This film is about nothing but a hectic pace of modern life. Crisply photographed, edited and directed, Yuzo Kawashima’s Hakone-Yama (1963) drives you through the world of highly-charged competition among corporations. It is fast, loud, vulgar, and mean. It is loosely based on the actual event at the time. It is timely, sensational and dirty. Most of all, it is energetic.
[Edit 2014.6.15: Added the trailer for this film at the end of this article.] Gray fluorescence fills a phone booth as bleakly as gray dusk outside. A pale-faced middle-aged man talks into a receiver in a rather frustrated tone: No, I can’t come home tonight. I will be away for a while. How about kids? Are they good? Bye bye. He hangs up the phone. He steps out of the booth into incessant high-pitch noise outside. Above him, the brooding gray sky silently pushes him into the noises of Tokyo. It is the last day of his life. Me No …
The Museum of the Moving Image (New York) is hosting the Series on Mizoguchi films during this May. The program includes many Mizoguchi’s works rarely seen, and one of them is war-time Jidaigeki, Meito Bijomaru (名刀美女丸, 1945).
