Untamed

I finally tracked down Mikio Naruse's 1957 Taisho era (1912-1926) film Untamed (1957) starring Naruse's frequent muse Hideko Takamine. It is Takamine's ferocious performance as the fiercely independent and industrious Oshima that would place this in the top five of Naruse's films and certainly one of Takamine's finest performances. According to Catherine Russell in her book The Cinema of Naruse Mikio, the film is based on a novel serialized by Tokuda Shusei in 1915 that was adapted by Naruse and screenwriter Yoko Mizutani to incorporate some more contemporary aspects of modern women in the 50s while transporting the heroine back in time to the unpredictability of the Taisho era. Russell reports that Naruse was creating a character that was still present in contemporary Japan-one that was the embodiment of the entrepreneurial spirit and has no place in the traditional order of society. Furthermore, Naruse says that Oshima was the opposite of Yukiko in Floating Clouds-who was dependnent on men and put up with bad behavior and the indiscreet affairs of her lover. She is the opposite in a big way. She disapproves with her adoptive family's first marriage match and escapes to her sister's on the day of her wedding. Her first marriage to the philandering Tsuru (Ken Uehara) ends after a physical fight when she falls down stairs and has a miscarriage. After that she is sent to a inn in the mountains to work off her brother's debts, she soon becomes involved with the married owner of the inn, Hayama (Masayuki Mori), and when found out she is banished to another more remote onsen. Later her father arrives to drag her back to Tokyo because he believes that she has become a prostitute. While back in Tokyo she takes up the tailor trade and quickly hitches her future up with a seemingly compliant tailor Onoda (Daisku Sato), who is less industrious and reliable than she had originally thought. The have frequent fisticuffs and at one point turns a hose on him when he was being lazy in the shop. Later she fights her husband's lover and then leaves him taking the head shop assistant (Tatusya Nakadai who would later star with Takamine again in A Woman Ascend the Stairs in 1960). So Oshima is as far from Yukiko as can be. The period details of the film as well as the location settings are part of the artistry of the film when western fashions and innovations (bicycles and telephones) came into prominence. A rare non Fumiko Hayashi adapted film about a strong -willed and modern woman taking charge of her own survival-one of Naruse better films overall, full of the cinematic craftsmanship that Naruse had been known for.

Comments

[Norton Wheeler]

Greetings. I would like to watch Narsue's film, Untamed, and evaluate it for possible university classroom. You say that you "tracked down" the movie. Do you know where I can buy a DVD?