Makoto Wada’s Movie Inspired Art 4: Modern Classics

Makoto Wada (和田誠, b. 1936) is best known as an illustrator whose work has adorned the pages of writers as diverse as Shinichi Hoshi, Haruki Murakami, and Agatha Christie.  In addition to illustration, he has also dabbled in film directing and animation – winning the Noburo Ofuji Award for 1964 for his comic animated short Murder (殺人).  In Murder, he spoofs a wide variety of famous film and literary icons including Poirot, Sam Spade, Dracula and James Bond.  He has also done a range of paintings inspired by film stars and classic movies.  This is my third in a series of posts looking at his art and his muses.  See also: Part 1: Early Hollywood,  Part 2: Hollywood Classics, and Part 3: European Classics.

You can support this artist by ordering collections of his work such as:

Order: Makoto Wada Cinema Art

Life is Beautiful (1997) put Italian comedian Roberto Benigni on the Hollywood map when he won not only the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film but also the  Best Actor Oscar.  Wada's painting captures the essence of this tragicomic film: the resilience of the human spirit in even the most desperate of circumstances, seen here through the love of two parents for their young son.  

Luc Besson's Léon: The Professional (1994) was written as a star vehicle for Jean Reno, hence the title, but what most people remember is the unlikely friendship that develops between Léon and the teenage girl Mathilda (Nathalie Portman).  

In this painting Wada brings together two seminal moments in Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List (1993): the girl in the red coat and Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson) and his employee Itzhak Stern (Ben Kingsley) writing the famous list of Jews that they hoped to save from the Nazis.  

Wada's take on the movie poster for Wim Wenders's Wings of Desire (1987) captures the contemplative gaze of  the angel Damiel (Bruno Ganz) as he sits on the Victory Column (Siegesäule) looking out over the divided city of Berlin.  Although the body positioning of Solveig Dommartin as Marion is different than in the poster, she does make that pose during her acrobatics in the film itself.

Next: Makoto Wada's Movie Inspired Art 5: Hitchcock

Cathy Munroe Hotes 2015

Makoto Wada’s Movie Inspired Art 2: Hollywood Classics

Makoto Wada (和田誠, b. 1936) is best known as an illustrator whose work has adorned the pages of writers as diverse as Shinichi Hoshi, Haruki Murakami, and Agatha Christie.  In addition to illustration, he has also dabbled in film directing and animation – winning the Noburo Ofuji Award for 1964 for his comic animated short Murder (殺人).  In Murder, he spoofs a wide variety of famous film and literary icons including Poirot, Sam Spade, Dracula and James Bond.  He has also done a range of paintings inspired by film stars and classic movies.  This is my second in a series of posts looking at his art and his cinematic muses.  See: Part 1: Early Hollywood.

You can support this artist by ordering collections of his work such as:

Order: Makoto Wada Cinema Art

This image of Marilyn Monroe is not from a movie, but it is one of the iconic images of the more personal side of Marilyn that the press rarely saw in the 1950s.  Instead of looking all glammed up, Marilyn is dressed in a modest bathing suit and is reading from her copy of James Joyce's modernist novel Ulysses (1922).  The photo was taken by Eve Arden in 1954 on Long Island where Monroe was visiting her friend the poet Norman Rosten.   I find it interesting that Wada has chosen to partially obscure Marilyn's face, yet she is still instantly recognizable by her trademark hair and mole.  The boldly coloured bathing suit doubtless appealed to Wada's eye for colour, and the blue background matches her beautiful blue eyes.  

Audrey Hepburn embodied Hollywood glamour in the adaptation of Truman Capote's novel Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961).  Hepburn shines like a ray of light in a black space in Wada's portrait of her.   

In the neo-noir film L.A. confidential Kim Basinger embodied Hollywood elegance of the Golden Era.  I love how Mada makes the black and white of her cloak pop by giving her such a dramatic colour for the background.  

Although this image has all the key elements (costume, chair) to make Liza Minnelli in Bob Fosse's Caberet (1972) recognizable, I think this is one of Wada's less successful homages.   He makes the character of Sally Bowles more kawaii than erotic.  It's a lovely image but it misses the mark for me.  

