A Fugitive from the Past

 A Fugitive from the Past is a Japanese police procedural, jumbo-sized at 185 minutes, directed by Tomu Uchida.  The movie was made in 1965 and was Uchida's last film.  (Uchida began his career in the silent era; he died in 1970 at the age of 72).  Uchida was a reliable director working in a variety of genres for Japanese studios -- his equivalent in Hollywood would be William Wellman or, even more precisely, King Vidor.  (Analogies, however, break down -- neither Wellman nor Vidor worked extensively in Japanese-occupied Manchuria making propaganda films for the Imperial Army.  Uchida's work in Manchuria for the notorious Manchuku Films apparently ended with his capture and he wasn't repatriated to Japan until eight years after the War in 1953.)  A Fugitive from the Past isn't well-known outside of Japan.  It was never commercially shown in Europe or America (except for a few festivals and museum retrospectives) and its release on Arrow DVD marks its first appearance in commercially available form outside of Japan.  The movie is highly regarded.  Kinema Jumpo, the Japanese equivalent of Cahiers d' Cinema, rated the movie as the third-greatest picture in the history of Japanese movies -- I think this was in 1990; the film has since dropped off the list of the ten-best Japanese pictures of all time.  Uchida is best known in the West for Mad Fox, a surreal Kabuki-styled melodrama and horror film and his luridly named Bloody Spear and Mount Fujiyama.  The latter picture, which I have reviewed in these pages, is the opposite of its garish title -- it's a serene, leisurely road picture set in the 19th century with only a couple spurts of violence at the end of the movie; the film is amiable, fairly funny, and seems to be similar to some of John Ford's pictures, particularly My Darling Clementine.  Japanese audiences, I think, were enthralled with Uchida's portrait of the American occupation in A Fugitive from the Past and, further, would have sensed a strong resonance with the director's own problematic career -- Uchida went from an urbane, civil director of period pictures and screwball comedies pre-War into a phase in which he worked on virulent propaganda movies supporting the vicious and genocidal conflict in Manchuria:  so there is a strong sense that the overriding atmosphere of guilt over past crimes that oppresses the picture arises from both the culpability of Uchida for his actions in the War and, in general, reflects the Japanese people's unresolved feelings about that conflict.  In some ways, the movie resembles some of Fassbinder's works, particularly the BRD Trilogy, in which recovery from the ravages of war results in former Nazis rising again to power; repatriated soldiers return from Russia to a society anxious to forget events occurring only a few years earlier -- concerns as to justice and accountability are suppressed in favor of the economic Wirtschaftswunder.  Similar motifs animate A Fugitive from the Past -- indeed, the repatriation of soldiers from camps in Manchuria is a major theme in the movie.  

Despite it's inordinate length, A Fugitive from the Past is very gripping and feels far shorter than its run-time.  And, unlike many Japanese movies the picture isn't so complex as to be impossible to understand.  The plot is clear, vividly dramatized, and the movie is mildly exciting (and mildly suspenseful) up to its last third.  There is a perky, idiosyncratic prostitute who worships the criminal hero of the film.  She occupies the middle half of the movie and is the best thing in the movie.  When the anti-hero murders her, all the energy seeps out of the movie and the final part of the film just consists of middle-aged men berating one another -- we are told things and not shown them and, although the film is so well-directed that it never becomes tedious, the last third of the picture is confined to conference rooms, involves long speeches, and is perversely claustrophobic.  I think these debates and loquacious seminars on various subjects are a grave flaw in the picture -- the film is impeccably scripted but one wonders if there wasn't some better way to adapt this part of the source material (the movie is based on a 1700 page novel that obviously resembles Victor Hugo's Les Miserables.)

