Red Angel

Red Angel (1966) directed by Yasuzo Masumura is just another impressive film that makes me wonder why he isn't better known outside of Japan. This is yet another powerful, subversive film that embodies what the New Wave was all about-shaking up the status quo. It was written by Ryozo Kasahara and based on a novel by Yoriyoshi Arima, Red Angel has to be counted among the great Japanese war movies of all-time. This is no simple humanistic take on WWII, within the first twenty minutes there is a rape and a graphic amputation of a leg-complete with bone chilling sawing sounds on the score. This film is not for the squeamish. Ayaka Wakao, who seems to be Masumura's muse, plays Sakura Nishi, who is sent to the Manchurian front where she learns the brutal realities of the war first hand through the rape and many amputations and bullets removed from soldiers who seem to have a 50-50 chance of survival in such conditions. She is well-meaning and a bit sensitive and feels that her complaints about the soldier who raped her got him sent back to the front early, which in this film means certain death. Later she tries to comfort a double arm amputee, who feels that he won't have that sort of comfort again, so kills himself by jumping off a roof. At another station near the front there is an outbreak of cholera among the comfort women, imagine admitting that comfort women existed! But of course they seems to be Japanese "volunteers" (but it is still hard to image them appearing in a film made today). She eventually falls in love with a well-meaning doctor, Dr. Okabe (Shinsuke Ashida), who is numbing the reality with drink and morphine. The morphine has made him impotent, but Nishi helps wean him off it so that they can a last fling before they are overrun by the Chinese army. During this sequence a young nurse Nishi has brought along, in order to protect and look after, is killed before her eyes. Nishi emerges as the lone survivor finding her lover dead on the battlefield. It is a bleak and somewhat exploitative war film that is astonishing in the fact that the studio signed off on such a dark and truthful film about the war.