Bernardo Bertolucci may be a European director, but his epic The Last Emperor was a large scale Hollywood production with an international cast.  Winning 9 Oscars at the 60th Academy Awards, it was certainly the film of 1987.  I like how Wada pares the iconic film poster down to its key elements: the boy emperor Puyi and his castle.  If you haven't seen the film, you should, if only for the amazing Ryuichi Sakamoto / David Byrne / Cong Su soundrack:

Next: Makoto Wada's Movie Inspired Art 3: European Classics

2015 Cathy Munroe Hotes

Makoto Wada’s Movie Inspired Art 1: Early Hollywood

Makoto Wada (和田誠, b. 1936) is best known as an illustrator whose work has adorned the book covers and pages of writers as diverse as Shinichi Hoshi, Haruki Murakami, and Agatha Christie.  In addition to illustration, he has also dabbled in film directing and animation – winning the Noburo Ofuji Award for 1964 for his comic animated short Murder (殺人).  In Murder, he spoofs a wide variety of famous film and literary icons including Poirot, Sam Spade, Dracula and James Bond.  He has also done a range of paintings inspired by film stars and classic movies.  This is my first in a series of posts looking at his art and his muses.  You can support this artist by ordering collections of his work such as:

Order: Makoto Wada Cinema Art

Charlie Chaplin is a popular subject in Wada's work.  This is the classic scene in The Gold Rush (1925) where the Tramp boils and eats his shoes, imagining that the shoelaces are spaghetti.  As is typical of Wada's style, he simplifies the background in order to put the emphasis on the central character and themes of the scene.   Makoto Wada is known for his love of colour, and I like his choice of green for the Tramp's vest.

This is the final scene in Chaplin's City Lights (1933) when the Tramp finds the Flower Girl again and discovers that she has regained her sight.  She does not recognize him at first and offers him a flower and a coin.  When he grabs her hand, she suddenly realizes that he is no stranger.  It's a moving scene that leaves audiences wiping a tear from their eyes every time.  The colour palette  of Wada's interpretation emphasizes the whiteness of the flower, and the blondness of Virginia Cherrill's hair - the latter of which we only get a notion of in the black and white film.

Wada captures Greta Garbo's austere regalness in her iconic role as Queen Christina of Sweden in Rouben Mamoulian's critical and financial hit for MGM studios.  He's got the Garbo Look just right by capturing the arc of her eyebrows.

I was amused by how fat Orson Welles' head is in Wada's interpretation of this iconic image from Citizen Kane, because I didn't recall Welles looking so fat-headed in this scene.  But then I discovered that some stills of this scene do make his head extraordinarily large.... and of course Charles Foster Kane was indeed getting progressively big-headed throughout the film in the figurative sense. 

The Puerto Rican singer and actor José Ferrer is not as well-known today as many of his contemporaries (Bogart, Peck, Wayne, Tracy, Stewart), but he was a superstar in his time, winning the Tony in 1947 for playing Cyrano on Broadway before going on to win an Oscar and a Golden Globe for this screen portrayal.  Ferrer was the first Hispanic to win an Oscar.  To hear him in action, his best Cyrano speeches are available on iTunes.  He is arguably the top English Cyrano of the 20th century.  

For more by Wada: 

Makoto Wada’s Movie Inspired Art 2: Classic Hollywood

2015 Cathy Munroe Hotes

Three Came Home (三人の帰宅, 1950)

In 2001, I was writing a paper on Nagisa Oshima’s Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1983), and decided to find out if any American films had tried, as I feel Oshima did, to understand the horror of Pacific War from both the Japanese and the Allied perspectives.  Among the predictable John Wayne war films like They Were Expendable (John Ford, 1945) and Back to Bataan (Edward Dmytyk, 1945), I discovered the remarkable 1950 film Three Came Home (Jean Negulesco, 1950).

The story is an adaptation of Agnes Newton Keith’s memoir Three Came Home (1948) about her experiences as a prisoner of the Japanese during World War II in North Borneo (today called Sabah) and Sarawak.  An American writer married to British forester Harry Keith, Agnes made a name for herself shortly before the war with her bestselling memoir Land Below Wind (1939) which painted a idyllic portrait of her early married life, the land and the people of Sandakan – then the capital of British North Borneo.

The film begins with the growing unease of the British inhabitants of Sandakan as they hear radio reports about the escalating war.  After the attack on Pearl Harbor and the fall of Singapore, many husbands begin sending their wives and children back home.  Agnes; however,  refuses to leave her husband’s side.  When the Japanese invade British North Borneo, Agnes, Harry, and their young son George become prisoners-of-war. 

Agnes and George are separated from Harry and imprisoned first on Berhala Island and then they are shipped to the Bau Lintang camp near Kuching.  The women and children do not receive any special treatment and are forced to live on the edge of starvation in primitive conditions.  A Hollywood film of that era could not really capture the horror of the living conditions in the camp (lack of clothes and diapers, lack of hygiene and clean water, widespread disease) as Agnes does so movingly in her book, but the film does not sugar coat the situation either.  It is a rare look at the Pacific War from the perspective of an American mother.  The film was also shot on location as much as possible which gives it an air of authenticity. 

