Made by an inexperienced Australian filmmaker who had recently left behind a career as a trauma room physician, George Miller's debut, Mad Max, became an action-movie legend that launched a multi-film franchise and forged a superstar out of then-unknown drama student Mel Gibson.
In 1979, even cinematographer Greg Eggby (Warlock, Quigley Down Under) was new to the film business, though you’d never know it from adept camera work rooted in low-to-the-ground shots that put viewers in the driver's seat--or in the path of oncoming traffic. With a shoestring budget, a tight script, and bottomless reserves of resourcefulness, their thoroughly Australian artifact thrilled audiences around the world with minimal dialogue and maximum mayhem, though the original release, unlike Kino Lorber's edition, was unnecessarily dubbed by AIP for American audiences.
As a filmmaker, Miller keeps cliché at bay through his attention to detail even as he hews to revenge-thriller archetype: highway patrolman Max Rockatansky starts with everything and ends with nothing. In a classic Hollywood move, the director introduces him four minutes into the picture by focusing exclusively on his reflective sunglasses and black biker boots.
Gibson's famous blue-eyed visage doesn't materialize for nearly 20 minutes, by which point Max's colleagues have enlisted him to track down Nightrider (Vince Gil), a cackling cop killer joyriding with his girlfriend. The high-speed chase ends in fiery death for the both of them, leading his gang, led by Toecutter (Hugh Keays-Byrne, Fury Road's Immortan Joe), to plot revenge.
After they set a trap for Max's friend, Goose (Gibson's drama school pal, Steve Bisley), that results in a gory outcome, Max decides he's had enough, but instead of quitting the force, he goes on vacation to clear his head before making a final decision. He and Jessie (Joanne Samuel) load up the car with toddler Sprog and hit the beach, picking up a canine companion on the way.
The gang looms closely behind, and when Max's car experiences engine trouble, they close in like outlaws in an old Western. No shrinking violet, Joanne is a fighter who gives Toecutter a swift kick in the biscuits before speeding away, but the gang eventually dispatches dog, wife, and child, leading Max to pick each one of them off before riding off into a mythical future in which he'll become The Road Warrior.
If Miller would play up the post-apocalyptic qualities of his environs in subsequent installments, the look of the first film owes largely to budgetary considerations, since he could turn oil cloth costumes and ramshackle locations into strengths rather than liabilities. The abundant extras include archival featurettes, commentary from Eggby and art director Jon Dowding, and an interview with the ever-expansive Miller (now working on sequel #4).
Decades after the fact, Mad Max remains a kinetic experience spiked with humor, romance, and real-world stunts that offer the kind of visceral excitement computers can't quite replicate. To quote an original tagline, it's a "movie that runs on adrenaline, high octane, and raw nerves!" Highly recommended.
There had been War Is Hell movies before Yasuzō Masumura's The Red Angel, but presenting the battlefront from a woman's eyes was rare at the time. It's still rare. Granted, the women of Kantemir Balagov's Beanpole served on the Russian Front, but that film focuses on one woman's post-war experience. Like Ayako Wakao's Sakura Nishi, Iya serves as a nurse, but unlike Nishi, she entered the field untrained and didn't treat men at the sites where they suffered injuries.
By contrast, 24-year-old Nishi is a well-trained nurse in 1939, stationed at a Tientsin field hospital in Japan-controlled China. She's capable and prepared for what awaits. She's also pretty--a liability. A greater liability: her gender in and of itself. To these men, it only matters that she's young and female.
Though it isn't unusual for a war picture to feature a few bad apples--Platoon and Apocalypse Now come to mind--Masumura, working from screenwriter Ryôzô Kasahara's adaptation of the 1966 novel by Yorichika Arima, takes a more cynical approach, because most every military figure in the film is singularly unpleasant. It's a move that can only have been poorly received in Japan. Irene González-López, a Japanese cinema scholar, confirms my suspicions in her excellent essay for the Arrow Blu-ray, "It did not receive such a positive reception in Japan and still nowadays barely features in Japanese publications on Masumura and Wakao" (even the actress, according to González-López, felt the film was "too much").
If Masumura steers clear of sentimentality, he isn't without sympathy, since he's always on Nishi's side. Though she feels responsible for the bad things that happen to her patients, it's clear that she isn't, but the way her good deeds never go unpunished only reinforces the film's central driving thesis that war corrupts everything it touches.
