Giants and Toys

A Japanese salary-man is coughing up blood due to overwork.  His subordinate says that he wants to escape the mad pace of life in the Tokyo business world: "I will live like a human being," the subordinate proclaims.  "Are you kidding?" his boss says, "this is Japan."  Yasuza Masumara's comedy Giants and Toys (1958) explores the application of the samurai or Bushido code to business, specifically the candy industry. The film is an acerbic indictment of the anything goes morality of Japanese industry.  And, it's more than a little crazed in itself with wild montages cut to the rhythm of a man flicking a cigarette lighter, images multiplying wildly, and bizarre characters, including fashion-photographer who fancies himself an heir to Lord Byron.  Nothing, the film seems to propose, can be more weird and surrealistic than a Japanese ad campaign and the film luxuriates in images of commerce gone completely rogue.  The picture's sardonic vision of Japanese business and advertising is directed with a ferocious attack that seems like  combination of Billy Wilder and Frank Tashlin.

The premise in Giants and Toys is simple enough.  Three competing companies manufacture caramel candies.  These firms are World, occupying a low skyscraper surmounted by gimcrack planet, Giant, and Apollo.  All three firms are perplexed and fearful that they are losing market share because an American candy manufacturer has invaded their territory with caramels that somehow change taste as you suck on them.  These leads the marketing departments of the three competitors to work feverishly to implement advertising campaigns to rescue their products.  (It doesn't seem to occur to anyone to make a better product -- the idea is to seduce the public into buying caramels on the basis of gaudy advertising campaigns.)  At World, Mr. Goda has risen to the head of marketing because of his marriage to the boss' daughter -- this advantage just makes him work even harder and more frenetically.  Goda' sidekick and lieutenant is Nishi, an earnest young man looking to get ahead.  Goda sights a girl in a bar who seems well-suited to pitch World's caramels.  This is Kyoku, who is said to look like a monkey -- she has rotten teeth, a tribute to her love of caramels.  Nishi and Goda hire the girl (she works for a cab company) and make her into a media star -- Haramura, a fashion photographer, features her in a Manga spread and the public is enthralled by the persona that the company creates for her.  (The aspect of the film is similar to My Fair Lady -- the two ad-men, like Pygmalian, create a sex-star out of the improbably plain and impoverished Kyoku; but their Galatea turns out to be impossible to control.)  Meanwhile Giant promotes an ad campaign featuring a real giant who gives away product from his giant-mobile and loyalty prizes for customers that include small animals.  Apollo's advertising staff, including a woman who is Nishi's girlfriend, promote the candy through a competition offering a "subsidized life from cradle to wedding."  Giant's ad-man is a college buddy of Nishi.  Nishi, Masami Kurahashi (the girl at Apollo) and Yokogama (Nishi's school chum) all get together from time to time to gossip and drink.  But, in fact, everyone is engaged in industrial espionage -- everyone is spying on everyone else.  Ultimately, the caramel factory owned by Apollo burns down.  Far from lessening the competition, this just drives World and Giant into even more destructive and fierce competition -- it now seems possible to corner the market.  Kyoku, who has become intractable, gets her teeth fixed and returns to the market as a refined lady -- she's now too dignified to pitch caramels.  Instead, she appears in a lavish song-and-dance review, shrieking like Ima Sumac and hurling herself around half-naked -- her cabaret dance involves a "native woman" who saw blood spilling from a wounded man and, then, became possessed by the God of Death.  World can't get her to appear at the Space Expo -- World's theme has been outer-space and Kyoku has made most of her appearances wearing a space suit and carrying a ray gun.  Goda is going to don the space suit and carry the ray gun to the Expo but he collapses spitting blood from overwork.  Nishi goes in his place and the film's last scene shows him dressed idiotically as a space-man strolling down a neon-lit street in Edo, his ray gun making a clicking sound when he fires it. 

There's a lot of sound and fury in this film.  Kyoku's dance number is way over-the-top and there is other music that features wailing saxophones and people howling barbarically to the sound of tribal drums.  In one sequence, an aerial shot shows white-robed rioters -- the idea is that people can eat caramels while demonstrating in the street.  The women are all horny and demand sex from the men who are too tired to accommodate them.  At one point, the subtitles quotes Andy Warhol -- someone says that Kyoku has had her "fifteen minutes of fame".   Except, of course, Warhol's statement to that effect was made in the 1960's and this film was premiered in 1958.  A lot of the picture is astonishing.  The idea that the film promotes is that Japanese commerce is driven by a misplaced zeal -- the Bushido spirit creates chaos, wild Banzai charges in all directions.  At one point, Mr. Goda says that he stands for the "dictatorship of publicity" -- caramels and advertising circuses have so degraded the sensibility of the public that almost nothing excites them anymore. This leads to a self-destructive publicity spiral -- with each agency aiming to top the other with regard to vehemence of its advertising.  The film is convincingly weird.  Michelangelo Antonioni is said to have clambered out of his death bed to attend a ten-film retrospective of Masumaru's films and this picture certainly suggests the director as a figure requiring further study.