1h 37min | Drama, War | 6 August 1952 (Japan)
Director: Kaneto Shindô
Stars: Nobuko Otowa, Osamu Takizawa, Masao Shimizu
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0044497/
Watched online; good print on small screen.
Last week I watched a 9'1945 film (maybe Duffy's Tavern; I didn't write about this) where a couple of people in a bar sang, or maybe just said, something very insensitive about the war with Japan. It made me wonder what Americans knew about our dropping the atom bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and what the results were. Did people realize it was worse than when we destroyed Dresden? Or was it all just <shrug> the effects of war?
So I searched for films that had keyword atomic bomb, and didn't find anything terribly interesting. That was a week ago. Today, IMDb reinstated the ability to search for words within plot summaries, so I gave it another try. I found a few more candidates, and this sounded very interesting: what were the Japanese thinking?
This film should be part of any high school WW2 curriculum. It's really too long for 55 minute periods, and watching it in 2 pieces would likely hurt the momentum. But it is fascinating to see that, 4 years after the bomb, people are still living (and dying early) in Hiroshima. They know about radiation poisoning, but not enough to know they should get away from there? The film portrays the city as still being a lot of rubble (I wonder how Dresden looked in '49).
Given that the story looks at 4 children, it's not terribly sentimental or emotionally wrenching. I don't know whether that should drive my rating up or down. But I'm not a fan of silent or subtitled movies, because I can't do anything else but sit and watch. I had NO trouble sitting through this film with that constraint. THAT says a lot.
The characters in this film blamed War (not The war, but war in general) and the A-bomb for their suffering. No mention was made of America or the Allies that I heard or saw in the subtitles.
It's not meant to be a documentary, but I have a lot more questions, like when did we really begin to understand how poisonous radiation was, and how long it lasted? After all, the American film that killed so many cast/crew from cancer because they filmed near an A-bomb test site was The Conqueror (1956), with production date 1954. This web article was the first hit for my google search, and is pretty good (and hopefully accurate).
Notice this film was released on the anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing, August 6, 1945.
This is the 3rd film of director Kaneto Shindô. I've watched one other film where he has writing credit for the Japanese original: Hachi: A Dog's Tale (2009; motion picture "Hachiko monogatari", '87), with Richard Gere, which I rated 7 in 3'2017 (before I started blogging). Notice that this director was born and died in Hiroshima, and lived to be just over 100. Not much available on Amazon.
dir. Shindô; 8
P.S. 31Mar'18
Watched some of Cloak and Dagger (1946), where Gary Cooper plays a scientist working on the Manhattan Project who is deployed to Europe to spy on Nazi scientists during the war. While being briefed in his lab, he makes a speech that science will determine how to turn an apple into a bomb, but not how to create an apple. So he's not happy working on the project, and is willing to become a spy. I previously rated the film 5, and didn't find it interesting enough to finish.
