Production Company	Asahi Kinema
Scenarist	Unknown
Source	Japanese newspaper article (page three)
Cinematographer	Hayakawa Kiyoshi
Performers	Tatsuta Shizue (Natsuko); Hasegawa Kiyoshi (unknown role); Hanazawa Yoshiyuki (unknown role); Uchida Tomu (bus passenger)
Status	Extant (presumably complete)
Photography	Black-and-white
Music	Composer unknown1
Sound	No (except for music score)
English Subtitles	No
Original Release Date	1925 (exact date unknown)
Length	467 meters (two-reel short subject, approximately 15 minutes on video)

Plot Summary

Google translation of Japanese plot summary:

“Shoeshiner Haruo and ‘bus girl’ Natsuko are leading a sweet, newly-married life. Haruo poses as an elite salaryman for a big company in order to win Natsuko’s heart, while Natsuko, for her part, is falsely claiming to be a company president’s secretary. One day when Natsuko sees him shining shoes, his heart is broken and he plans to kill himself. He tries to throw himself under a bus, and the one who comes off the bus in surprise is Natsuko.”

Note: The author would like to express his gratitude to Matsudo Makoto of Matsuda Film Company Ltd. for allowing him to view this film during his recent visit to Japan, both in a private screening and through an online video link. For further information on how to arrange screenings or obtain links for this film or other films in the company’s collection, please go to the company’s website at www.matsudafilm.com.

Note: The author would like to thank Hideko Otake for her help in translating the film’s intertitles.

Note: All screenshots used in this and other posts on this website are reproduced under the Doctrine of Fair Use, and are intended for educational purposes only and not as a substitute for the actual experience of viewing the films themselves. The author receives no profit from this website.

Notes on the Cast

Tatsuta Shizue (not to be confused with the actress Natsukawa Shizue: see my review of Uchida’s The Rowing King) – For about ten years (1925-1935), Tatsuta served as the quintessential “modern girl” (modan garu) of silent Japanese Cinema, and thus more often than not played the heroine’s antagonist rather than the heroine herself. She dropped out of Japan Women’s University to become a photographer, but soon switched her career goal to acting. Ultimately signed by Shochiku, she appeared in many films by genre pioneer Shimazu Yasujirō, as well as films by Naruse Mikio (Love Is Strength: Ai wa chikara da (1930, lost)); Gosho Heinosuke (The Bride Talks in Her Sleep: Hanayome no negoto (1933)); and Ozu Yasujirō (An Introduction to Marriage: Kekkon-gaku nyumon (1930, lost) and Young Miss: Ojōsan (1930, lost)). Following her retirement in 1935, which occurred shortly before the transition to sound films in Japan was more-or-less complete, she opened a successful bar in the Ginza in Tokyo. She died in 1962 at the age of 58.

Commentary and Analysis

In Search of Harold Lloyd

“For those who know Uchida Tomu from his current [late 1950s] films with their powerful and heavy impact on the viewer, it will be surprising to learn that Uchida started out with light and cheerful comedies and adventure films… But Uchida Tomu’s comedic line breaks off with [The Revenge Champion (1931)]. It would be more correct to say that Uchida forgot comedy, forgot it completely, without a trace, as if he had suffered a memory loss… I think about this with great regret. What happened to his comedic talent?” – Iwasaki Akira, prominent Japanese film critic²

We bid a final farewell to Uchida’s prewar period with this very likable pre-Nikkatsu comic short, which may be the oldest surviving film Uchida ever made, with the possible exception of the animated Tale of Crab Temple, also produced by Asahi Kinema. Or at least, I believe it was intended as a short. (Several sources describe it as Uchida’s “first feature.”)

