Kon Ichikawa’s harrowing “Fires on the Plain,” now available in a DVD edition from the Criterion Collection, begins with a stinging rebuke: a literal slap in the face. The movie’s protagonist, a mortally ill Japanese soldier named Tamura, portrayed by Eiji Funakoshi, is on the receiving end of this blow. The physical recoil is intensified by a prolonged rant from the slapper, Tamura’s infuriated squad leader.
Pfc. Tamura is part of the retreating, overwhelmed Japanese army in the Philippines at the beginning of 1945. He has offended his immediate superior by returning to his depleted, starving unit after being ordered to a nearby medical compound, which refused to accept him as a patient. A tubercular case before we even encounter him, Tamura is regarded as a walking-dead burden by the squad leader, who considers him useless for details such as digging trenches or foraging for food.
Obedient and bewildered, Tamura explains that the doctors, disinclined to shelter another patient, possibly an infectious one, pronounced him “cured” and ordered him to retrace his steps. The squad leader insists that he retrace them again, after being supplied with a few yams for sustenance and entrusted with a grenade. His sense of duty to nation and emperor might require suicide, courtesy of the grenade, if he’s again refused medical attention. At least he won’t remain a drain on dwindling resources.
“Fires on the Plain” (1959) and Carol Reed’s “Odd Man Out,” made 12 years earlier, are probably the most eloquent and memorable movies ever contrived around the allegorical notion of outcast men whose precarious hold on life weakens as the plot unfolds. They are profoundly “negative” classics.
Mr. Ichikawa’s example is also the most perversely eloquent, since it also insists on the grotesquely funny aspects that may cling to a sentence of death. The initial recoil of the slap and tirade administered to poor Tamura are echoed in subsequent episodes, which follow the character’s odyssey across the countryside (Leyte, ostensibly), vainly searching for shreds of camaraderie and a secure resting place.
Whatever the destination, Tamura’s survival instincts and need for companionship are systematically mocked or shortchanged. Ultimately, a last-ditch decision to surrender when approaching a Filipino village is rewarded by a stray bullet.
The title alludes to fires whose purpose mystifies the Japanese soldiers: Are they a system of signals between Filipino guerrillas and American troops? Merely the smoke rising from farmers burning the waste of their crops? At the end of his journey Tamura seems to regard them as a last hope of salvation or escape from solitude. In a way he has earned a parting delusion, but it remains a delusion.
At 92, with a career as a feature director that extended from 1948 to 2001, Mr. Ichikawa has sustained a remarkable longevity. Originally an animator and then an assistant director for more than a decade, he emerged as a distinctive manipulator of alternately heartfelt and sardonic material.
Most of his prominent or acclaimed films date from the early 1950s to the middle 1960s, and these reflect a close collaboration with his wife, who became a screenwriter under the pseudonym Natto Wada. Born Yumiko Mogi, she died in 1983 at the age of 63. In an interview completed a few years ago for this DVD edition, Mr. Ichikawa mentions that “Natto” was coined as an homage to the English actor Robert Donat, one of her favorites.
As a rule, the Ichikawas turned to novels or stories for movie subjects. Typically, “Fires on the Plain” derived from a best-seller of 1952. In a disarming magazine interview 20 years ago, Mr. Ichikawa explained, “We would have liked to make films from original subjects, but we didn’t have enough life experience to do so.”
Having chosen a promising book or story, they evidently digested and discussed it thoroughly in the course of everyday domestic and family life until satisfied that Miss Wada could begin a formal screenplay. Her husband assumed authority once the script was completed and pre-production began. Fond of illustration since childhood, he became accustomed to sketching storyboards and visualizing the production in considerable pictorial detail well in advance of shooting. If writing was her speciality, the planning and execution of the finished film was his.
Both Japanese and European critics proved somewhat grudging when it came to recognizing the Ichikawa output in its prime. Was the marital element in his work a source of disillusionment? There are critical schools that cherish legends of individual creative genius in the film medium, with masculine directors, of course, as the pre-eminent beneficiaries.
Not a volunteer combatant during World War II, Mr. Ichikawa was a last-year inductee, assigned to the Hiroshima regiment. His mother and one of his sisters were living in the city at the time. In the DVD interview he recalls their remarkable survival from the atomic bomb blast. He leaves the impression that the army had somehow forgotten about his existence after he needed an appendectomy. Otherwise, he might have been stationed in Hiroshima on the fateful day.
In a recollection published several years ago, Mr. Ichikawa described busily trying to refurbish a wrecked apartment in Tokyo in the weeks before the war ended. It had been gutted during an air raid, but he thought he could fix it up with supplies still available at his film studio. Then came the close call experienced by his family and the subsequent Japanese surrender, conspiring to underline the absurdity of his impulsive, eager-beaver building project.
“Fires on the Plain” has no discernible political baggage, but it partakes generously of polemical theater-of-the-dreadful-and-absurd. According to Mr. Ichikawa, it reflects his conviction that “war is an absolute evil,” a theme that sounds more platitudinous than the movie looks or feels. “Fires” qualifies as some magnitude of bedrock moral indictment, rooted in the weaknesses of human nature rather than national political rivalries and struggles.
When it was still new (the American release took place in 1961), the film seemed to provide an unflinching vision of degradation in exotic terrain and extreme conditions. Two generations of horror-genre shock effects have probably subdued the impact of Mr. Ichikawa’s most graphic images, although one encounter with a crazed comrade remains nearly impossible to trump for primal repulsion. The director still has few peers, living or dead, as a misanthropic observer of what misery and brutality can do to madden human beings.
TITLE: “Fires on the Plain”
RATING: No MPAA rating (made in 1959; adult subject matter, involving extremely graphic depictions of wartime carnage and squalor)
CREDITS: Directed by Kon Ichikawa. Screenplay by Natto Wada, based on a novel by Shohei Ooka. Cinematography by Setsuo Kobayashi. In Japanese with English subtitles
RUNNING TIME: 104 minutes
DVD EDITION: The Criterion Collection
WEB SITE: www.criterionco.com
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