Otoshiana

Plot synopsis:
John "Johnny" Forbes (Powell) is a middle-class husband and father who is tired of his boring routine, working for the Olympic Mutual Insurance Company in downtown Los Angeles. Private investigator and former policeman J. B. "Mac" MacDonald (Burr) reports that Bill Smiley (Barr), an embezzler who had been bonded by Olympic Mutual, caught and sent to prison, had given several expensive presents - including a speedboat named "Tempest" - to Smiley's girlfriend, model Mona Stevens (Scott) in Santa Monica.
Mac wants to stay on the case, admitting he is attracted to Mona, but Forbes decides to try to retrieve the gifts himself. He ends up spending the day with the sultry blond on her speedboat, and a physical romance begins. His wife Sue (Wyatt) has no idea what is going on; Mac, however, does. The next night, he beats Johnny up and tells him to stay away from Mona. When Mona hears that Johnny has called in "sick", she goes to visit him at home and learns at the last moment that he is married with a young son. She calls off the affair, unwilling to break up Johnny's family.
Mac keeps stalking her, both at the May Company department store where she works and at her home in Santa Monica, so Mona finally tells him bluntly that she does not like him. He goes to see Smiley in prison and informs him what is going on. Mona finds out Smiley's release date the day before he is to be released. When Smiley gives her a hostile reception, she turns to Johnny. Johnny pays back Mac for the beating he received earlier with one of his own for Mac.
When Smiley is freed, Mona tracks him down and discovers that he has been drinking, and that Mac has given him a gun. When Smiley rejects her plea to move to another city and start a new life together, she phones Johnny to warn him. Smiley goes to Johnny's house that night. Johnny drives him away at gunpoint, but when Smiley returns and breaks in, Johnny shoots him dead, letting the police think Smiley was just a burglar.
Mac feels he has eliminated both his rivals and expects Mona to go away with him. She shoots him instead and is taken into custody. Johnny gives a full confession, first to his wife, then to the district attorney, over Sue's objections. The DA reluctantly pronounces that Johnny is safe because it was justifiable homicide. Sue gives him a second chance, though she is not sure their marriage will ever be the same. The charge against Mona will depend on whether Mac will live or die.

Tags: psychedelic, avant garde

Review:
It's the first collaboration between director Teshigahara, writer Kodo Abe, and composer Toru Takemitsu, who went on to make the more widely available WOMAN IN THE DUNES and FACE OF ANOTHER.
If you're familiar with Hiroshi Teshigahara's work, especially the notorious "Woman In The Dunes", you will understand the starkness, the harsh reality, the irony of this film.
Ostensibly about a miner who is stalked by a man in a white suit and who then is killed for reasons that do not become apparent until nearly the end of the film, the film is, like "Dunes", an uncompromising look at life.
Although structurally and aesthetically experimental cinema, Teshigahara's debut proper already carries all the trademarks of an assured author and although a bit rough around the edges here and there it shows a director experimenting with his craft even as he perfects it.
Japanese new-wave ferried to its logical conclusion even as it takes its first baby steps.Based on a story by Kôbô Abe, PITFALL explores the myriad possibilities that emerge from the space where life and death overlap, as a poor miner is murdered under mysterious circumstances in the marshes near an old ghost town.
His murderer, an alluring white-clad figure, buys off the silence of the one witness, a woman operating a candy store in the ghost town district, and disappears as mysteriously as he appeared.
In the mean time the murdered man wakes up next to his corpse only to discover he's now a ghost.While THE SIXTH SENSE milked a very similar idea for maximum mainstream appeal, shock twists and shallow thrills, Teshigahara is wise to allow his material to breathe.
Even though a very pragmatic subplot about two rival labour unions introduced in the end of act two detracts from the existential nature of the story, like all great storytellers Teshigahara never settles for the convenient and tidy, refuses to explain what the viewer most needs explained.
Questions left open, the character cleverly typed as a seriocomic grim reaper of sorts riding around in his moped, a manifestation that invokes notions of fate by the very nature of his acts.
