Everything Goes Wrong is a Nikkatsu Studios "Sun Tribe" or juvenile delinquent film. It's a raw exploitation film directed Seijun Suzuki. The movie has a complex plot and is very short -- it's about 71 minutes long. The viewer spends most of the movie trying to figure out that relationship between the characters and, once this is understood, the film is pretty much over. Japanese movies pose a problem for me for two reasons: first, to my eyes, many of the characters look alike and, on first viewing, I can't figure out who is who; second, I find it difficult to reliably assess the age of the characters -- women, in particular, who look very young to me turn out to be middle-aged; therefore, I sometimes interpret male-female couples as lovers or siblings when, in fact, the characters are mother and son. This leads to a misconstructions of an interesting nature. (Confusion of this sort is integral to this film in which the boys all seem to be in strangely romantic relationships with their mothers.) When the characters are given names, they often are unfamiliar, confusing, and hard to remember. I suppose these admissions are tantamount to racism to which I am willing to plead guilty.
Everything Goes Wrong is the story of a promising young man who is tempted into criminality. This boy, Jiro Sugati, lives with his mother, a secretary at an insurance firm. Jiro's mother, Masayo, has been the mistress of a Japanese industrialist for ten years. The Japanese industrialist, Mr. Nambura, is married and works for a firm that built tanks during the War. Jiro's mother is war widow and the boy's father was killed in New Guinea when a Japanese tank (built by Nambura's firm) ran over him. The movie begins with the delinquents watching an earnest-looking Japanese war film Fight to the Last Drop of Blood. The kids come out of the movie, blinking in the hot light of Tokyo mid-afternoon, and, in several long virtuosic shots wander around an urban landscape rife with sleazy bars, cluttered disreputable alleys, and sex hotels. At first, there seem to be a welter of plots and subplots although the film fixes on three narratives: Jiro's troubled relationship with his mother, Jiro's friendship with a boy who is not a good student and has had to drop out of school to work in the Mitsubishi factory, and Etsuko who is pregnant and trying to raise money for an abortion. Etsuko has been living with a callous student named Ono but he has now abandoned her. The kids are all vaguely affiliated with a gang that shakes down couples coming from the Sex Hotel, blackmailing them for chump change. There are two kids who wear panama hats (confusingly) who seem to be car thieves. From time to time, cars owned by Europeans or Americans get hijacked and, apparently, chopped up for parts. A nearby American military base is also a source of various kinds of corruption. Jiro fights with his mother over her relationship with Mr. Nambura who the boy regards as a war profiteer. He runs away from home and spends an afternoon with his old elementary school buddy now working at Mitsubishi. The boys go on rides at an amusement park but Jiro, who is intensely proud, thinks his friend is being humiliated by his work at the factory and so flees from the kid in horror. (Jiro is also particularly horrified that the kid's mother is a retired geisha -- that is, a woman with a tarnished background.) There's a tavern decorated with music posters -- it's bizarre: Coleman Hawkins shares space on the wall with a French poster advertising a concert of the works of Faure. Some local boys sing doo-wop in the joint and there's even a girl group that sounds a little like Martha and the Vandellas. Juvenile delinquents use the bar as their headquarters and engage in lots of underage drinking and cigarette smoking. The delinquents have molls who have been initiated into the gang by (literal) gang-rape. One of these girls, now ruined by her association with gang, seduces Jiro. He goes to her squalid digs and has sex with her, afterwards pitching a handful of coins on her bed. The girl, Toshimo, is outraged -- she may be the plaything of the coltish gang of delinquents but she's no hooker. At the bar, a cynical journalist exchanges quips with the weary hostess; he's writing an expose of the juvenile delinquent gangsters. As the title of the film overtly advises, everything goes wrong. Mr. Nambura searches the mean streets for Jiro with whom he is hoping to reconcile. But, instead, of finding Jiro, he runs into Etsuko who is desperate to earn enough money for her abortion. Etsuko tells Mr. Nambura that Jiro is hiding out at the beach. Mr. Nambura goes there with him and is sighted by Jiro. Jiro runs back home and advises his mother that her boyfriend is two-timing her. Then, Jiro takes his mother to the beach where Mr. Nambura is with Etsuko, who has now taken off her shirt and is frantically trying to get the businessman to have sex with her. This reveal backfires on Jiro. Jiro's mom, who is a bit of a door mat, takes the blame for Mr. Nambura's apparent sexual infraction (in fact, Nambura has virtuously rejected the girl's advances) as evidence of her own failings as a woman. She falls on her knees and begs Nambura to take her back. This sickens Jiro who hurries downtown where he picks up Toshimo, kisses her frantically, and, then, steals a car. Meanwhile, poor Etsuko, still without cash for her abortion, hurls herself down a flight of steps leading to the subway, thereby inducing a miscarriage. (A student denounces Ono, Etsuko's callous boyfriend and pronounces the moral of the film: "Today good will can't exist between people any more." Meanwhile, Mr. Nambura happens on the joyriding couple of Jiro and Toshimo and makes the mistake of hitching a ride with them. The couple go back to Toshimo's miserable digs where they are about to have sex in front of the nonplussed Mr. Nambura. (Nambura, by this point, has admitted that he was a war profiteer but claims he was forced into that enterprise by his greedy wife, the daughter of a prominent member of the military industrial complex.) Out on the streets, a bunch of kids are protesting Japan's militarization and the H-Bomb. Toshimo admits that as the moll in the gang, she's been complicit in securing other girls for the delinquents to rape. She attaches her face to Jiro's cheek by a strand of adhesive chewing gum while the lad smokes disconsolately. At last, Jiro takes a wrench (earlier brandished by Toshimo to threaten a malevolent gangster) and beats in poor Mr. Nambura's head. Spattered with blood, Jiro goes to the stolen car and, with Toshimo pleading with him to stop, drives wildly through the crowded streets. With a motorcycle cop chasing him, he crashes head on into a truck, thus killing himself and poor Toshimo. In her apartment, Jiro's mother hears the sirens. The hapless Mr. Nambura is still alive, although barely, and we see him wheeled into surgery. At the bar, the cynical journalist says that he probably has enough materials for a pretty good story and says he'll make sure he mentions the sad, world-weary barmaid.
The film resembles American movies like Rebel without a Cause. As in that movie, the picture posits a world of feckless, emasculated middle-age men who are useless as role models for their sons. (The hero's father in Rebel without a Cause wears an apron around the house as he does chores.) The Japanese men are the victims of World War Two, literally defeated and traumatized. There are no viable models for masculinity, the film seems to assert, and so young men fall into the trap of becoming gang-members -- at least, the violent gangs are run by men who don't seem to be passive eunuchs. As in the American films, the pop-sociology is questionable at best and, at worst, pernicious hokum. Everything Goes Wrong relies upon a half-dozen coincidental meetings -- in a city of many millions, Mr. Nambura keeps running into the young characters whose mishaps provide the motor for the plot. The climax involving the car chase is cheaply shot and unimpressive -- it features some unconvincing rear-projection footage with inserts of the supposedly pursuing and implacable motor cycle. The picture wants to blame the entire malaise in post-war Tokyo on World War Two, which may be convincing if simple-minded. Suzuki's direction in this film is pretty restrained -- often, his films are very expressionistic and over-the-top. The movie is probably better than it looks but I'm not persuaded that it's anything other than mediocre.
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