Photo above: Uchida Tomu (left) directing actor Tsukigata Ryūnosuke in a dramatic scene in A Bloody Spear at Mount Fuji (Chiyari Fuji, 1955) – the very first Uchida film reviewed on this site, nearly four years ago.

Note: I am capping my series of reviews (29!) of the films of Uchida Tomu with this post.¹ This is not necessarily the final post I will ever publish on this site, though it will definitely be the last for the time being, as I’ve now achieved the goal I set for myself when I began work on the site in June 2021, exactly four years ago. These random notes are an attempt to sum up what I have learned over those four years and the meaning of that amazing experience.

The Ghost-Friend

This blog would never have existed if the late Uchida Tomu had been, for me, merely a filmmaker I happened to like and admire. For me there are a great many such moviemakers about whom it would never, ever occur to me to launch my own blog, never mind such an elaborate one as this. But Uchida is an artist who tends to inspire in his fans a passionate, personal response to his work, and more than once in these last four years, I’ve felt Uchida’s presence as a kind of “ghost-friend,” urging me on in my seemingly impossible quest. I certainly regard his films, the best of them, as a very personal gift, and the enormous trouble it took just to view all of them – including two trips to Japan, the first when the country was still in COVID lockdown – was more than rewarded by my ever-shifting and expanding sense of his achievement as an artist.

And if I were to add that discovering Uchida’s body of work when I did was an emotionally and even spiritually redemptive event, that would be overstating a complicated experience… yet such an exalted claim wouldn’t be totally inaccurate, either. The chief goal of any aspiring artist – in a sense, the only goal – is to survive his or her death through the power of art, and for me, Uchida succeeded more than he could ever have imagined. And I’m far from the only one who believes this, as the small but passionate membership of the International Uchida Tomu Appreciation Society – IUTAS – as shown on our Members Page, can attest.

Here’s another example. During the 2016 retrospective of Uchida’s work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, I recall hearing, after a screening of The Horse Boy, several excited male movie fans in the audience loudly proclaim “Uchida is better than Kurosawa!” I didn’t happen to agree with them, as I consider Kurosawa Akira to be cinema’s finest director to date, but I certainly understood where those guys were coming from. The Horse Boy was a movie that, like most of the others in that series, only a master could have made, and the fact that these men probably had never even heard of Uchida prior to this retrospective doubtless filled them with both delight and puzzlement. Who had been hiding the work of this genius for so long, and why?

In my Introduction to this series of blog posts, I suggest possible reasons why Uchida was and remains so very obscure, especially in the West, so I won’t rehash them here. But what I will say is that it’s a very different experience to discover artistic genius in an individual who is world-famous and almost universally celebrated (such as Kurosawa) than to find it unexpectedly in an artist so unheralded that many noteworthy American scholars of Japanese Cinema have never so much as mentioned his name. To put it another way, it’s a different matter entirely to encounter a treasure in a palace or a museum than to find one in a cave totally hidden from the world… particularly since you can then make it yours.

Assessment

I have no idea – and because so many of his prewar films have been lost, neither does anybody else – whether Uchida ever made, in his long career, even one truly bad film. What I do know now is that he never made a bad movie that has survived into the 21^st Century. He did, admittedly, make some dull ones (Crown of Life and The Thief Is Shogun’s Kin come uppermost to mind), but these are astonishingly few. In my assessment of any artist – and this applies not just to filmmakers, but to anybody working in any creative medium – my five most-prized virtues are consistent intelligence, taste, range, depth and power. Uchida possessed all five of these qualities – particularly range – in superabundance, which would alone place him in the ranks of the world’s greatest film artists.

If I were to compile a list of my Top Twenty favorite Japanese movies of all time, three films made by Uchida – Earth, Hero of the Red-Light District and A Fugitive from the Past – would definitely appear on it, with Fugitive ranking among the Top Ten. If I then expanded my list to the Top Fifty Japanese films, at least five more Uchida films would need to be added: Police Officer, Unending Advance (despite Nikkatsu’s inexcusable butchering of the film after the war), A Bloody Spear at Mount Fuji, Chikamatsu’s Love in Osaka and The Mad Fox. And if I expanded the list still further to 100 films, four more Uchidas would probably join it: Twilight Saloon, Rebellion from Below, The Horse Boy, and the director’s strange and intriguing final film, Swords of Death. That’s twelve films out of a hundred, a little less than one-eighth of the entire list. Not a bad outcome at all… for an allegedly “minor” filmmaker.

The above overview still manages, however, to leave out some significant movies. The excellent drama about racism, The Outsiders, for example, is Jasper Sharp’s most admired Uchida film, just as the dark domestic melodrama A Hole of My Own Making was the late director Oshima Nagisa’s favorite. And there’s also the impressive trapped-miners thriller, The Eleventh Hour (yet another film about racism), as well as the five-part Miyamoto Musashi epic, which a lot of people seem to like much more than I do. It’s amazing, yet not at all surprising, how very different each person’s unique experience of Uchida’s art is.

For me, what most distinguishes Uchida from Hollywood Cinema – much of which, it should be said, he loved and admired – is that when I think about his films, I don’t recall brilliant dialogue or stellar performances (though there are, of course, many of the latter in Uchida’s work), so much as individual moments of almost uncanny power. These include the amazing cat-and-mouse chase through urban alleyways in Police Officer; or the farmer Kanji and his daughter Otsugi stepping out into the predawn darkness to start working in the fields at the beginning of Earth; or the hapless servant Genta futilely pleading for his life in A Bloody Spear at Mount Fuji; or Sano Jirō’s mad rampage in Hero of the Red-Light District. Most striking of all is the murder of Yae the prostitute in A Fugitive from the Past, which is more powerful and disturbing and, yes, more erotically charged than any killing in the collected works of Alfred Hitchcock. And as I pointed out in my review of Hero, a scene like Sano Jirō’s psychotic break, as well as the other scenes I just mentioned, would never work as they do if Uchida had not also mastered the fundamentals of film storytelling: plot, theme and, above all, characterization.