Teshigahara pits the dead against the dead, the living against the living and everybody against each other, ghosts quizically examining their corpses and wondering the reason of their deaths, the living deaf to their protestations and too busy being suspicious of each other.
A world revolving around a discordant axis, thrown off balance and left for us to explore its geometry.Teshigahara's direction reflecting the uncertainty and disorientation of the plot as much as Toru Takemitsu's dissonant score.
Construction works photographed in all their derelict, abandonded glory, a ghost world for the dead to haunt.
The ghost of the murdered man complaining he's hungry as winds rise in the soundtrack.
Then The miners move on to new jobs but the man in white follows still unnoticed....This movie is much more about moods I think than the actual story.
I did also like the boy as the silent observer where I wondered if he would interfere with the story at a time and in what way.I would not recommend this movie to everybody.
Most people watch this movie after 'Suna no Onna' (Woman In The Dunes).
No this is not a movie you can understand with watching it second time like 'Memento'.I give 5 stars out of respect to the dead/alive ghastly effects for 1960s..
As the ghosts of two of the victims of the man in the white suit chase his Vespa, they yell, "You can't kill someone for no reason." Whatever that reason is, it is never shared with us.
The man in the white suit has a book and after carrying out his hit, or setting one up, he quietly writes things in that book.
One of the strangest characters is a little boy, the son of the first victim, who seems only intent on eating throughout the movie.
In "Pitfall", an employer who owns two mines has had to deal with one big union in the past.
However, when the miners of mine number one ask miners of mine number two for class solidarity in their strike to get lost jobs back, the miners of mine number two refuse and keep working as the employer has told them that they will not suffer layoffs.
The answer to this question is large part of what director Hiroshi Teshigahara's "Pitfall" is about.
To be sure, "Pitfall" was also the work of author Kôbô Abe. In fact, "Pitfall" was originally a stage play by Abe. One must keep in mind when watching this film that both men were leftists, influenced by surrealism and it shows in the direction, screenplay, choice of music and cinematography.
But neither of them was about to produce a piece of nihilist fiction, which is what many reviewers of this film seem to think "Pitfall" is about.
Teshigahara and Abe are depicting life under the rule of Capital and showing how it works to keep workers at each others' throats.
As the film opens, a father and his young boy wander a stark landscape in Kyushu, industrially pockmarked by mines and the scattered, wild remnants of a supremely indifferent Nature.
We know this because the father is being accompanied through part of the film by a fellow mine worker who is also on the run, a self-proclaimed 'deserter'.
We also know because in one scene from a mine work-site a man is fallen upon by two other men, authorities who take him away after a scuffle.
When he spies a man in a pristine white suit riding through the mining town on a motor scooter, the only motor vehicle around which isn't a truck, he hides.The father, his son and their companion, the other mine worker, leave one job secretly in the night and go on the road to look for another.
The father has always dreamed of working for a union mine and of the better, more comfortable and secure life this would mean.
Instead, the father is led by the written map given to him by his former supervisor to an abandoned mining town where only one person lives, a woman who owns a candy/trinket store.
The candy store owning woman suggests that he might be looking for another mine, just over the hill.Be prepared for ghosts, doubles and dastardly planned murders most foul.
Teshigahara called his first feature film "a documentary fantasy" and it is indeed a strange amalgam of social realism, political thriller and ghost story.People in a mining community are being bumped off by a mysterious white-suited hit-man and the two warring unions are blaming the murders on one another.
The fate of the main character in the film, a common mine worker who shifts from town to town with his young boy in search of better working conditions, is sealed when he is mistaken by the hit-man (posing as an innocuous photographer) for the secretary of one of the unions and ends up face down on a beach before the eyes of his own passive son.The other notable inhabitant of the ghost town is a female candy-store owner who is perennially waiting for news from her far-away lover.
The mine worker seems resigned to his fate of suffering eternal hunger (since he died on an empty stomach!) but the woman can't accept the fact that she was taken away from this world just as her life was about to take a turn for the better; her incessant questioning and screaming after the hit-man riding away on his motorcycle is not easily shaken off.The second half of the movie deals in more detail with the machinations of the two miners' unions which are being pitted one against the other by some unknown force.