Husbands and wives separated by a trench.

Although Nunnally Johnson’s screenplay embellishes some parts of the story (a massacre of horny Australians, the stereotyping of the brutal Nekata as a hulking oaf) and leaves out some important aspects (the complexity of Anges’ relationship with Lieutenant Colonel Tatsuji Suga, how she made toys for her son, how she buried notes that she dug up later in order to keep a record of her ordeal), on the whole the film captures the essence of Agnes Newton Keith’s wartime experience.  She went through hell on earth in that prisoner-of-war camp, but emerged from the war with a surprising lack of bitterness.  Somehow, despite having had a miscarriage brought on by the stress of detainment and witnessing/experiencing torture and other cruel behaviour from the Japanese soldiers, Agnes did not learn to hate the Japanese.  She learned to hate war and what war does to humanity.  The film retains her sense of balance by showing the small gestures of good will made by some Japanese soldiers (such as the doctor secretly giving Agnes medicine)  in contrast to the cruelty and inhumanity of others (Nekata, the anonymous soldier who assaults her).

The casting of Three Came Home was really key to making this work for Jean Negulesco.  Claudette Colbert (It Happened One Night, The Gilded Lily) plays Agnes – ideal casting because the women were about the same age and Colbert had a great range as an actress.  Colbert was nearing the end of her peak as an actress as there were (and still are) few good roles written for older women in Hollywood.  She unfortunately was injured during the Three Came Home shoot and lost out on the role of Margo Channing in All About Eve (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1950) – a role which Mankiewicz had written with her in mind.

Col. Suga weeps - a man broken by the horror of war

The real success of the film hinges on the casting of Sessue Hayakawa (The Cheat, The Bridge on the River Kwai) as Col. Suga.  Hayakawa had been a major Hollywood star during the silent era, but his star had waned with the coming of sound and he was stuck in France for the duration of the war under the German Occupation having gone there to star in French films directed by Max Ophüls, Marcel L'Herbier, and others.  Humphrey Bogart’s production company tracked him down to have him star as Baron Kimura in Tokyo Joe (1949).  As a seasoned actor, Hayakawa brings sense of humanity to the role of Suga – without giving this depth of character to the enemy, Negulesco would not have been able to really capture the core message of Agnes’ memoir:   

“If there are tears shed here, they are for the death of good feeling.  If there is horror, it is for those who speak indifferently of ‘the next war’.  If there is hate, it is for hateful qualities, not nations.  If there is love, it is because this alone kept me alive and sane.” (Three Came Home, p.9)

Tokyo Joe (東京ジョー, 1949)

Made at the peak of Humphrey Bogart’s career, Tokyo Joe (Stuart Heisler, 1949) provides some rare glimpses into life in Tokyo under the American Occupation. Bogart plays Joe Barrett, a retired lieutenant colonel who ran a nightclub in Tokyo before the war and was married to the beautiful European singer Trina (Florence Marly). For reasons known only to himself, Joe left his wife and Japan shortly before the attack on Pearl Harbor and the intervening war made it impossible for him to return.

Did they really label the streets with letters of the alphabet during the Occupation?

Several years afer the war, Joe decides to pick up the pieces of his life in Tokyo. Haunted by the song Trina used to sing, “These Foolish Things Remind Me of You”, he wonders what happened to his wife whom he believes must have died. He discovers that Trina has indeed survived the war but has remarried and has a child, and that he will need to deal with a lot of red tape, hassle, and prejudice in order to go back into business with his old friend Ito (Teru Shimada). He gets blackmailed by Baron Kimura (Sessue Hayakawa) into participating in an illegal smuggling operation and has to find a way to reconcile his personal life and ambitions with the precarious situation he finds himself in.

Bogart in a rickshaw with Tokyo streets rear projected behind him.

 It was impossible to shoot Tokyo Joe on location in 1948 – the first Hollywood shoot there wouldn’t happen until House of Bamboo (read my review of it) in 1955 – but Columbia Pictures was able to send a camera crew to Tokyo to shoot exterior footage. They were the first Hollywood camera crew to be granted permission to shoot there by the American Occupation. The opening aerial footage of Tokyo is quite impressive and Columbia pictures tries to give the film an air of authenticity with the street scene footage in the opening scenes when Joe first arrives in Tokyo. Sadly, these are rather awkwardly handled through the use of a Bogart body double and Bogart shot with rear projection of the Tokyo footage. 