Uchida the Subversive

As recounted on page four of my Biography of Uchida on this website, during the war Uchida unfortunately succumbed to the allure of Fascist imperialism, declaring at one point how wonderful it would be to die for Japan. But once the war was over, he almost immediately went over to the opposite side ideologically, embracing the romance of Communist revolution and even teaching Soviet film editing techniques to young Chinese and North Korean film students.

Returning chastened to a Japan in the grip of the Cold War, he would forever after downplay his political past. But thankfully, one conviction he retained, as reflected in his postwar movies, was never to “punch down”: his sympathies were always with the downtrodden, the humiliated and injured, never with the elites or the powerful in general. This was one of several traits that made him akin to the younger generation of humanist filmmakers, such as Kurosawa.

One of the most subversive aspects of Uchida’s work vis-à-vis his own national culture is, I believe, his attitude towards ganbare, the popular Japanese command that can roughly be translated as “do your best.” As the blogger for Japanonfilm points out, this sentiment, or some variation upon it, “shows up so often in Japanese movies that it might be taken for a national motto.” The general idea is that if the Japanese, collectively, simply give their all to whatever they’re doing, everything will, indeed must, come out right. And thus a big part of Uchida’s integrity as an artist, I think, is that he clearly doesn’t believe this. Almost nobody in his films (with the possible exceptions of the opera singer in Twilight Saloon or the Teruzo (“William Tell”) character in Rebellion from Below) is saved by doing his or her best. This is particularly true of Inugai in Fugitive, who, with the help of stolen loot, rises impressively from filthy tramp to local captain of industry, only to be undone by an almost literal ghost from his unsavory past.

Which is another way of saying that Uchida – unlike, say, Jean Renoir – presents a tragic rather than a progressive vision of life in his films. It’s a matter of debate whether this pessimistic viewpoint evolved from his Marxist learning or his Buddhist leanings: both these aspects of his thought are very strong in his postwar work, particularly Fugitive. The latter film is especially interesting as a fusion of the two aspects of his theory of violence, which is depicted either as an inevitable result of society’s contradictions – as posited by the philosophy of Mao Tse-tung, which Uchida absorbed while in China – or as an unavoidable result of dukka, or existential human pain, as posited by classic Buddhism.

Yet the film’s unforgettably eerie final shot implies a miraculous resolution of both these tensions, as we witness, accompanied by haunting choral voices scored by Tomita Isao, an image of the earth in perfect equilibrium, as it might have appeared at the moment of creation, before humans arrived to spoil it. This is one of the two transcendently beautiful moments in all Uchida’s cinema.²

Uchida the Star?

I have sometimes thought: what if Uchida and his films actually became popular in the West? Not Kurosawa-level or Ozu-level popular – that would be too much to hope for – but as well-known and esteemed as, say, Ichikawa Kon’s or Kobayashi Masaki’s works are? Would that satisfy me? More to the point, would I even like Uchida’s movies anymore, or as much, if most critics and film buffs in America, or at least those who cared about Japanese Cinema, knew his films well and sang their praises?

My investigation into Uchida’s life has led me to the conclusion that the man always seemed to have viewed himself as something of a failure. He was a Romantic, and Romantics are by nature dissatisfied with mere reality. His finished films, impressive as they were, may have fallen far short of the ideal versions conceived in his mind. In the postwar era, he was often compulsively, dangerously busy, despite his very poor health, perhaps in the hope that his next movie might meet his (unattainable) ideal. The fact that two significant films of his, The Horse Boy and The Mad Fox, received no validation at all from Western audiences and critics when they were entered unsuccessfully in foreign film festivals – Berlin and Venice, respectively – may well have reinforced these dark feelings.

So, for his restless spirit’s sake, I sincerely look forward to the day when the world finally agrees with me that Uchida Tomu is a major, indeed essential, figure in the history of World Cinema. If that means that I’ll have to abandon my proprietary feelings towards him – the sense that he is my auteur, a precious secret shared with only a few fellow obsessives – so be it. And if this website, in its modest way, brings that day just a little bit closer, I’ll have served my ghost-friend well.

1. Actually, there’s just one film of Uchida’s that I know still exists that I’ve been unable to see: the 1959 feature Voyage to Patagonia: Crossing the Great Glacier (Nanbei Patagonia tanken: daihyoga o yuku), which was, as far as I know, the director’s only documentary. For my second trip to Japan, I made a good faith effort to schedule a screening to view this work, only to be told by the institution that owns the one existing print that it was damaged in a recent flood, and thus needed to be restored before it could be screened again. This news did not greatly concern me, as: 1) Uchida obviously did not journey to Patagonia to shoot the footage, but only edited footage that other filmmakers had shot; 2) he was credited as the film’s “supervisor” rather than its director, though the work is nevertheless listed in most Uchida filmographies, including mine; 3) it is not even known whether the film was commercially released at the time it was made. The fact that I am able to shrug off such a setback with a smile proves that my Uchida obsession has not degenerated into morbid fanaticism – at least not yet.
2. The other such moment is the mysterious and haunting “crying baby” scene in Hero of the Red-Light District, as I describe it in my review of that film.