Towards the end of the film, there is a lengthy, impressive sequence of a clandestine meeting between the two secretaries (one of whom suspects the other of having hired the hit-man to terminate him) which turns into a gritty fist-fight between the two and ends with their two ghosts haunting the sea-side spot were earlier on the mine worker met his doom.
This time, however, the miner's son is moved to tears by what he witnesses and, bewildered and alone, runs off aimlessly in a stunning, fluid camera move which ends the film on a high note.The occasionally elliptical narrative may be explained by the fact that we see the events unfolding before us through the eyes of the child and the film's most arresting image is that of the boy's eye peering through a crack in the wall of the wooden shack spying on the woman being raped.
While on his way to an interview, the miner is visited by death in the form of a man in a white suit (Kunie Tanaka).
This fascinating, surreal drama, is a blend of many genres, and was Hiroshi Teshigahara's first feature film.
The setting is a ghost town where the dead amble about, carrying the pain that plagued their lives.
Novelist Kobo Abe, who wrote "Pitfall", and was responsible for "The Face of Another" and "The Woman in the Dunes", was a writer of uncommon originality and intelligence, and his work here is excellent.
Our hero, the murdered man, was given some very weak dialog.
The man in white was not as much of a mystery as the film seems to think he is.
-----paragraph----- The film sets up the murdered man to slowly come to realize the fact that there will be no justice for his murder and that it is better, once one has died, not to torture oneself by watching the world he has left behind.
The movie seems to think he's a mystery, but it's pretty obvious that he's a representative of the mining company looking to crush the unions.
The murdered man, our hero, does not realize this, nor does the movie seem to think the viewer does, but the viewer does know, and with all the murdered man has heard, by all rights he should, too.
He recites his stilted inner monologue like a man in a stage play, and it doesn't work.
At the end, he's even trying to speak to a living man, even though he should have come to realize that it's impossible.
Moving on from this we follow the man (a miner) and his son as he tries to find work, until eventually he is set up in a complex murder plot.
The simple technique of playing a shot backwards recalls another early 60's Japanese film, Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo, while there it was used as a slight character moment, here it completely reinvents the film's narrative  melting away all we've seen and reforming into something much more ambitious.Pitfall contains elements of social realism, surrealist experimentation, crime procedural, conspiracy thriller, and fantasy-tragedy.
Teshigahara's roots in documentary film-making and strong leftist political view provide reason for his sympathies with the struggles of miners, shown through the exploitation of the miner and his son and the two union's confrontation.
Selfishness pervades the film, the individual selfishness of the exploitative old man hiring the men to do a mining job, the boy taking a candy from his dead father's corpse, and the political selfishness, as seen in the confrontation between the two unions.Duplicity and division are chief devices in Pitfall.
Cinematographically we see this through the sensual distance of Teshigahara's camera, at once close, tracking, exploring the personal space and frame of mind of the characters, other times distanced and merely observing, displacing the individual as they get lost in the harsh world around them.
The welding of extreme social realism (at one point real documentary footage of impoverished miners is inserted) and the surrealist imagery of ghosts left in the town, carrying on their lowly routines with no effect, and of the many dead characters inspecting their own corpses, quizzically studying the circumstances of their deaths and often probing the living, creates a fusion of misery  both in life, and forever in death.
In ghost form the miner laments his hunger  something he no doubt would've done often in life.Despite all these many seemingly contradictory modes and random story-strands, Pitfall holds together well.
As Teshigahara's first feature film, this as a major outlet for his artistic visions, and consequently the film is slightly untidy, structurally the film lacks a successful linking of the many elements at play, they seem to pop-up randomly, sometimes without reason.
Rough around the edges it may be, Pitfall is a genuinely fascinating, thrilling, involving picture from beginning to end, possessing the visual tenacity and narrative complexity of a first-time director finding his feet and unleashing his cinematic imagination..
Teshigahara's debut, at least as a feature length director of fictional films.
