La Terreur des huit heures

Seijun Suzuki's 5th film, in just his second year as a director, was a little too goofy for me early on. The premise is that a group of Japanese citizens from all walks of life find themselves cramped together on an overnight bus after their train gets canceled. It's a device that's been used in other notable films to create a microcosm of society and reveal the idiosyncrasies of people. One of the faults of the film, however, is that it exaggerates things a little too much, undercutting the tension and any of the social messages it's making. For example, while driving at night, several people are so cartoonishly frightened they make Shaggy and Scooby Doo look brave. Another is when a baby is in critical condition following her mother's unsuccessful murder-suicide attempt, and a guy gets up to start a sing-along. There are several others.

On the other hand, Suzuki does get some nice points in. I think there's something symbolic in the bus being taken over by the two armed robbers. The society with all its types, struggling to enjoy the ride harmoniously with one another, are suddenly in the hands of cruel madmen, rather like being under an authoritarian government. It's also telling that one of the heroes is a woman who after the war worked as a prostitute on the army bases of the occupying US force, and another is a man whose wife left him while he was away during the war, prompting him to a crime of passion. Those traumatized the most by the war, the ones whose standing in society has dropped the most, have deeper souls than the entitled rich, and are certainly more likeable. Unfortunately, there was an ugly moment condemning the woman not just because she's a prostitute, but because she had given herself to black American servicemen, and it's not clear the film condemns this racism.

The film lacks subtlety and a certain lightness of touch, but Suzuki is economical in telling the story, with the runtime coming in at a brisk 78 minutes. It's a bit of a mixed bag, but worth seeing.

After a typhoon causes a landslide which blocks the railroad tracks and prevent the passenger train from going any further, a few people decide to take their chances aboard an old bus even though they realize that the roads are quite hazardous. To make matters even worse they are informed by a radio broadcast that two extremely dangerous bank robbers are somewhere in between where they are now and their destination. But since these passengers are in a hurry, they decide to proceed on bad roads into the pitch-black night and take their chances. Unfortunately, the thugs they were warned about do indeed intercept the bus and from their point on their lives are in great jeopardy. Now, rather than reveal any more, I will just say that this film didn't resonate with me all that much due in large part to the exaggerated drama displayed by some of the characters. Of course, it is also possible that the director was attempting to use these characters as symbols of the current society in post-war Japan but, even so, I still wasn't that impressed. That's not to say that this was a bad film by any means, but again, I just couldn't get that interested in it, and for that reason I have rated it accordingly. Average.

Some critics of Seijun Suzuki tend to bifurcate his career into two largely disparate chapters, downplaying his mid-1950s Nikkatsu assignments in favor of his later transcendental visions. Still, "Eight Hours of Fear" is an exceptional work inspired by John Ford's "Stagecoach" with a Hitchcockian flavor, especially the dazzling opening sequence in a train station where a crowd of hapless travelers are stranded. Some opt for a harrowing detour in a sketchy bus through treacherous backroads that would make a unit production manager blanche. Given the movie's relatively short running time and some coverage holes, I suspect filming must have been a challenge. Suzuki and cinematographer Kazue Nagatsuka capture the ruggedness of mountain exteriors, decrepit bridges, and crumbling dirt roads, casting geography as an uncredited villain.

There are other bad guys aboard; a convicted double-murderer, and a pair of fleeing bank robbers with seriously venomous traits, though seemingly immune from random police. Here, Suzuki foretells the more extreme criminal nastiness and violence that would bloom across a decade of his later gangster classics. The rest of the cast is a ragbag of road trip characters, some with cheeky comedic overtones, others revealing a wealth of empathy and compelling backstories. Suzuki brings out the best in each. Millions in stolen loot, an assortment of ladies lingerie, and an ailing baby on board are among their carry-on luggage. His bumpy ride is never complacent, won't stop shifting gears, shot after shot. Takio Niki scores with fresh incidental and main title music, some featuring a well-orchestrated theremin. Enjoy the ride!

