Kon Ichikawa’s revenge melodrama, set among the kabuki theatres of old Edo, is staged like a play and shot like a dream, and Kazuo Hasegawa is remarkable in two parts at once. The scheming in the middle goes slack; the pictures never do.
Kon Ichikawa’s An Actor’s Revenge is a revenge melodrama that never once pretends it is not a play. The story is an old one: Kazuo Hasegawa had played Yukinojo before, in Teinosuke Kinugasa’s 1935 version, and Kinugasa shares the screenplay credit here with Daisuke Itō. Ichikawa’s idea is to take the warhorse and do it in colour and widescreen with every wire showing. The sets are flats, the moon is a lamp, the street outside the theatre is as painted as the stage inside it, and a thief sits above the action telling us what to make of it. We have seen a good many films that borrow from the theatre. This one moves in.
Setsuo Kobayashi photographs most of it against black. A figure stands in a single pool of light and the rest of the wide frame is nothing at all, so that when Yukinojo crosses a garden at night he seems to be walking across the inside of his own head. Yoshinobu Nishioka’s sets stop where the light stops. A sword fight is played in a bare square of moonlight; a country road is a strip of ground, a painted sky and a wind machine. Shigeo Nishida cuts straight from the stage to the memory the stage has set off, so that Yukinojo’s dead parents arrive in the middle of a snow scene with no dissolve to warn us. It ought to look cheap, and it does not, because the light is always exactly where Kobayashi wants it.
Hasegawa is doing two things at once and doing both well. As Yukinojo, the onnagata, he keeps his voice high and level and his steps small, on stage and off, and lets you see the performance being held in place by will. As Yamitaro the thief he is loud, broad and delighted with himself, and his running commentary is the film’s way of admitting that revenge plots are absurd and worth watching anyway. The device could have been a nudge in the ribs. Hasegawa plays the thief as a man who wishes he had a grievance this good.
What got at us was not the avenger but the girl. Ayako Wakao’s Namiji is the daughter of the man Yukinojo most wants ruined, and he decides to reach the father through her. Wakao plays her with no guile at all, a young woman who thinks she has met someone kind, and the scenes in which Yukinojo courts her in a woman’s robe and a woman’s voice, meaning every word as a lie, upset us more than anything the film does to the men he hates. Ichikawa does not soften this. Nor does he point at it. He lets Wakao’s face do the pointing.
Then there is the music. Masao Yagi and Tamekichi Mochizuki mix shamisen with a jazz combo, so that a samurai crosses a bridge at night to a walking bass. We laughed the first time it happened, and then stopped, because the score is doing the thief’s job: reminding us that this is a show and that we are in on it. Yoshio Ueno dresses the thieves in dark working cloth and the theatre in every colour the dye-house had, and Fujiko Yamamoto’s Ohatsu, the thief who has taken a fancy to the actor, gets the best coat in the film and knows it.
The middle is where the film goes slack. Yukinojo’s plan against the merchants Kawaguchi-ya (Saburo Date) and Hiromi-ya (Eijirō Yanagi) runs on rice, prices and rumour, and Ichikawa is far less interested in it than in the light falling on it, so we lost the thread for a stretch and did not much mind. The lesser thieves, Naritoshi Hayashi’s Mukuzu and Ichikawa Raizō VIII’s Hirutaro, are there for comedy the film could spare. Eiji Funakoshi’s Heima Kadokura, a swordsman who wants Yukinojo dead, is a threat the script keeps remembering and forgetting.
Ichikawa had made The Burmese Harp and Fires on the Plain before this, sober films about soldiers, and nothing in them prepares you for a director this happy to be caught playing. It is a 15 certificate, at 114 minutes, and it needs a dark room: half the frame is black and a lamp behind you will fill it. Watch it in one sitting and let the jazz in.
