako Wakao has another bravura role as Sakura, a nurse in wartime Manchuria, where the Imperial Army committed crimes of shocking brutality. Yet when a soldier is brought in, near death from the torture he’s suffered, the soldier is Japanese, and the torture was inflicted by the opposing army.
Still, whatever political points Masumura could not or would not include explicitly, he conveys in other ways. In Red Angel he does so mostly in the character of Okabe (Shinsuke Asida), the impotent, morphine-addicted doctor Sakura falls in love with. Okabe knows the war has no point—that in fact it never did. Not only can Okabe not save his patients, even if he does they will be kept from returning home, for fear their missing limbs and shattered psyches will hurt civilian morale. In this world, drugs and sex are the sole means of keeping the horrors at bay, with Sakura giving in to the pleas of an armless soldier for oral sex—only for the man to kill himself afterward.
