Uchida with sunglasses

A Biography of Uchida Tomu, the Mystery Master

(Continued from page 1)

A Journeyman’s Journey

Uchida as actor in Lights of Sympathy
Uchida as an actor in Henry Kotani’s Lights of Sympathy (1926)

Uchida, after his brief stint as a vagabond, then directed a few features and several shorts for tiny studios. Two shorts, both from 1925, are extant. One of these, the charming 11-minute animated film Tale of Crab Temple (Kaniman-ji engi) – also known as Crab Temple Omen – for which he was credited as director along with Kimura Hakusan and Okuda Hidehiko, is very mysterious, because as far as we know, Uchida was never an animator or even a cartoonist. The other short, the live-action film The Pure Heart (Shonen bidan: Kiyoki kokoro), mixes a contemporary moralistic tale with a slapstick movie-within-a-movie set in the feudal era, and is the earliest example we have of this artist’s tendency to combine two or more genres within the same movie.

After signing with Japan’s oldest major studio, Nikkatsu, and passing through a brief period as an assistant director – apparently, his previous directorial experience didn’t count with his new employers – in 1927 he helmed for the studio his first important film, the lost sports comedy Three Days of Competition (Kyoso mikkakan).1 (The vast majority of his subsequent prewar productions would be for Nikkatsu.) The confusion about his debut – 1922 or 1927 – may stem from the fact that Uchida’s period of vagabondage began after the quake, in 1923: that is, after his career as a director had just begun but before starting his stint as assistant director at Nikkatsu.

Uchida directed 29 films of various lengths in the nine-year period between 1927 and 1935, inclusive, more than three per year on average. This seemingly astonishing output was actually not unusual for filmmakers of the time. Mizoguchi, Ozu, Gosho and Naruse were all similarly productive in their prewar careers. Probably they had to be in order to eat. It was only after the war that prominent directors became big celebrities and were compensated enough to make movies at a less furious rate… though interestingly, this was not true of Uchida for the decade between 1955 and 1965, in which he was very nearly as prolific as he had been before the war, as noted later in this essay.

Among the most important films Uchida released during this early period was the 1929 comedy A Living Puppet (Ikeru ningyō, 1929), which placed fourth in the annual critics’ poll  held by Kinema Junpo [Cinema Times] film magazine, to which I will refer hereafter as “KJ.” It would be the first of 13 placements of Uchida’s films in the KJ Best Ten lists over the course of his career. (Both the publication and its annual critics’ poll still exist to this day.) It’s to be regretted that this satire about the rise and fall of a capitalist con man, played by Uchida’s regular leading man at the time, Kosugi Isamu, is no longer extant: it seems probable that the film brought a salutary dose of wit and irony to the sometimes strident “left-tendency” (keikō eiga) genre of the time. Interestingly, Uchida admits in his memoir that the film was a mere company assignment and that he had had no particular interest in Leftism prior to this period. (He was in his early 30s.) It was only after he made this film that he began to study Leftist theory seriously for the first time.

Uchida in 1929, a few months before the comedy Sweat was released.

A sunnier take on such class-driven concerns was the short feature Sweat already mentioned, released in the same year. It’s a lightweight but occasionally quite amusing Harold Lloyd-style comedy, influenced by Ernst Lubitsch, about a rich, spoiled idiot who loses everything, but finds happiness in hard work and love.

It was also during this time period that Uchida extended his satirical talents to the period film, with the lost comedy The Revenge Champion (Adauchi senshu, 1931), starring the 14-year-old actress Yamada Isuzu, later to become legendary. (More than a quarter-century later, in 1957, Uchida and Yamada would team up again for The Horse Boy (Abarenbo kaido).) This work provides the earliest evidence of his skill at the jidai-geki (that is, feudal-era) film. The movie’s premise is intriguing, since the plot apparently mocked the whole feudal obsession with revenge, which drove, and would continue to drive over the decades, the plots of countless such films. The critics were certainly intrigued, as the movie won sixth place in that year’s KJ Best Ten poll.

Sometime during this period, Uchida married. His older son, Issaku (1928-1983), would grow up to become a television director active in the 1970s. Another son, Yusaku, born 1934, would eventually become an executive for Toei, his father’s main studio during the postwar period.

The Young Master

Image from Policeman
A scene from Uchida’s Police Officer (1933)

After a time, Uchida became fed up working for Nikkatsu and, according to this website, he left that studio to set up an independent company with six directing colleagues, including Itō Daisuke, Murata Minoru and Tasaka Tomotaka, who called themselves “The Team of Seven” (nananin-gumi). This venture quickly failed, and for a few years, Uchida went to work for the minor studio Shinko. By 1936, he was back at Nikkatsu.