Though The Red Angel feels epic, it clocks in at a tidy 95 minutes. Masumura introduces Nishi with a few quick brushstrokes before plunging her into the action. She was raised by her aunt, because her parents died when she was young, and that's the extent of her biography. If anything, she might feel unformed if portrayed by an actress of lesser skill, but the role represented Wakao's 15th collaboration with the director. She and Masumura would make five more films (she would also work with Yasujirō Ozu and Kon Ichikawa).
I was particularly struck by the contrast between her characters in The Red Angel and Irezumi (both 1966), since the sex slave-turned-courtesan of the latter--a tattoo of a spider covers her back--is more of a femme fatale.
Five minutes after Masumura introduces Nishi, men swoop onto her like vampires. The most vocal, Pvt. Sakamoto (Jôtarô Senba), rapes her while others hold her down or gawk. It's the worst kind of trial by fire, but Nishi is no shrinking violet. She promptly reports the assault, but the head nurse insists there isn't much she can do, except to send Sakamoto back on to the field, and she only takes that measure because Nishi is his third victim.
Though it sounds like she's letting him off easy, the opposite proves true when Sakamoto ends up in Nishi's care after a mortar blow to the abdomen. As she sees it, she can save him or let him die. In truth, survival was never an option, but she feels guilty for reporting the rape that led to the circumstance that made the fatal injury possible.
Nishi will have life-changing encounters with two other men. She meets the next, Dr. Okabe (Shinsuke Ashida, Crazed Fruit), when she transfers from the field hospital to a frontline facility. A new kind of hell awaits as she assists in an endless series of amputations. Dr. Okabe explains that they lack the resources, medicine above all, to implement less extreme measures. If an injured arm or a leg risks killing the patient: off it goes.
It becomes clear at this point why Masumura, working with cinematographer Setsuo Kobayashi (Fire on the Plains, The Burmese Harp), chose to shoot in black and white even as Irezumi blooms with color: the screen would otherwise be saturated with crimson. As disturbing as The Red Angel may be--and it's plenty disturbing--it really could be worse. Nonetheless, the sound of the bone saw and the sight of a can filled with limbs says it all.
The third man, Pvt. Orihara (Japanese New Wave star Yūsuke Kawazu), is a young soldier who has lost most of both arms. One was lost to an explosive device and the other amputated to stop the spread of gangrene. He's largely healed, except the Japanese army refuses to send him home for propagandistic reasons: if civilians were to see for themselves what happened to him at the front, they would be less likely to support the war: out of sight, out of mind.
He's the only military figure in the film for whom it's possible to feel any sympathy. He's also open about his needs. After Nishi bathes him and helps him to urinate, he asks if she can provide an even more intimate service. It's clear what he means, and Nishi complies. The virginal character at the film's opening has transformed into a sex surrogate, at least for this stranded, forgotten soldier with a fiancée waiting for him back home.
In Nishi’s attempt to build his confidence, and possibly her own, she takes things a step further by booking a room for them at a local hotel. His injuries haven't affected his ability to perform, and she wants to prove to him that he can still please his fiancée, even if there are other things he can't do. They have a pleasant evening, but afterward things take a turn Nishi could not have foreseen. Once again: her good intentions end up backfiring.
Since Nishi has no time to bond with the other nurses, she bonds with Dr. Okabe instead. It's a problematic relationship of a different kind. Dr. Okabe wants to sleep with her, and yet he admits that morphine addiction has rendered him impotent. This is doubly dangerous, because it means he's depleting the supply of a desperately-needed painkiller. When he propositions Nishi, it's mostly because he requires her expertise with the needle. Not feeling she has a choice, she agrees to assist him.
Though there's nothing romantic about the world-weary Dr. Okabe, Nishi falls for him anyway, possibly because her loneliness makes it easy for her to overlook flaws that would loom larger in peacetime. Naturally, this angelic character wants to help him, too, and so she does. In this case, her good intentions don't backfire, but it doesn't matter: war still manages to entirely obliterate her efforts. And that's the pessimistic note on which the film ends.
From start to finish, The Red Angel doesn't mess around. There are no flashbacks to better times. Everything takes place in the present. It's also one of the more brutally honest films I've ever seen about the connection between war and misogyny. Just as the Nazis had their joy division (freudenabteilung), Jewish prisoners forced into prostitution, the Japanese army had comfort women (ianfu), Chinese and Korean women forced into prostitution. Towards the end of the film, a cholera outbreak takes the lives of several of these women before spreading throughout the soldiers' ranks.
