| So why is Matango Ishiro
Honda’s greatest film? I dunno, you
tell me why not; you pick the ones off the shelf
you like better and I’m sure I could make
the same case for some of them too (I’m
particularly notorious for favoring off-market
titles like The
Human Vapour [1960] and All
Monsters Attack [1969]). I know this
much: as a will-be filmmaker myself, I wondered
even back in the college days how Mr. Honda pulled
this off, Matango, this strange, hallucinatory
character study within which nothing makes sense
if you think about it objectively, but emotionally
it hits every note that anybody with a brain already
owns. Nominally based on the short story “A
Voice In the Night” by William Hope Hodgson,
then adapted into a shape I’m not familiar
with (haven’t read the first screen treatment
and doubt I’d recognize it even if I could
read that much Japanese), and then turned into
screenwriter Takeshi Kimura’s swan song
of sorts, Matango remains a masterpiece, something
long belittled under its AIP title Attack
of the Mushroom People, but which is something
a lot more interesting and deep than such an exploitive
title suggests.
I’ve seen both the Japanese
and American versions of this movie dozens of
times; I could dissect it to an inch of its life,
yet even then I would not manage to tell you what
you saw the first, second, third, or twentieth
time you ever wanted to see this very special
motion picture. What I can do is tell you how
important it was to everyone who made it. At this
point, Ishiro
Honda had directed all the actors but one
(newcomer Miki Yashiro) in several movies, and
felt able to gather them all together beforehand
to tell them (each one of those actors I’ve
been fortunate enough to know — Kenji Sahara,
Akira Kubo, Yoshio Tsuchiya, Eisei
Amamoto — all remembered this specifically),
to tell them “This is a very unusual story
compared to what we’ve done before; it’s
very serious and I need you to perform accordingly.”
Of course each of them responded
in kind. Not one of the actors (which includes
Kumi
Mizuno, Hiroshi Koizumi and Hiroshi Tachikawa)
have done better work in movies; some have been
fortunate enough to win equivalently weighty roles,
but except perhaps for Tsuchiya (he did, after
all, debut in Seven
Samurai [1954]), have ever been asked
to do as much. Matango is a story both
about the nature of humanity, and how we fail
to be as good as we hope we are; oh, we may think
we know about what good we can do as people, but
then there’s the case of what we can be
reduced to when we’re starving and backbiting
even at the only people who might help us get
through it all. Honda was very careful to cast
who he did, all but Yashiro actors he knew very
well, and all actors he knew would provide him
with what was needed (he saw things in them that
hadn’t been shown before; Kenji Sahara,
until then typecast as a kindly salaryman type,
was especially grateful to be shown off as a semi-toothless
sunglasses-clad would-be molester; "I think
it showed directors I had more range than they
thought," he observed).
Technically, too, the picture is
impeccable; Honda’s usual cameraman by then,
Hajime Koizumi, never did better work for him,
and the design by relative newcomer Juichi Ikuno
is also spectacular. I’m not sure but I
think the budget dictated that the score be done
by the relatively cheap Sadao Bekku, who in fact
did a brilliant job; I’ve thought that Bekku
must’ve been listening to old Bernard Herrmann
recordings when he scored Matango, but
have no proof of that.
As for the special effects, there
are great miniatures and, per Teruyoshi Nakano,
the most elaborate makeup work ever then done
for a Japanese movie; uglying up Kumi
Mizuno, Nakano joked later “I wondered
if we’d ever see her again!” The movie
was not hugely expensive, in fact it played on
a double bill with the vaguely ironically chosen
Young Guy in Hawaii (directed by another
future Godzilla helmer, Jun
Fukuda), which must have looked like a sort
of jokey choice as far as double bills went.
I find I’m not telling you
why this movie is so special, and I guess it’s
because I want you to see it for yourself. If
you really like this genre, and really care about
the people who made these films, including the
actors, this is one you can’t afford to
miss. Let me close with something that Ishiro
Honda did himself:
One day I asked him: “What
are your favorites of the movies you directed?”
This was in his own home, and he
actually went so far as to get up off the couch
and peer at the video titles (no LDs or DVDs then).
He decided his favorite was Matango.
Make of it what you will. Signing
off, G.
|
(5/5)