Ore wa matteru ze

This came in a boxset of Japanese crime-thrillers that I plan to work through over the next week or so, and as this was the earliest release of the five, I decided to start here.

It's very simple and tells a story about a young man and a young woman who both have connections to various shady characters that they both wish to escape from. Its unapologetically direct and for its time, it probably had a little more impact than it does now.

But it was still far from a bad watch, and it can be appreciated and enjoyed as a well-acted and well-directed film that serves as a decent crime movie for the time it was made. It's also nice to see something unpretentious and straightforward every once in a while, because you often can't make a movie nowadays unless it's got a bit more going on to complicate it.

I Am Waiting, originally known as Ore Wa Matteru Ze, is a Japanese film noir that mixes elements of a personal drama with gangster thriller segments. This was the first movie for promising young director Kurahara Koreyoshi and its lead actress Kitahara Mie and lead actor Ishihara Yujiro had been working together since Crazed Fruit, originally known as Kurutta Kajitsu, the previous year and ended up getting married three years after the release of this film. This film by Nikkatsu Studio was a commercial success and inspired numerous other film noir releases throughout the late fifties, early sixties and mid-sixties in particular.

This movie pairs up two desperate outcasts. Former boxer Joji whose career has failed under dramatic circumstances is a restaurant owner who dreams of joining his brother who had left one year earlier to work on a ranch in Brazil. Club singer Saeko has narrowly avoided being sexually abused in a cabaret and is on the verge of suicide because she believes to have murdered one of her supervisors. Slowly, the two outcasts start developing feelings for each other but things take a sinister turn when they realize that their lives are more entwined than they could have been anticipating when a group of ruthless gangsters gets involved.

This film convinces on multiple levels. The story has enough little twists and turns to entertain through ninety-one gripping minutes. The desolate settings in a desolate port area show the slow rise of Japan after the humiliating ending of the Second World War. The movie oozes with atmosphere thanks to precise camera and light effects. The soundtrack and title song enhance the melancholic vibes even further. The acting performances are above average and Kitahara Mie and Ishihara Yujiro have excellent chemistry throughout. The film smoothly develops from a personal drama into a gangster thriller and ends on an emotionally and physically intense note.

To keep it short, I Am Waiting or Ore Wa Matteru Ze, is an atmospheric film noir that fluidly mixes personal drama and gangster thriller and convinces most with authentic settings, clever camera and light effects and gripping acting performances. Genre fans as well as cineasts interested is Japan's post-war cinema from the forties, fifties and sixties should certainly give this movie a try. Contemporary audiences might however find this film somewhat old-fashioned and overtly melodramatic and should start their discovery of the film noir genre with American classics instead.

A bar owner on the waterfront takes action to prevent a young woman from killing herself. This leads to a nice relationship, but both characters are carrying around deep secrets. The young man was a promising boxer but one night a man provoked him into a fight and he killed him, losing any chance of realizing his dream. This has led to depression and hope of changing his life in some way. His brother has supposedly gone to Brazil and is getting things ready for them to farm some land. The odd thing is that there has been no word from the him. The young woman is a lounge singer, and she is hooked up with some bad guys who want her back. Neither of them can seem to get rid of their respective pasts. Soon, the two stories become intertwined. This isn't bad but it is slow moving and meandering. Also, there is some unfinished business at the end.

This Japanese noir from director Koreyoshi Kurahara is gritty and cool, taking us to smoky pool halls, sleazy bars, and cabarets filled with young people dancing to western music. Yujiro Ishihara makes quite a leading man; he plays a tough guy with a past he's trying to escape from and a dream of moving to Brazil that's mysteriously disappearing. He oozes confidence as he stands up to gangsters and tries to protect a cabaret singer (Mie Kitahara) who's run away from them. The two make quite a pair and I was surprised to learn from Alicia Malone at TCM that aside from marrying in real life, they made 24 films together. The plot to this one is a little contrived in some ways, such as the number of guys that have been killed in barroom brawls and just how easily gangsters will hand over a gun, but it works nonetheless. Very satisfying.

A simple story (though its premise gives hope of something better) whose length depends to an uninteresting degree on portraying endlessly brutal fights between the protagonist (on the whole, a likable fellow) and gangsters dressed in clothes borrowed from American film noir. The love story which begins the narrative gets no more than a glance while following the protagonist's quest to find and then avenge his brother, but that relationship is also left barely examined in favor of the fights in various locales. Nor does the film explain in any way the enslavement of the singer. I was left with many irritated questions, including the fundamental one of wondering why directors think humans can sustain dozens of repeated blows to the head and gut and continue to fight for another ten minutes as though it was the first round. It's a form of laziness, a substitute for knowing and telling the story. .