Red Angel

Japanese war films, of course, have a different orientation from pictures made in this genre in Hollywood.  A Hollywood war movie, often, laments the destruction of handsome and courageous young men -- war is tragic because it destroys human capital of high value.  Since Americans see their wars as just and, even, inevitable, the pity is that achieving victory has such a high cost. (This is the burden of Spielberg's execrable Saving Private Ryan.)  From the losing side, Japanese war films focus an something more unsettling:  war turns men into animals and so the creatures that are slaughtered on the battlefield aren't even human any more.  By the time, the war destroys them, soldiers have absconded from the human race.  This is gist of Kon Ichikawa's harrowing Fires on the Plain, Kazuo Hara's terrifying documentary The Emperor's Naked Army Marches on, and Yasuza Masumura's Red Angel.  Released in 1966, Red Angel is an extraordinarily savage account of Japan's war in China.  Any summary of the horrors chronicled by the movie will seem risible.  In fact, Red Angel projects an eerie sense of utter detachment -- like most large-scale Japanese films, the movie is beautifully shot and Red Angel's exquisite compositions designed for extreme wide-screen format are ingenious and, even, poetic.  Masumura uses the big screen to highlight areas of action while staging events in deep focus, far from the camera.  One of his signature shots shows a tile roof with vegetation growing in rifts between the tile shingles -- the plants twitch and wiggle in the wind:  it's unsettling like centipedes half emerging from the dark places where they live.  In the upper right corner of the DaieiScope image dominated by the tile roof, we see a corpse lying face-down in a puddle of blood -- the man has just killed himself by leaping off the roof.  The film's stance of omniscient indifference is mirrored in the performance by the stoic heroine, the nurse Sakura Nishi (played by the beautiful Ayako Wakao -- "Sakura", her name, means Cherry Blossom.)  Nishi goes through the film's hell with serene equanimity -- in fact, her libido is intact despite the horrors that she endures and she even falls in love during her nightmare experiences.  At the end of the movie, the sexually rapacious Nishi is, both figuratively and literally, the only survivor. 

