Crazed Fruit (1956, Kō Nakahira) (Patreon)

55/100

Middling sexual melodrama, fascinating cultural object. Apparently there's an entire strain of mid-century Japanese cinema with which I've been wholly unfamiliar, trafficking in the same adolescent restlessness as Hollywood peers The Wild One and Rebel Without a Cause; while this example—adapted from a popular novel by future nightmare Tokyo governor Shintarō Ishihara—involves a particularly ugly love triangle, the film keeps pausing its ostensible narrative in order to just observe a larger group of violently bored overgrown boys complain about their "two-bit country." ("A wasteland for the young," one actually calls it, in what passes for casual conversation.) Ishihara's Wikipedia entry features such adjectives as "misogynistic," "racist," and "xenophobic" in its lead descriptive paragraph, and the movie stars his younger brother, Yūjirō, as the most noxious character, so it's something of a relief to find that it's no more objectionable than any number of classic films noir, guilty only of depicting women as either agency-free playthings or inherently faithless sadists. Dichotomy of the good virginal brother and the bad womanizing brother—their joint paramour in love with the former but more than willing to be seduced by the latter, plus married to a white dude for his money—is itself pretty musty, and the conflict builds to a climactic eruption of vindictive rage that's impressive solely for how long director Kō Nakahira (of whom I'd not so much as previously heard) delays it in the moment, watching the perpetrator literally circle his prey for a small eternity. Crazed Fruit generally lives up to its title less in the plotting than in tiny formal ruptures, like a shot that racks focus from the actor in the distance to another actor moving into the foreground, his back to the camera, and then cuts midway through the motion of him whipping his jacket over his shoulders. (I'm not describing that well, but try to picture it happening in a split second.) And I never stopped drinking in the signifiers of mid-'50s Japanese cool, which lean heavily Hawaiian: shirts, decor, music. Kinda doubt that the score's primary theme deliberately warps "I Only Have Eyes for You," but it's potent all the same.