Nishi Ginza Station

 Nishi Ginza Station (1958) is Shohei Imamura's second feature film and was an assignment from the studio as a vehicle for a popular song with the same title of the film by Frank Nagai. This short film comes across as less ambitious than his debut and can also be considered a minor work. But there are some interesting aspects to it. Imamura wrote the screenplay which has some prosaic ideas about human nature. A henpecked husband, who is prone to reality altering day dreams about his idyllic past on a South Pacific island with a local girl "Sally," is left behind for a few days by his wife and kids. His philandering best friend, a veterinarian, whose family has also gone away coerces him into looking for an affair in order to assert his masculinity. Nagai narrates and provides musical interludes throughout. The dream sequences feature a woman-foreign-we know this by her name, "Sally"-obviously a South Pacific Islander name-who appears in black-face. Without giving away too much of the plot, one can expect a happy ending. There is a comic sequence where the doctor's student assistant gives the henpecked husband advice about his upcoming date as if he were giving advice about a female dog. The location scenes of Ginza give the viewer a taste of what it was like in postwar 50s Japan as well.