As a movement in Japan, film noir didn't really gather steam until 1957, when the venerable Nikkastu Studio plunked the stars of the mega-popular flaming youth flick, Crazed Fruit, into a despairing little potboiler entitled I Am Waiting. The box office success of this "borderless B-movie" led to a steady stream of hard-boiled features featuring hard-luck heroes, five of which have just been collected as a part of Criterion's Eclipse Series in a handsome box entitled Nikkatsu Noir. Good grim times for lovers of gritty black-and-white melodrama, multiple betrayals, and violent showdowns in the seedier fringes of the city landscape.
Koreyoshi Kurahara's Waiting, the breakout flick that opens the set, is in some ways the most curious — containing, as it does, elements of the "Sun Tribe" movies that first brought sweet-faced lead Yujiro Ishihara into prominence. An ex-welterweight once jailed for killing a man in a bar fight, Ishihara's Joji runs a seedy restaurant by the wharfs in Yokahama, dreaming of the day his brother sends him a letter from Brazil, presented here as a Land of Opportunity. We know from the mournful jazzy soundtrack and the rain-drenched opener that our hero's dreams are gonna be crushed, however.
Walking to the mailbox to drop off a letter to his brother, Joji runs into a sad-looking young girl (Mie Kitahara, the married vamp of Crazed Fruit), who he takes back to his restaurant. The girl, Saeko, is a cabaret singer who once had dreams of becoming an opera star until illness robbed her of her voice. ("I'm a canary that's forgotten how to sing," she says.) Mistakenly believing that she's killed a lecherous punk who attempted to assault her backstage, she's on the run from the punk's brother, a gangster who also has a connection to our hero's absent brother.
The duo have a believably tentative relationship in Waiting (Ishihara and Kitahara ultimately costarred in something like two dozen films together). Though he may be a pug with a violent temper, Joji also proves to be a sensitive young guy capable of crooning and strumming a ukulele. He's strong enough to face down the movie's former fighter gangster villain and his thugs, but, once he does, the movie leaves him standing by himself, crazed with sorrow over all that he's learned about his brother. Waiting may be noir, but there's a strong element of the misunderstood youth theme also common to the era.
Toshio Masuda's Rusty Knife, the second entry in the set, also features the twosome in starring roles, and, once again, Ishihara plays a character trying to leave behind a sordid past that inevitably catches up with him. In this entry, he's one of three would-be robbers who unexpectedly witnessed the murder of a councilman by a local gangster. When one of the three (Joe Shishido, the lead of two later entries in this set) is thrown in front of a train for attempting to blackmail the gangster, his death alerts authorities to the existence of the remaining two witnesses.
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