Ore wa matteru ze

A good movie with interesting characters and mood that sort of falls apart at the end when everything gets rushed to a conclusion. It's almost a classic, but just needed a bit more work to push it over the edge.

What a great Japanese from my box of World Noir No.1 from the splendid Radiance blu-ray company. Right from the start it is wonderful and we see a bar, cafe with neon and on the waterfront and a steam train carrying goods in front of us. Yujiro Ishihara one of the stars that I have never seen before is great and we see Mie Kitahara the lovely girl I have once seen her in Crazed Fruit (1956 ). Together we see them both wearing those noir macs. The dialogue is fine and just the style and hard as we like it, the cinematography is also just as we like it as the tropes and the cliche but some new and different. He used to be a boxer and can fight and she used to sing, 'I'm a canary that forgot to sing' but she does remember. And there are the thugs that make us smile but they can be tough and towards the end the dialogue changes and the fight ends in the jazz club. I know it was a bit silly now and again but I loved it.

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.

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.

I Am Waiting (1957)

A Japanese kind of noir flavored crime drama that uses tropes and cliches to their max. And it works. There is the woeful beautiful woman and the troubled handsome man, and they meet in ways that make their relationship complicated. Some thugs get in the way, the past has its grim details resurface, and a couple of side characters give the main pair color and life.

It's kind of great in a B-movie way. The filming (camera and lights) by Kurataro Takamura is terrific, and helps hold it up even if the writing is sometimes a bit obvious. The acting is solid, maybe even very good, but the characters are made to play types that don't allow for as much development as you might like.

In all these ways the film is a lot like the average noir. But it doesn't hold a candle to a great American noir. The editing is sometimes awkward, the story a hair too simple (despite all the unnecessary flashbacks), the good and bad guys a bit too simple in their motivations. I think you can love this movie for exactly these things, but know it ahead of time.

Takamura is terrific, it has to be repeated. The long fight scene near the end, and the final long take before the credits, are both first rate stuff. This is director Koreyoshi Kurahara's first film, and if a novice feeling sometimes shows, the movie also reveals a bold talent and reckless love of cinema, which is really all that matters.