EIGHT HOURS OF FEAR (aka HACHIJIKAN NO KYOFU, 1957) offers a classic suspense plot focused on a group of people confined to a small space under threat from criminals who have taken control of them. In this case, it's a small rural bus containing about 15 passengers on their way to make a train to Tokyo after the train line they meant to ride has stopped service due to a landslide. The bus is then stopped and boarded by a pair of criminals fleeing with the proceeds of a bank robbery. The passengers constitute a microcosm of Japanese postwar society and their numbers include a businessman and his arrogant wife; a lecherous lingerie salesman with crude personal habits; a radical student couple given to singing Russian work songs; a despairing single mother with her baby; an aspiring actress on her way to an audition; a seasoned sex worker lamenting the closing of American bases in Japan; an old couple going to visit their daughter; and a detective escorting his prisoner, a convicted murderer. The driver is an old man who works rural mountain routes and the rickety bus is a relic of an earlier age. The movie itself, although filled with references to World War II and postwar problems, plays like it could have been filmed and staged twenty years earlier. It has the feel of a much older movie and deliberately recalls such Hollywood movies of the 1930s as Frank Capra's IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT, much of which also takes place on a long bus trip through back roads, and John Ford's STAGECOACH, but with a much darker edge than either of those films.

The characters are informed early about bank robbers on the loose and their bus ride is marked by fear of a potential encounter. It quickly becomes clear that the more "respectable" passengers are the most cowardly and the least reliable in a crisis. The first major setback occurs when the single mother and her baby go missing and are discovered unconscious in the river over which they've just crossed by bridge after taking a break on the road. The prisoner turns out to have been an army doctor and is recruited to try to save the baby's life as the ride continues. Eventually, of course, the robbers appear on the road and stop the bus and board it. After they've learned of the detective's presence and booted him from the bus, they force the driver and passengers to follow their instructions. When they are stopped by rural police, one of the robbers holds a gun on the baby as the others assure the police they've seen nothing out of the ordinary. Quite a bit of suspense develops as the passengers slowly develop a plan to turn the tables on the robbers, culminating in an eventful confrontation on a mountain pass blocked by a landslide.

The scenes in the bus are mostly shot in a studio set with moving backgrounds supplied by rear screen projection. After the robbers enter the story, several major scenes are shot on location in a mountainous region on narrow, treacherous roads. Significant portions of the action move off the road for what must have been a difficult shoot, enhancing the plausibility of the proceedings. The actors are all excellent and make their characters quite believable. (The actor who plays the lingerie salesman is quite funny and reminded me of British comedian Benny Hill.) I'm only familiar with two of the cast members, Nobuo Kaneko, who plays Mori, the army doctor-turned-prisoner, and Hideaki Nitani, who plays the student radical. I wish I knew which actress played the attractive prostitute, who has a secret that's revealed late in the film and adds a whole new layer to her character, while commenting on the plight of women and racial attitudes in postwar Japan. It's hard to identify the cast members since only one of the characters, Mori, is identified by name in the film. (The fact that no one introduces themselves to each other in the film should tell you something about the social mores of this motley group.)

The director is Seijun Suzuki, who would go on to become renowned for the increasingly experimental style he would bring to genre exercises at the Nikkatsu studio, an approach that would irritate the studio bosses and have negative repercussions for his career. While there are occasional bold camera angles and unique editing touches, EIGHT HOURS OF FEAR was still early in his career and is comparatively conventional compared to such later works as BRANDED TO KILL and TOKYO DRIFTER. To be honest, I tend to prefer the earlier films to his later ones. I saw this film in a 35mm print at a Seijun Suzuki retrospective held in November 2015 at the Walter Reade Theater (Film Society of Lincoln Center) in New York. The series was programmed by Tom Vick, author of "Time and Place Are Nonsense: The Films of Seijun Suzuki."