One movie Uchida made for Shinko has survived, and it’s his earliest to be widely reviewed (at least on the Internet) in our own time: Police Officer (Keisatsukan, 1933), a.k.a., Policeman. This film did not win a place in its year’s KJ Best Ten poll, which is strange, because it’s one of the most viscerally exciting silent action films I’ve ever seen from any country, particularly in its astonishing concluding chase sequence, which is worthy of what Fritz Lang was doing at the same time in the German sound film.2 Many commentators accuse this movie of right-wing sympathies because of its apparent veneration for the police and because the criminal is a Communist bank robber. But in his memoir, Uchida argued convincingly that the propaganda in the film was imposed on him by the police, who were partly sponsoring it, and that he had merely set out to make a movie dramatizing an ordinary policeman’s personal suffering, rather than a glorification of the police per se.

An amazing photograph exists from February 1936, showing a group of 18 Japanese filmmakers who have gathered to celebrate the launching of a brand-new organization, the Japan Film Directors Society. They are all dressed in traditional kimono, looking like they’ve all just stepped out of a spa. The photo is the rough equivalent, for Japanese Cinema, of the legendary “Great Day in Harlem” photo from 1958, in which 58 jazz artists posed for posterity in front of a brownstone in northern Manhattan.


Most directors of any importance in mid-1930s Japan appear in this picture. At the extreme left in the front row is Uchida’s bespectacled mentor, Kinugasa Teinosuke. Young, mustachioed Yamanaka Sadao, the greatest prodigy in Japanese film history, is also sitting in the front row, grimacing, with arms folded – two years later, as a common soldier, he would die in China at the age of 28. The man to his left, crouching, is Itami Mansaku, the pioneer jidai geki director, who would also die much too young, right after the war. To his left is frail, sickly Gosho Heinosuke, who would shock his contemporaries by surviving into the 1980s. Two rows behind him sits the usually dour director of movies about women, Naruse Mikio, who’s almost smiling, and right next to Naruse is Uchida’s old friend Inoue Kintarō, who’s definitely smiling. At the right side of the frame, to the rear, elegant Ozu Yasujirō poses, cigarette in hand, and standing at the extreme right is pale Mizoguchi Kenji, thumbs tucked in his belt, looking like a king in a relaxed mood. And sandwiched between Ozu and Mizoguchi is a mysterious standing figure with very light hair and an absolutely unreadable expression on his face, looking… well, not much like a Japanese at all. And that’s Uchida Tomu.

Yagi Yasutarō, the radical screenwriter who co-wrote the script for Theater of Life: Youth Version for Uchida; he would collaborate with the director on four other films.

By 1936, Uchida had more than earned his place among this talented company. In that year, he’d released the very first adaptation of the popular, much-filmed novel by Ozaki Shirō, Jinsei gekijō (Theater of Life). (Uchida in that film only covered the part of the novel about the protagonist’s youth; Part Two was filmed by another director.) This work exemplified a popular trend of the 1930s called the Pure Literature, or junbungaku, movement, which sought to adapt distinguished works of contemporary Japanese literature. By filming acclaimed stories and novels set in modern times, Japanese directors hoped to bring the national cinema up to speed with what was already common practice in Europe and America. And as Arthur Nolletti, Jr. notes in his excellent book on the films of Gosho Heinosuke, “junbungaku literature proved a boon for… the film industry. As canonical literature, it was generally able to circumvent war-time censorship.”3 The critics chose Theater of Life as the number two picture of 1936. (Less than half of this movie, which I have not yet seen, survives today.) It was Uchida’s highest showing yet in any KJ poll.

The following year, he released yet another acclaimed picture, the Naked Town (Hadaka no Machi), unfortunately now lost, which appeared in fifth place in that year’s KJ poll. In this picture, he cast both his regular male leading players, Shima Kōji and Kosugi Isamu, in a tale about a man who, according to Donald Richie and Joseph Anderson, “acts as a guarantor for a friend’s debt and loses everything when the friend fails to pay.” They called this film, because of its realism, “a landmark in the junbungaku movement.”4 At the time, the composer Fukai Shirō admired and praised the fact that no non-diagetic music (that is, music from a source outside the world of the film) was heard on the soundtrack, which he believed enhanced the film’s realism.5

