Kiri to kage / 霧と影 (‘Fog and Shadow’, 1961)

Obscure Japanese Film #182

Tetsuro Tanba
 

When Kasahara, a teacher from the local school is found dead atthe bottom of a cliff on the Noto Peninsula, it’s assumed that he eitherslipped or committed suicide. However, his old friend Komiya (Tetsuro Tanba),who works as a reporter in Tokyo, smells a rat – he knows that Kasahara wasafraid of heights, so he decides to investigate. In the process, he uncovers acomplex (but not terribly interesting) web of conspiracy and corruption…

 

 

This Toei production features the type of story more usuallyassociated with Seicho Matsumoto, but which in this case is actually based on a1959 novel of the same name by Tsutomu Minakami (or Mizukami), known for Bamboo Dolls of Echizen, The Temple of Wild Geese, and Straits of Hunger among others. TheMatsumoto resemblance is no coincidence as Minakami himself said that he hadbeen inspired to write the book after reading Matsumoto’s Points and Lines (also known in English as Tokyo Express). It was Minakami’s first big success as a writer,and he soon proved that he was more than a mere Matsumoto imitator. Accordingto Japanese Wikipedia, a critic named Kazushi Shinoda admired Kiri to kage for portraying the ‘anguishof a man cursed by fate, and the depth of the karma of a man who tries toescape his fate but ultimately cannot’.

 

 

It’s a pity, then, that this aspect of the work is absent fromTeruo Ishii’s film, which is strictly B-movie stuff. It has been said thatIshii repeatedly attempted to make Naruse-like dramas early in his career, butthese projects were all rejected. He later became a cult director, perhapsmainly due to his willingness to make exploitation films with titles such as Horrors of Malformed Men and Inferno of Torture.  Kiri tokage is well-shot but largely routine apart from the odd eccentric touchsuch as giving one of Komiya’s fellow reporters the gross habit of picking hisnose with his pencil. 

 

 

Despite a reputation for turning up late on set without havinglearned his lines (and often using cue cards), Tetsuro Tanba was a fine actor, but theearly leading role he gets here is the type in which the main thing the actor has to do is simply to find adifferent way to look surprised each time they receive new information. Theremainder of the cast are not especially notable, and Chuji Kinoshita’sunsubtle music score does not help matters either, so I have to mark this onedown as another disappointment. If it’s karmic anguish you’re after, watch TomuUchida’s adaptation of Minakami’s Straitsof Hunger (better-known in English as AFugitive from the Past) instead.

Watched with dodgy subtitles (I auto-translated from Japanese). 

Amazon Japan (no English subtitles)