No.191 My Movie Notebook (2) From Fifth Grade to Third Year of Junior High: Memories of the 'Ginza' Theater in Onahama, Iwaki City, and My Encounter with 'Kinema Junpo'
No.191 My Movie Notebook (2) From Fifth Grade to Third Year of Junior High: Memories of the 'Ginza' Theater in Onahama, Iwaki City, and My Encounter with 'Kinema Junpo'
(This is a continuation of No.189)
In 1965, I was in the fifth grade of elementary school. Around this time, there were about five movie theaters in my hometown, the small town of Onahama in Iwaki City. There was the 'Kokusai,' a Toho-affiliated theater that mainly showed the 'Young Guy' series starring Yuzo Kayama and monster movies; the 'Kinseiza,' which mainly showed Toei-affiliated works, the heyday of yakuza films starring Ken Takakura and Koji Tsuruta; the 'Iwaki-za,' which showed Nikkatsu works before they entered the Roman Porno era; the 'Chikyu-za,' which mainly showed Shochiku-affiliated works; and finally, the 'Ginza,' a theater specializing in foreign films located next to the 'Kinseiza,' which I visited most frequently.
The films shown changed once a week, and it was common to have double or triple features. Since there are 52 weeks in a year, if you watched everything shown at the 'Ginza,' you would end up watching over 100 movies a year. Unlike today, release dates were after those in Tokyo and other major cities, and likely due to the business circumstances of local theaters at the time, the films shown were mainly entertainment movies, and so-called literary works were rarely screened.
My family home, which ran a sake brewing business, had a large property that was a perfect playground for children. It was not an era where cram schools and lessons were popular. After school, several friends would come over almost every day, and we would play games like kick-the-can and hide-and-seek until dusk fell (No.084).
Among my friends, I really hit it off with Sadakazu-kun, who became my classmate in the fifth grade. At some point, we started going to see movies together, especially foreign films, and 'watching movies' became one of our pastimes. This was likely influenced by the fact that there was a movie magazine called 'Screen' at home that my sister occasionally bought, and that both my parents loved foreign films.
Not every movie shown at the 'Ginza' was something that fifth-grade Sadakazu-kun and I wanted to see. We were boys, after all, so we were drawn to action movies. At the time, the composition was such that so-called 'spy movies' and 'spaghetti westerns' were competing for the throne of entertainment cinema.
The first film in the pioneering '007' series, 'Dr. No,' directed by Terence Young and starring Sean Connery, was released in Japan in 1962. This Japanese title was later changed to '007 Dr. No,' and the way '007' was read at the time was 'zero-zero-seven.' A dozen years ago, when I was talking about movies with a young friend, I said 'zero-zero-seven,' and they laughed out loud, saying, 'What is that!'
The first '007' film that Sadakazu-kun and I encountered was the third in the series, 'Goldfinger.' When we left the theater, what we were excited about wasn't the action scenes, but the famous scene where a woman is lying face down on a bed with her naked body painted in gold dust. We ran through the twilight streets, breathless, saying to each other, 'That was amazing!' as we hurried home.
One of the 'selling points' of spy movies was the love scenes, and just like the action scenes, we would wait excitedly to see when they would appear on the screen. When we entered the theater, the woman at the ticket gate said to us in a tone that was either admonishing or exasperated, 'You kids are watching this kind of stuff?' I felt offended, perhaps because a love for movies had already sprouted within me.
I liked 'spaghetti westerns' even more than spy movies. 'Spaghetti western' is a term for 'westerns' usually produced in Italy, and they were called 'spaghetti westerns' in Italy as well. The story that the famous film critic Nagaharu Yodogawa said, 'If it's spaghetti, it sounds thin and weak,' so it became 'macaroni western' in Japan, is well-known among movie buffs.
Clint Eastwood's starring vehicle 'A Fistful of Dollars,' directed by Sergio Leone, was the first 'macaroni western' released in Japan. The plot was a rip-off of Akira Kurosawa's 'Yojimbo,' and it is said that even director Akira Kurosawa was stunned by the extent of the imitation.
The theme song 'A Man with a Harmonica,' composed by Ennio Morricone, was also a big hit. The first LP record I bought with my New Year's money was 'The Definitive Edition: All the Themes of Macaroni Westerns.' I listened to it until it wore out, and it is still stored on the bottom right end of my record rack.
I think there are many people of my generation who, like Sadakazu-kun and me, have a strong impression of Clint Eastwood as 'one of the heroes of the macaroni western.' I feel like I could talk all night with people who can recite the names of actors like Franco Nero, Giuliano Gemma, and Lee Van Cleef.
Even after I entered junior high school and became busy with table tennis club practice, my visits to the 'Ginza' continued. In the winter of my first year of junior high, the inside of the 'Ginza' was cold. I was sitting alone towards the back left of the screen, with the collar of my school uniform turned up even higher, watching 'Fantômas.' It was a triple feature that day, and it was past 8:00 PM.
There was a silhouette standing in the aisle to my left, seemingly watching something. When the scene in the movie changed and the screen became a little brighter, the silhouette moved closer to me. I recognized the face. It was Mr. Kinoshita, who would later become my homeroom teacher in my second and third years of junior high. He asked in a hushed voice, perhaps because the movie was playing, 'What are you doing at this hour?'
My parents knew I watched movies, and I was raised in a home that even said it was better to watch movies or read books than to do boring studying (I could go on forever about this, but I will save it for another time). I had no feelings of rebellion against Mr. Kinoshita, nor did I feel like I was doing anything wrong, so the answer that came out of my mouth was, 'I'm watching a movie.'
It must not have been a perfect answer. Mr. Kinoshita continued, 'It's already late.' My next answer was, 'Yes, the movie will be over soon. I'll go home when it's over.' The teacher left. I was disappointed that I couldn't tell in the darkness whether he was smiling bitterly or had a stern expression on his face.
In 1968, my second year of junior high, I learned of the existence of a magazine called 'Kinema Junpo.' Although it was smaller in size than 'Screen,' it had an overwhelmingly larger number of articles. 'Screen' also published a 'Best Ten Foreign Films' list by critics once a year, but 'Kinema Junpo' also selected a best ten for Japanese films in addition to foreign films, and the number of critics who voted was much larger. While I felt that my world had expanded by encountering a 'serious' magazine, I was stunned when I saw the 'Best Ten Foreign Films' that had been selected.
From the number one film 'The Battle of Algiers' to 'Blow-Up,' 'The War Is Over,' 'A Man for All Seasons,' and 'Pierrot le Fou'... not a single one of the films up to seventh place had been shown at the 'Ginza.' I had only seen the eighth-place 'In the Heat of the Night' and the ninth-place 'War and Peace.' It felt like I was being shown that there were wonderful things in places I could not reach.
Carrying those feelings with me, I reached the ninth grade and encountered a film at the 'Ginza' theater. I trembled when I finished watching it. It was a shock.
...To be continued