The story is about a man and his son who arrive in a mining camp to start a new job.
The child notices a lanky man in white following them about.
The man in white follows and attacks with a knife.
The child hides, watching his father's murder from afar.
The film is a murder mystery.
It is also a ghost story, as Igawa rises from the dead and wanders the camp looking for answers to his murder.
The film plays out as an existentialist nightmare, people wandering through empty landscapes, surrounded by distant hills of dirt and rocks, abandoned settlements and seemingly unmanned mining equipment.
And it's one of the best films I've seen in a long time..
In his feature-film maiden voyage, Director Hiroshi Teshigahara demonstrates that he can be a master of the provocative (provocative extraordinary)---when he closes to be--with films that are filled (actually packed in this case) with incidents and shots that evoke as many interpretations as there are viewers (and likely even more with re-viewing!).
The film elicits a vague sense of dread right from the opening scenes which does not seem to go completely away!
But he also has a lot more on his mind such as: the exploitation of young itinerant coal miners by older former miners; miners who have run away only to be hunted down and captured (like military deserters); mine-owner benefits from inducing conflicts between/within miners' unions; murder mysteries involving contract killings of union leaders; ghosts (both human and canine (the latter may have been eaten by the former)); land rape by coal mining companies (represented by the bleak landscape of abandoned coal fields in Northern Kyūshū); deadly misidentification which isn't what it seems to be; how the dead might confront and try to solve the mystery of their own murders; symbolic use of white; etc.
Exterior locations (depressing landscapes and a river with quick-sand like mud shores) and set design (a ghost town you may have seen in other films) are outstanding.
And this makes one wonder why so many films are so straightforward and dull, visually, when the very usage of such techniques actually complexes a rather simple narrative quite dramatically.
Some critics have carped that the film is not that realistic in its depiction sof its characters; especially the dueling union heads who end up killing each other.
In fact, I would say, that in the less philosophic aspects of the tale, the film is amongst the most realistic portrayals of unionism going; in many ways more so than even a film like Norma Rae. And the portrayal of the company-hired assassin recalls that other great corporate malfeasance film, Akira Kurosawa's The Bad Sleep Well, while the ironic bleakness recalls Kon Ichikawa's Fires On The Plain.The DVD package, from The Criterion Collection, Three Films By Hiroshi Teshigahara, comes with a fourth disk of supplements, the main feature of which is a documentary about Teshigahara and his Kobo Abe's lives and collaborations.
There are also four short early documentaries by Teshigahara, none of which presage his fictive films.
Hiroshi Segawa's cinematography is very daring, and the scoring, by Toru Takemitsu, is always apropos to the scene, underscoring emotions, never exaggerating them, and often adding to the scenes with an askewness to what is seen, which throws a viewer into a different state of mind, aiding the feeling of alienation many of the characters feel.This alienation is at its greatest when one realizes that the first two murders of the miner and the candy saleswoman are incidental to the real 'meat' of the film.
And, in this way, Teshigahara is offering up his version of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, wherein the character the viewer presumes is the film's main character, is not.
That both of those films were influenced by documentary forms, as was Teshigahara's work is no coincidence; as is Teshigahara's will to break with the tried and true.Pitfall is a film that is great because it is daring, it does not bite off more than it can chew, it provides a strong narrative, but leaves enough mystery for the viewer to cogitate on through multiple viewings, is technically strong, in all areas, and provides solid enough acting (never great) that its just mentioned framework of excellence never frays.
It provides a narrative for those drawn to plot first films, yet also has a philosophic heft that works on many levels- from the existential to the ethical, and touches upon identity, the layers of the self, and what is and is not private and is and is not evil.
It may be a bit less daring than Teshigahara's later The Face Of Another, as well as lacking in as much razzle-dazzle and narrative complications, but it is also less flawed, and this latter quality is why it stands taller as a great work of art than the later film.
However, both films evince an undeniable fact- Hiroshi Teshigahara was a force of great talent and achievement in Japanese and world cinema, and the world of art, and that at large, is poorer for his absence, and the absence of his creative descendants.