To detail the film's plot is to risk comedy.  There's no backstory and no peace-time.  We're pitched into hell headfirst and in media res.  Nishi is assigned to a hospital in Tientsin where she is supposed to minister to a ward full of TB victims.  Many of the soldiers seem to be malingering and, within the film's first ten minutes, Nishi is violently gang-raped by a group of patients.  When she complains to the matron, she is told that Sakamoto, the ring-leader has perpetrated two other gang-rapes on nurses and, therefore, is going to be discharged to the front lines.  Sakamoto petulantly complains that Nishi has sentenced him to death.  Nishi is, then, transferred to a field hospital near the battlefields.  Periodically, trucks arrive full of mangled soldiers.  There's no anesthesia and not enough staff to deal with the horribly injured men.  Combat surgery has reverted to American Civil War standards -- the head surgeon, Dr. Okabe, spends his days and nights lopping off limbs while Nishi struggles to hold the howling victims down.  Wards are carpeted with writhing soldiers many of them begging to be killed.  Buckets fill up with arms and legs and the floor is ankle-deep in blood.  In one protracted scene, Okabe hacks off someone's leg at the thigh, the soundtrack treating us to bellowed screams and the sound of the bone-saw cutting through the wounded man's femur.  The rapist Sakamoto turns up, shot through the belly.  He accuses Nishi of engineering his death and she pleads with Okabe to give the man a transfusion.  Okabe agrees if Nishi will come to his office alone late at night.  (Sakamoto dies anyway, an orderly denouncing his corpse as a "waste of valuable blood." )  Okabe turns out to be sexually impotent although he orders Nishi to sleep with him -- his principal solace is morphine.  Nishi drinks wine with him and, then, shoots him up.  We see hundreds of dead soldiers lying in a courtyard where other men are snipping off their dog tags.  After a stint at the field hospital, Nishi gets sent back Tientsin.  Back in the surgical ward, Nishi meets a young soldier who asks her to "help (him) urinate" -- he's a double amputee with arms cut off at the shoulders.  This soldier, Private Onihara, tells Nishi that the more badly wounded soldiers, particularly double amputees, are kept in the hospital in China long after they have healed -- they can't be sent home for fear of demoralizing the folks back in Japan.  Onihara asks for "relief" from  his sexual urges -- Nishi gives him a sponge bath and masturbates him to climax.  (It's astonishing to recall that this film was released in 1966).  Nishi likes Onihara and, with the connivance of the understanding matron, takes him to a hotel where she has sex with him.  She tells Onihara that this can never happen again.  Onihara is pathetically grateful but, then, throws himself off a tower and dies.  (The matron notes that his death earns him a promotion, he's no longer Private Onihara but Private First Class Onihara.)  Nishi is sent back to the field hospital where she continues her perverse affair with Dr. Okabe.  We see lots of graphic close-up surgery -- at one point, she digs 160 bullets out of smashed bodies in the course of 24 hours.  Dr. Okabe speaks the film's moral:  "These soldiers aren't human beings.  They're just weapons."  We see one casualty who has been gutted -- he swallowed a coded message and the Chinese ripped open his belly to get it. Dr. Okabe proclaims that the man is a hero, but a shot of his contorted features is enough to undercut this sentiment.  Another soldier intentionally allows maggots to infest his wounds so that he will lose his leg and be shipped home.  (He doesn't know, apparently, that official policy is to not send home amputees.)  Dr. Okabe is called to the front lines.  Nishi who loves him goes along with another nurse.  At this point, the film takes a strange right-hand turn.  Both Okabe and Nishi become zealots in the Japanese cause, at this point really just a death-cult.  The director's perspective toward their increasingly patriotic and gung-ho rhetoric is uncertain -- it's not clear whether he approves, disapproves, or is showing a queasy mixture of both attitudes.  Certainly, the context in which this patriotic sentiment is displayed is particularly horrific -- the protagonists are at a squalid outpost where one of the three "comfort women" has cholera.  The bedraggled "comfort women" are half-crazed, haggard, and physically decrepit.  Masumura shows that cholera is a worse way to die than being shattered by bombs and bullets -- the images of the blackened and dying comfort woman are the most horrific thing in the film and the soundtrack is lush with the sound of vomiting and explosive diarrhea.  Ultimately, just about everyone dies of cholera at the moment that the Chinese are implementing a big offensive.  Nishi sleeps with Dr. Okabe and revives his manhood -- apparently, he's able to achieve an erection with her.  (We gets lots of necrophiliac-looking sex scenes.)  She ties him up and refuses his fix of morphine.  He thrashes around for five hours and but seems to kick the habit.  Then, they engage in weird sex games:  Nishi dresses in Dr. Okabe's uniform and orders him around.  Dr. Okabe has his phallus back but this has just turned him into a bellicose warrior.  As the Chinese attack, he rushes to the battle-line arming Nishi as well and proclaiming that they will fight to the death.  There's a big mortar attack and they get their wish -- everyone but Nishi is killed.  She wakes up in a crater and finds that everyone is dead and has been stripped of their clothing.  A Japanese patrol arrives but Nishi warns them off, shouting that there is cholera in the ruined and smoking compound.  The Japanese troops back away.  (The irony is that the victorious Chinese have stripped the bodies of clothing that is undoubtedly infected with cholera and that their victory will kill them all as well.)  Nishi finds the naked corpse of Dr. Okabe, his hand clutching a banzai sword. 

It's hard to know what to make of any of this.  The film is tightly claustrophobic -- even the battle scenes are occluded by black smoke and seem to take place in a closet.  The hospitals are visualized as either infernal writhing masses of tortured men or tiny squalid rooms. The audience feels a palpable sense of relief when we are shown the trucks bumping across the wind-swept moors between the front and Tientsin.  The love scenes are gloomy with chiaroscuro -- we see fragments of limbs both in the operating rooms and during the sex sequences.  Sometimes, Masumura shoots through mosquito nets to give his images an elegant grainy texture.  In the death-by-cholera sequences, the camera is located in a mass grave and buried by troops throwing rigid corpses into the pit.  The film is so appalling that I can't really recommend it, but the picture has the courage of its foul convictions -- it's completely convincing.  Red Angel makes Saving Private Ryan look like a confection by Jane Austen.