A Bogart body double on the streets of Tokyo.

In spite of this, Tokyo Joe is an oddly likeable film. To be certain, it is not one of Bogart’s best performances and the plot and dialogue are a bit creaky at times, but there are enough interesting elements to keep fans of classic Hollywood films content. The story is a lot more believable than House of Bamboo when it comes to the portrayal of interactions between Japanese and foreign characters. As the actors were shot entirely in the Columbia Pictures Hollywood studios, there are the usual faux pas of characters wearing their shoes indoors but the interiors are more authentically staged than in House of Bamboo. In some ways they are the polar opposites of each other - the exterior shots in House of Bamboo were far superior to their interiors, and vice versa for Tokyo Joe.  In the name of realism, Bogart even takes a stab at speaking Japanese, which one would expect as the character that he plays lived so long in Japan – though he of course keeps the famous Bogart intonation. 

Great camaraderie between Bogart and Shimada.

 The American pilots that Joe hires demonstrate the kind of prejudices and suspicion towards the Japanese that one would expect considering the brutality of the Pacific War. Any negative comments about the Japanese are counterbalanced by Joe’s broader experience of the Japanese – particularly his close friendship with Ito. Ito’s friendly, open nature is contrasted sharply by the slyness and manipulativeness of Baron Kimura. This role was perfect for Sessue Hayakawa, who had mastered the role of the villain during the silent period. This film marked the beginning of Hayakawa’s post war comeback in Hollywood. 

Sessue Hayakawa plays bad well.

 The use of Japanese and Japanese-American actors aids the authentic feel of the film. The dialogue might not be as snappy as Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942) and the plot might not be as tight as The Maltese Falcon (John Huston, 1941), but the film putters along at a decent pace.  Furthermore, it’s nice to see a more well balanced portrayal of the Japanese in a Hollywood picture than the faceless, nameless, soulless soldiers in the war movies of the day. 

I would recommend Tokyo Joe to people who are interested in the time period. It is certainly interesting to see how they depict the American Occupation. I’m not sure how realistic the plot points are concerning war criminals hiding out in Korea trying to sneak back into the country to plot a coup, but the rising fear of communism was certainly a key concern of the times.

© Catherine Munroe Hotes 2011

Tokyo Joe [Priced-down Reissue]

House of Bamboo (東京暗黒街・竹の家, 1955)

Samuel Fuller’s House of Bamboo (東京暗黒街・竹の家, 1955) was the first Hollywood feature film to be shot on location in Japan. One earlier film, Tokyo Joe (Stuart Heisler, 1948), did shoot footage in Japan, but principle filming with the cast was done on a back lot in Hollywood. It also seems likely that House of Bamboo was the first film shot in Japan using CinemaScope – the high price and relative rarity of film stock in post war Japan meant that most domestic films were still being shot in black and white.

Kabuki practice on the roof of the Kokusai Theatre

A fine example of Hollywood "Oriental" font from the opening credits

Robert Stack plays Eddie Spanier, an undercover agent brought in to investigate the murder of an American sergeant during the heist of a military train carrying guns and ammunition. He uncovers a mob of American gangsters led by Sandy Dawson (Robert Ryan). He infiltrates their ranks in order to try to bring them down in a plot that is loosely based on The Street with No Name (William Keighley, 1948) – an earlier film written by the same screenwriter Harry Kleiner. Some romance is thrown into the story in the form of Mariko, played by Shirley Yamaguchi (the Hollywood star) aka Li Xianglan (the hugely popular 1940s Chinese singer-actress) aka Yoshiko Ōtaka (the Japanese politician). The film also stars Sessue Hayakawa – the biggest Japanese Hollywood star of all time – as Inspector Kito. Fans of Star Trek should keep their eyes peeled for DeForest Kelley in the role of Charlie.

A narrator announces during the opening sequence that the film was photographed in Tokyo, Yokohama, and the Japanese countryside in 1954, but anyone who has spent any time in Japan will immediately pick up on the fact that many of the interiors are not Japanese. The interior scenes shot with Robert Stack and Shirley Yamaguchi, for example, clearly have straw mats rolled out on concrete floors in order to resemble tatami floors, but the set design is very inauthentic.  The most glaring error is that many of the houses lack a genkan – a traditional entryway into a building where one can remove one’s shoes. . . but as none of the Americans remove their shoes before entering the houses I guess they didn’t feel the need. And don’t even get me started on the "Japanese" bathtubs which can be viewed from the front door.   There is a scene featuring an authentic sento – which Robert Stack rudely busts into looking for Yamaguchi (hence the image of her in a towel for the movie posters).  Amusingly, Robert Ryan's house is a high-ceilinged affair, seemingly designed to fit his tall frame and featuring unlikely views of Mt. Fuji from his garden (especially when compared with the realistically smoggy Asakusa roof top scenes).  