The film begins fairly abruptly, without at first establishing that the man and woman depicted are in fact married, which leads me to believe that there may have existed, at one time, at least one reel prior to the one that begins the version that has survived. In any event, the male protagonist, Haruo, appears in the very first scene running down the street wearing eyeglasses and a straw boater hat, which give away the game immediately: Uchida is here channeling the Hollywood comedies of the bespectacled Harold Lloyd, which were quite popular in Japan at that time, when film audiences were seeking escapist fare.

At first, it seems as if Haruo may be chasing this woman, Natsuko, simply because he wants to meet her, as he is seen spying on her from behind the corner of a fenced-off street as she walks away from him, carrying a parasol. But then he glances at his watch, indicating that he’s late, and is then shown running into an office building in the city. This is followed by an iris-in – a scene transition that was so common in silent films that it’s often used in modern times to parody them – showing Haruo polishing a pair of shoes of a seated man, and we realize that the “important” work that the young man was rushing to is a job as a shoeshine boy in an office building. So Haruo in the first scene had been simply checking to make sure that his wife had left for work so she wouldn’t see where he was going and catch him at his real job.

The witty following shot shows Haruo and the woman with the parasol – his wife, Natsuko – in medium shot, relaxing in a house whose elaborate furnishings they have purchased on credit. (See the Featured Image above.) She’s playing a wind-up gramophone; he’s wearing a bathrobe and smoking a cigarette as if he owns the world. As indicated in the plot summary above, he had lied to her that he works as a corporate executive, as she had lied to him about being a secretary – though to her it’s not quite a lie, because she considers herself the “secretary” of the bus driver for whom she works. We realize that we are in the timeless world of self-important “yuppies” – specifically those who live way beyond their means.

This fragile bubble of marital bliss exists to be burst, which occurs in the very next scene, when Natsuko makes an (unmotivated) appearance at that very same office building. She stops and suddenly realizes that the shoeshine boy at the entrance looks awfully familiar.

Uchida finds exactly the right tone for this scene: absurd, yet still quite painful. This is indicated by Haruo’s ridiculous expression of dismay when he turns around and sees her, as well as her own look of childlike disillusionment.³ Needless to say, Haruo loses both his wife’s respect and his no-nonsense customer, who’s disgusted that the hapless Haruo can’t keep his mind on his (humiliating) work.

Suicide Is Painless

One thing Uchida obviously learned from American comedy is not to avoid extreme situations if they can be exploited for laughs. Thus, Haruo is so dismayed at being exposed as a fraud that he decides to end it all. Successful suicide is never funny, but the loser who is so inept that he fails even at killing himself is inherently funny, however much we may sympathize with the loser’s pain.

Physics itself proves uncooperative. A tree branch to which Haruo ties a rope, at the other end of which he had fashioned a noose, is revealed to be much too flexible to allow him to hang himself. A barrel lying on the bed of a truck to which he ties the same rope simply slides off the moving truck rather than breaking his neck (though just about anybody else would have figured out beforehand that this lame trick wouldn’t work). He tries drowning, but the river into which he flings himself – after carefully putting aside his jacket and straw boater, perhaps as a means for others to identify his corpse – turns out to be only a few feet deep.

Soaking wet and disgusted with himself, he is discovered on the riverbank by a robber. (Cleverly, Uchida shows us the robber’s knife inches from Haruo’s neck before we see him.) When Haruo realizes his life is in danger, he’s ecstatic, and practically seizes the knife to help the stranger plunge it into his own eager breast.

The terrified thief then runs for his life, as if Haruo were the criminal. Haruo chases after him, begging him to come back and finish the job, but in vain. This is by far the funniest bit in the entire movie.

After falling asleep in the woods, Haruo winds up on a city street, where the approach of a bus gives him an apparently foolproof idea. He darts out into the road, and as the driver weaves from side to side to avoid him, he keeps struggling to move into the vehicle’s path. At last he flops down on the asphalt, but the bus stops inches from his head.