On September 20, 1947, three criminals steal a modest fortune from a pawnshop in a provincial city.  They set the pawnshop on fire and the whole town is destroyed with many casualties.  (There are aerial shots showing the devastation in the town and it looks like Hiroshima.)  The leader of group of criminals seems to be a man named Inukai.  (He is similar to Fred McMurray in appearance and plays the part in a bemused way -- again a bit like McMurray in Double Indemnity; it must also be observed that A Fugitive from the Past is an impressive Japanese film noir.)  Inukai and his accomplices happen into a horrifying natural disaster -- a ferry carrying over 800 people has sunk in straits between Japan's main island and Hokkaido; these are the so-called "Hunger Straits", the Japanese term for the body of water.  Hundreds of corpses are washing ashore and we see spectacular scenes of the typhoon, the rescue efforts, and the dead bodies being dragged off the beaches to makeshift morgues.  (Less successful shots showing a model of the ferry breaking apart in heavy seas seem to be channeling the Godzilla films -- you expect to giant lizard or a man in giant lizard suit to emerge from the turbulent bathtub waters.)  As it turns out, there are two extra corpses in the dead recovered from the ferry-boat tragedy.  The two unaccounted-for corpses turn are ultimately identified Inukai's colleages in crime.  Inukai appears, bedraggled on the wooded and mountainous coast on Hokkaido.  He observes a scary medium channeling the spirit of a dead woman and, later, on primitive train carrying cut trees, he meets the dead woman's daughter, a prostitute called Yae.  In a small town at a harbor, Inukai hides from authorities in a whorehouse where Yae works.  She seems half-deranged, mocking her father's superstitious engagement with the blind medium and wriggling around lasciviously in a sort of cocoon-like blanket. Somehow, she senses that Inukai is a "good man", has sex with him, and, then, finds that she has been badly scratched about the throat by his uncut fingernails.  While cutting his fingernails, she gets one of them embedded in her palm.  Inukai has to flee and so he pays her the ill-gotten loot from the pawnshop robbery, a large sum.  The girl buys her way out of the brothel (where she is indentured due to her parents' debts) and goes to Tokyo where she tries to earn an honest wage.  She works at a noodle shop and bar as a hostess, hanging around the train station and soliciting travelers for the shop.  The business is under the protection of Japanese gangsters and there's a fight that results in the noodle-shop having to close.  So Gae goes back into prostitution and, apparently, is very successful -- she earns a lot of money, is frugal and hardworking, and, after ten years is on the verge, of embarking on an honest enterprise.  (In any event, she works at a legal brothel which will be closed due to a change in the law six months in the future abolishing state-sanctioned prostitution -- so it's time for her to find another job.)  By this time, she has a lot of money and, when a newspaper article reveals to her that Inukai is now a successful businessman and philanthropist (he's now called Tarumi), she goes to his house on Hokkaido Island to thank him for his kindness.  (She still has the fingernail as a fetish that she carries everywhere with her.)  Inuakai-Tarumi panics when he meets her and strangles Gae to death.  When his male secretary inadvertently discovers the crime, Inukai (said to have enormous strength) murders him as well, weighting the bodies with stones and throwing them in the bay.  

During the first part of Gae's ten-year stint as a successful Tokyo prostitute, the cops from Hokkaido are tracking Inukai.  They conclude that Inukai killed his two accomplices but he has, then, vanished.  A detective even goes to Tokyo to try to interview Gae -- the cops know Inukai went to her brothel on Hokkaido -- but they can't find her.  The two murders of Gae and the secretary (Inukai claims it was a result of a lover's quarrel with murder and sucide) cause the local cops to interview Inukai.  He defies them and there is no evidence as to his guilt.  The cops, then, locate the old detective (he has a tubercular cough) who chased Inukai unsuccessfully ten years earlier.  The old man travels to the city in Hokkaido where the police suspect Tarumi (Inukai) of the crime.  After various interviews and interrogations, Tarumi- Inukai is cornered and confesses to killing Gae and the secretary -- he doesn't confess to killing his two accomplices or burning down the whole city during the typhoon.  Here the movie's length proves to be its strength.  The viewer can't exactly recall what we were shown in the film's first twenty minutes and, so, Inukai's account of the events involving the robbery of the pawnbroker (probably a reference to Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment) and the typhoon seems plausible -- we can't exactly recall whether what he is telling us is true or false.  And the film features unreliable flashbacks -- we sometimes see images reconstructing events that turn out to be false.  On the ship crossing the Hunger Straits, the pious old detective casts flowers into the wake of the ferry.  He chants the Heart Sutra in a guttural voice :  Emptiness is Form -- Form is Emptiness.  Inukai dives off the ship and perishes.  The Hunger Straits symbolize the passage from life to death.

This summary, of course, doesn't do justice to the novelistic complexity of the film -- obviously the source novel was a book with an ambition to import every possible aspect of post-war Japan into the narrative.  The film's scenes rhyme with one another -- for instance, the final chanting of the Heart Sutra echoes an earlier scene in which the detective buries the two accomplices in shallow graves so that they can be exhumed and later identified.  (The movie is full of scenes with people inspecting corpses -- these are hyper-realistic although mercifully we don't see the bodies; people cover their noses with handkerchiefs or burn incense to ameliorate the stench.)  Some of the sequences are solarized for effect, with weird flares and bursts of light suffusing the elegant black and white images.  Much of the movie was shot on 16 millimeter blown up to 35 mm -- this gives the picture a grainy documentary aspect that is particularly effective in the scenes involving the fire, the typhoon and its aftermath, and the mean streets of Tokyo.  Uchida's camera frequently moves, but the shots are hand-held and have a herky-jerky immediacy.  The acting is naturalistic and impeccable.  Essays on the film emphasize Uchida's commentary on social problems -- apparently, the prostitute and her aged father (who cheerfully acquiesces in her sex work) are members of some kind of low-caste group who are despised by other classes in Japanese society.  (None of this is apparent to a casual American viewer.)  Post-war Japan is viewed as a sort of inferno -- prostitutes are everywhere, starving children roam the street where arrogant-looking American soldiers prowl for sex.  Little kids fight over pieces of potato in their soup.  The outskirts of the cities are squalid wastelands.  Nightmarish crane shots show crowded slum streets patrolled by sinister gangsters.  The small Hokkaido villages are shattered, ruinous, and completely impoverished.  The movie is very powerful, but not entirely engaging and the last part of the picture is a misfire.  It's not as good as its reputed to be -- but still the movie is worth watching.