As David Desser notes in his historically-rich commentary track, rape during wartime, particularly in Japan, went far beyond the experience of the occasional nurse. It was widespread. Only two years before the events depicted in the film, the Japanese army invaded Nanking, slaughtering 200,000 men and raping and mutilating 20,000 women. Though the Rape of Nanking goes unmentioned in The Red Angel, Masumura provides a glimpse of the mindset that could lead to such an atrocity.
If his film isn't as hallucinogenic as, say, Elem Klimov's Come and See, it ranks among the most uncompromising antiwar films. Though it isn't feminist as we currently define the term, the entire project condemns misogyny, an egregious phenomenon in 20th-century Japan that war would only serve to reinforce. Though it doesn't destroy Nishi after one soul-crushing encounter after another, it's also clear: she's one of the lucky ones.
The Red Angel is out now on Prime Video and Blu-ray from Arrow Video. It includes an introduction from Tony Rayns and a video essay from Jonathan Rosenbaum on Masumura's career. The gist: he did his best work, like this film, with Ayako Wakao and in B&W CinemaScope (or "DaieiScope"). His favorite, which I haven't yet seen, is 1961's A Wife Confesses. Images from Asia Shock, DVD Beaver, Barnaby Page, and Wednesday Dreams.
THE SYSTEM (KL Studio Classics, 1964, UK, 93 minutes)
Oliver Reed shines in The System, released as The Girl-Getters in the US, as a ladies' man at a crossroads in his life. Years before the roles that would come to define him, like Father Grandier in Ken Russell's The Devils, the intense, blue-eyed actor played souvenir photographer Steve "Tinker" Taylor in Michael Winner's 1964 character study.
At first, the 23-year-old seems to have it all. He lives in a seaside resort town where he has his pick of the ladies in town for the summer. He has a job, an apartment, and a group of like-minded friends. Granted, the job doesn't pay much, the apartment is a low-ceiling affair, and the friends are a rowdy lot, but it's a sweet life for a man of minimal ambition (David Hemmings, who plays one of those friends, would go on to portray one of cinema's most iconic photographers in Antoniono's Blow-Up).
Tinker spends his days wandering the beaches of Dover, flirting, snapping pictures, and getting in fisticuffs with rival photographers. Afterward, he asks his subjects for their addresses, and if they're pretty, he shares them with his pals. Once his camera shop boss (The Hill's Harry Andrews) develops the pictures, subjects can pay to claim their copies.
Winner focuses on a climactic summer in which Tinker tangles with an unhappily married woman (Ann Lynn), a busy model (Susan Merrow), and a party girl (Barbara Ferris) desperate to marry and settle down. Once he realizes he's fallen for Nicola, the model, the tables turn as he questions the smallness of his life, but a humiliating afternoon with her upper-crust associates drives home his limited range of options. While out on a date, Nicola asks him, "What happens to these places in the winter? Do they close down?” Then, she adds, "What happens to you in the winter?" "I close down, too, don't I," he quips.
The System is a very British film that compares favorably to the work of Tony Richardson and John Schlesinger in which the wealthy characters hold all of the cards, but it also bears the continental imprint of Federico Fellini, particularly in Nicolas Roeg's atmospheric cinematography and a rueful, nostalgic tone that recalls I Vitelloni (Roeg was six years away from his co-directorial debut, Performance, with Donald Cammell).
In his fast-paced commentary, Australian film historian Stephen Vagg notes that Reed and Winner would make four films together, including 1967's I'll Never Forget What's'isname, while the filmmaker would find even greater commercial success in the States where he directed six blunt-impact movies with Charles Bronson, including 1974's Death Wish.
The extra features also include an insightful interview with Susan Merrow, who describes the alcohol-sodden shoot as rambunctious (she would end up dating Hemmings for four years). As for Reed, The System helped him to graduate to A-list pictures from low-budget horror features, and he's terrific here as a conflicted character who can be funny and romantic, but also sarcastic, cruel, and possibly even dangerous. Highly recommended.
Coverage of the Seattle International Film Festival and year-round art house programming in the Pacific Northwest.
Kathy Fennessy is President of the Seattle Film Critics Society, a Northwest Film Forum board member, and a Tomatometer-approved critic. She writes or has written for Amazon, Minneapolis's City Pages, Resonance, Rock and Roll Globe, Seattle Sound, and The Stranger.