Takihana Hisako and Todoroki Yukiko in Unending Advance (1937)
Takihana Hisako and Todoroki Yukiko in Uchida’s film Unending Advance (1937)

But another film Uchida released in 1937 made an even bigger splash. Director Ozu Yasujirō had published a serialized story in a magazine about a middle-aged office worker who is thwarted in his hopes to build his dream house, due to a change in company policy shifting the mandatory retirement age downward, forcing him out before he can pay for the house. (Apparently, Ozu published the story because he was certain that Kido Shiro, the head of his studio, Shochiku, would never allow him to film such a downbeat tale.) Uchida took this modest little anecdote and turned it – with a script by radical screenwriter Yagi Yasutarō – into Unending Advance (Kagirinaki zenshin), a very un-Ozu-like movie, full of anger, bitter irony and fantasy.

Shortly after the salaryman hero, Tokumaru, has been informed that he is being retired against his will, he’s knocked unconscious, and, in an amazing dream sequence, he imagines himself promoted rather than fired, with his sons’ futures secured and his daughter happily married. When Tokumaru regains consciousness, the man, now unhinged, becomes convinced his dream was real, and goes to his (former) office to celebrate his imaginary job and take his colleagues out to dinner to celebrate. The situation becomes so embarrassing that the company’s executives have to call the man’s daughter to take him home. The movie became the first of two Uchida films to win the coveted “Best One” prize in the KJ poll.

This film is also, unfortunately, one of the most regrettably mutilated of all Uchida’s works, suffering from the same cruel corporate insensitivity inflicted on its hero. After the war, Nikkatsu decided to re-release this picture, but edited it in such a fashion that the dream sequence was presented unironically as a real-life happy ending, completely erasing Uchida’s and Yagi’s social criticism. Since the director was in China at the time, he was not around to protest. But when he returned and found out what had been done to one of his most acclaimed pictures, he was incensed, and forbade his former studio from continuing to show the re-edited picture. An unsatisfactory compromise was eventually reached, in which title cards describing the content of the missing footage – which was, presumably, destroyed – were inserted in the final reel, to explain the context and thus retain the original tragic storyline. (It was this version of Unending Advance that I saw and reviewed during the MOMA Uchida retrospective in 2016.)

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Footnotes

  1. Max Tessier, in an article written for a 1997 Uchida retrospective, claims that the director was hired by Nikkatsu in 1926, which make a lot of sense, since the two 1925 films cited above were made for small, independent studios. The speed with which Uchida finished his apprenticeship at Nikkatsu (only a year or less), was not at all unusual for that decade, as the studios, faced with the rapid construction of movie houses all over Japan, needed new, young, eager filmmakers to fill those theaters with fresh product. Mizoguchi apprenticed for only a few months before making his first film, due to the sudden resignation of a veteran director, and Ozu, according to Donald Richie, served as assistant director for less than a year. This is in dramatic contrast to the experience of filmmakers from subsequent generations: for example, Kurosawa Akira would undergo an arduous seven-year apprenticeship as an assistant director and scriptwriter before he was allowed to direct his debut film.
  2. For a variety of reasons, particularly the popularity and power of the silent film narrators known as benshi – who were, of course, eventually rendered obsolete by the sound film – Japan was much slower than the U.S. or Europe in adopting sound technology. The first successful full talkie was Gosho Heinosuke’s classic 1931 comedy, The Neighbor’s Wife and Mine (Madamu to nyōbō); by contrast, in the same year in America, virtually the only silent film released was Chaplin’s City Lights. But silent films continued to be made in Japan, though with rapidly decreasing frequency, throughout the 1930s and even the early 1940s. For additional information on this era, see the essay by Freda Freiberg, “The Transition to Sound in Japan,” from History on/and/in Film, pp. 76-80, O’Regan and Shoesmith, eds. History & Film Association of Australia (Perth), 1987 (available online here)
  3. Nolletti Jr., Arthur. The Cinema of Gosho Heinosuke: Laughter Through Tears, pp. 45-46. Indiana University Press, 2005. ISBN: 0253217253.
  4. Richie, Donald and Anderson, Joseph L. The Japanese Film, Art and Industry: Expanded Edition, pp. 121-122. Princeton University Press. 2018. ISBN: 9780691187464.
  5. Shibata, Kotaro (Waseda University, Tokyo) “‘Realism’ in late 1930s Japanese Films and Shiro Fukai’s Accompaniment Music: Contemporary Arguments for the Rejection of Non-diegetic Music.” Aesthetics No.21 (The Japanese Society for Aesthetics), (2018): 149-161, available online here.