One doesn't see scenes like this in today's Tokyo.

Robert Stack shocks Shirley Yamaguchi by wearing shoes in the house.

The best scenes in House of Bamboo are by far the ones shot on location. Thanks to the CinemaScope lenses from Bausch and Lomb and the vibrant DeLuxe colour, Samuel Fuller and his cinematographer Joseph MacDonald managed to capture some stunning winter scenes of Mount Fuji shot from the train line between Fujiyoshida and Kawaguchiko. From an historical perspective, the shots of the port at Yokohama when Robert Stack arrives and the shots of the Sumida River are fascinating. In the mid-1950s most visitors to Japan still arrived via ships to Yokohama, and the Sumida River was still cluttered with fishing boats and wooden houses.

Asakusa is heavily featured in the film - though many of the city streets and buildings have been so altered in the intervening decades as to make it barely recognizable. The Kokusai Theatre has long since been torn down and replaced by the Asakusa View Hotel and the Matsuya Department Store rooftop no longer boasts the unusual globe-shaped amusement ride on its roof (see what it looked like at the Showa Navi). It provides a spectacular location for the climatic final shoot-out with glorious views of the Sumida River and the popular temple Sensō-ji.

As far as Hollywood detective films go, the film satisfies on the whole. There is a fascinating sexual tension between the male leads, Robert Ryan and Robert Stack, which an interview with Samuel Fuller by Robert Porifrio and James Ursini reveals was intentional. The plot takes surprising twists and turns – all part of the charm of watching a Fuller film.

I had the impression that Twentieth Century Fox was doing its best to give a positive impression of Japan in return for the goodwill of the Japanese government and police during the shooting of the film. In spite of these efforts, the film was not particularly successful in Japan – largely because the country is only a backdrop to the film – the story really could have taken place anywhere.

No one will notice us if we meet in a temple with our fedoras on.

I think we blend in just swell with these kimono girls.

The lack of depth in terms of integrating the story into its exotic location leads to a lot of jarring things that just make no sense at all. The most obvious of these is the fact that the American gangsters in their fedoras stand out like sore thumbs everywhere they go. It is laughable to suggest that they could pull off these heists without any of the locals noticing and informing the police. The fact that they raise funds by blackmailing pachinko parlours also draws attention to the glaring absence of yakuza in the film. . . not to mention how unlikely it would be for Sandy to run such an elaborate scheme without speaking a word of Japanese apart from “ichiban” and “kimono girl.”

Shoot-out on the roof tops of Asakusa - note Sensō-ji on the far left.

The term “kimono girl” was new to me – I’m not familiar with the lingo of Americans stationed in Japan after the Occupation so I don't know if it is authentic to the times or not. In the context of House of Bamboo, it's definition seemed to lie partway between a Western stereotype of a "geisha girl" and a gangster’s moll. The film does fall victim to stereotypes when it comes to the portrayal of women .  There are also an unusual amount of women wearing kimono in this film. On one hand, this did add some welcome colour to an otherwise bleak winter landscape. On the other hand, it did not seem particularly realistic. In central Tokyo, I would have expected to see more women in modern dress – especially when compared to Japanese films of the 1950s like Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story (1953), Kinuyo Tanaka’s Love Letter (1953), or Mikio Naruse’s Floating Clouds (1955). 

Another odd thing about the film was that the sound seemed poorly mixed in some scenes so that the sound of the room didn't always match the space we were being shown onscreen.  The  scenes with Sessue Hayakawa were particularly bad.  He had oddly been dubbed over by a voice-actor. Hayakawa became a big star during the silent period and got less work in Hollywood after the advent of sound due to his heavy accent, but he did fine in Tokyo Joe (1949) and Three Came Home (1950). . . and he would of course earn an Oscar nomination in 1958 for his English-speaking role in The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957).  The lack of match between dialogue and lips in some scenes reminded me of spaghetti westerns.

It’s not one of Samuel Fuller best films, but it is endlessly fascinating to watch.  In the U.S. it is available as part of the Fox Film Noir series:

It is also on DVD in Japan:

House Of Bamboo

© Catherine Munroe Hotes 2011