The bus girl emerges from the vehicle to examine the victim, only to be startled to find that the man is Haruo… for she is Natsuko. Her own lie now exposed, she runs back into the bus and it drives away. Ironically, Haruo, himself disillusioned, is so angry with her that he loses all desire to kill himself, despite the fact that he is as “guilty” as she is.

The last part of the film, involving a confrontation between Haruo and some bill collectors, which Natsuko, who has just been paid, resolves, is, unfortunately, weaker than the amusing middle section and even more predictable. And it’s just occurred to me that – notwithstanding Iwasaki Akira’s comment quoted above – Uchida never really “forgot” his comic gift. For his funniest films were not his very early ones like this movie, or The Rowing King, or Sweat, but Unending Advance, a gentle comedy about a beleaguered salaryman that ends with the protagonist going mad, and A Bloody Spear at Mount Fuji, a very amusing road movie which nonetheless climaxes in a brutal massacre. In other words, like Shakespeare’s, Uchida’s comic muse functioned best in the shadow of tragedy.

A Glimpse of the Master

This film is notable for one other quite irrelevant but (to me) very interesting reason: it’s the only film Uchida ever directed in which he also appeared as an actor. (It was as an actor in 1920 that he began his fifty-year career in films, with a prominent role in the comedy Amateur Club [Amachua kurabu, lost], directed by his Hollywood-trained mentor, Thomas Kurihara.) His role here is a very modest one, playing a silent bus passenger whose ticket is taken by the heroine. And though his visage is obscured by the hat he is wearing, that very long, thin face is unmistakable.

Alfred Hitchcock was, by most accounts, a somewhat shy man in private life, but the presence of the movie camera brought out the ham in him, and his showy cameo appearances in his films delighted fans so much that he was forced to insert them as early as possible in the narrative so as not to distract the audience. But Uchida apparently didn’t have a hammy bone in his body. In this appearance, he, rather than playing to the audience, appears to want to fade totally into the background; for him, it seems, his brief cameo can’t end soon enough.

So his early decision to switch from acting to directing makes sense. As a director, he can reveal to the audience what he sees and feels, while obscuring the very private man who is doing the feeling and seeing. This is yet another intriguing aspect of the Uchida Mystery.

My IMDb rating

7

This very brief comedy – which resembles, in its “twist” climax, one of O. Henry’s short stories – can still charm audiences a century after it was released, and the hero’s hilarious attempts to kill himself are in hailing distance of Keaton’s or Lloyd’s classic slapstick.

Links

“Homework on Vanity Is Hell” (4/9/24) – Blog post by the katsuben (benshi) who calls herself Yamazaki Vanilla (presumably because she wears a blonde wig), in which she talks about the history of two Uchida films she has narrated: Vanity Is Hell and Moving Tales of Youth: The Pure Heart.

Silent Era website

Athénée Français Cultural Center screening

1990 Pordenone Silent Film Festival program

Program of the 2nd Katsuben Film Festival, affiliated with the 2022 Shinjuku East Side Film Festival, in which Vanity Is Hell was screened with The Rowing King and, appropriately, Buster Keaton’s The Blacksmith

1. The comic score has clearly been composed and recorded in recent times, rather than at the time of original release.
2. Iwasaki Akira. Nihon eiga sakkaron [Theory of Japanese film artists]. Tokyo: Chūō Kōronsha, 1958, pp. 238, 241. Excerpted online (in Russian) as Mastera yaponskovo kino [Masters of Japanese Cinema] at http://fenixclub.com/index.php?showtopic=49120, translated into English by Google Translate (registration is required).
3. It’s unfortunate that we cannot properly identify the actor who plays Haruo, who’s by far the best performer in the film. On the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), other than Ms. Tatsuta, two male actors are listed, but neither is identified by the character he plays, and both of them have only a handful of acting credits as well as some cinematographer credits, which seems very odd. (The similarity of the name of one of the actors listed, Hasegawa Kiyoshi, to that of the film’s credited cinematographer, Hayakawa Kiyoshi, only adds to the confusion.)