Giants & Toys (1958, Yasuzô Masumura) (Patreon)

56/100

Knew nothing about the film (or about Masumura, really, for that matter) going in, but it would have looked very appealing to me on paper—like a Japanese cross between Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? and Tin Men (both of which I loved the last time I saw them). Thing is, though, while those are both distinctly American films, neither openly professes to be about America, whereas Giants & Toys wants to say something not just about Japan's cutthroat mid-century advertising world but about Japan itself. (In that respect, it's more like A Face in the Crowd, which was likewise a bit of a letdown for me relative to its reputation.) The result is a satirical comedy that's neither quite exaggerated enough to provoke actual laughs (assuming that jokes aren't getting lost in translation—never a safe assumption) nor quite psychologically detailed enough to be truly incisive. Mostly, it's just frenetic and barbed, which gives it a superficially exciting texture that never coalesces into something more. Kyoko's metamorphosis, in particular, feels oddly flat and rushed. "Wait, when did she fix her teeth?" I suddenly wondered at one point; that's not an element to (heh) brush past, especially given that her rotten teeth were somehow considered an asset to World's campaign. (That the underlying message amounts to "Our caramels will make you ugly" does suggest that this film might be working at a subtler level than I'm generally giving it credit for. But I have trouble reconciling that idea with G&T's overall garish tone.)

As for Masumura, file under Subjects For Further Research. (It's humbling, as ever, to have spent decades immersed in cinema history and still have so many enormous gaps in my knowledge.) On the one hand, I'm impressed by his skill at orchestrating visual chaos, and he seems to handle rapid-fire dialogue quite well (though it's hard to be sure when you don't speak the language). On the other hand, he makes some choices that I find inexplicable, e.g. using one character's malfunctioning cigarette lighter to trigger montages (during which he retains not only the sound of the lighter's futile clicking but a superimposed image of the lighter itself, as if the lighter is somehow important, which as far as I can tell it is not). And it's rare that I notice a flagrant blocking error, but at one point an actor moves directly into another actor's shadow and delivers the rest of his line with his face obscured, which is clearly carelessness rather than deliberate visual symbolism. Like a lot of Giants & Toys, that shot could have used some refining.