ankokugai no bijo aka underworld beauty (seijun suzuki, 1958. japan)

from greenmanreview.com:

Underworld Beauty, shot in atmospheric Scope black and white, is very much like a good solid American film noir from the 1940s, except that it's a Japanese movie from the late 1950s. If John Huston had been Japanese, he would have made this instead of The Maltese Falcon. Which is not to say that Underworld Beauty is of the same level of quality -- it isn't -- but it's flying reconnaissance over very similar territory.

It opens in a shadowy tunnel beneath the Tokyo streets. Michitaro Mizushima, playing a yakuza who has just been released from prison for his role in a diamond heist, retrieves three diamonds and a gun from their hiding place.

He wants to give the diamonds to his yakuza friend who lost a leg during the heist and has been reduced to running an oden stand. (Oden is a hearty, warming soup of vegetables in miso broth, but one gathers from the characters' attitudes that running an oden stand is the equivalent of flipping burgers.)

But giving up the diamonds is not a simple task. This is, after all, a film noir. Their mutual yakuza boss wants the diamonds, the yakuza boss' Peter Lorre-like cackling assistant wants the diamonds, and the crippled friend has a sister (Mari Shiraki) who's running wild, picking up American sailors, and wandering bars in her bra. The sister doesn't want the diamonds, but her cowardly yet fiendish artist boyfriend, whom she poses for topless (with beams, paintings, mannequins, and other opaque items blocking the crucial parts) does. A lot.

Plotting, counterplotting, and mayhem ensues. The hero, the oden guy, the yakuza boss, and his minion attempt to sell the diamonds to a rich American, but they all get held up at gunpoint by masked men. The brother swallows the diamonds, then leaps to his death. (The hand-over occurred atop a tall building, presumably so that if anything went wrong, someone could leap to his death.)

The artist boyfriend, using his anatomical charts for reference, hacks the diamonds from the corpse's stomach while it's lying in state. The diamonds pass from hand to hand, and are hidden in different ingenious locations by just about every major character.

The sister is then kidnapped by villains who torture her by locking her in a sauna. Later she has to take off her shirt so she can shovel coal during the climactic shoot-out, in which she and the hero are trapped in the basement of a bathhouse. (There is a logical reason for this. Honest. It's so they can escape through the coal chute.) Happily, the hero takes off his shirt too. Both are given loving close-ups of their smooth flesh beaded with water and sweat.

This is not great art, but it's extremely enjoyable. In addition to being a fine gangster film, it's an intriguing portrait of post-war Tokyo. All sorts of things have changed since then, but apparently Shibuya has always been a good place to go dancing.

allzine