Film review

  • Miranda

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Ken Annakin (1948)

    Miranda was this month’s ‘Projecting the Archive’ offering at BFI.  As usual in this slot, the screening was introduced by curator Jo Botting; as usual, she was admirably efficient and informative.  Also not for the first time, the British film being celebrated turned out to be no great shakes.  Ken Annakin’s fantastical comedy, adapted by Peter Blackmore from his own recent stage play, may have cheered early post-war audiences in need of escapism but now makes for a rather long eighty minutes.  Temple Abady’s score keeps insisting how amusing Miranda is – after a while, Annakin seems to be using the music to try and convince himself of this.  Some of the performances make the film well worth watching, though.

    To be fair, Ken Annakin loses no time setting up the story.  Paul Martin (Griffith Jones), a London doctor, goes on a solo fishing holiday on the Cornish coast:  his wife Clare (Googie Withers) doesn’t fancy sitting in a boat all day.  Cut to Paul, excitedly trying to reel in what feels like a whopper; after a brief struggle, he’s pulled overboard.  Paul, in fact, is the catch – of a mermaid (Glynis Johns), who introduces herself as Miranda.  She keeps him prisoner in her submarine grotto, agreeing to let Paul go only if he’ll take her back to London with him.  Before doing so, he orders from his wife’s couturier (Brian Oulton) some extra-long dresses to conceal Miranda’s fish tail.  He lets Clare know he’ll be bringing back to their Chelsea flat, for an initial three-week stay, an invalid patient who’s unable to walk.  Clare, expecting an elderly lady as her guest, is surprised to find the invalid is no older than she is, and very attractive.

    In Chelsea Miranda subsists on a diet of raw fish sandwiches and glasses of salted water, and sleeps in the bath.  When she’s taken out, it’s in a bath chair; in the flat, Paul carries her around.  Her true identity is revealed only to Nurse Carey (Margaret Rutherford), whom Paul asks to look after his guest when he’s not around.  A comedy centred on a newcomer to human society might be expected to point up some of its foibles and absurdities by presenting them through the newcomer’s eyes.  There’s next to none of that in Miranda.  A mild romantic farce, the film confirms only that chaps’ll-make-fools-of-themselves-over-a-pretty-girl; that wives and girlfriends are liable to be suspicious, then angry, as a result.  The chaps in this case are, as well as Paul, the Martins’ chauffeur, Charles (David Tomlinson), and Nigel Hood (John McCallum), the artist fiancé of Isobel Lambert (Sonia Holm) – she owns a hat shop and lives upstairs from Paul and Clare.  When Isobel discovers Nigel is painting a portrait of Miranda, she desecrates the painting by chucking Nigel’s supper over it, and breaks off their engagement.  Betty (Yvonne Owen), Charles’s young lady and the Martins’ maid, becomes distressed by more than the smelly sandwiches she has to make for the invalid.

    Chaps is the mot juste for Miranda’s menfolk:  indeed, the film’s main personnel are nearly all resoundingly middle-class, the mermaid included.  David Tomlinson’s chauffeur isn’t much less nicely spoken than Paul or Nigel, and doesn’t give the impression of trying to sound socially better than he is.  Yvonne Owen’s Betty might give that impression if you couldn’t detect the RP vowels beneath her Cockney accent.  The setting is presumably contemporary but there’s not a whiff of austerity in the air:  if ration-book filmgoers were keen to escape reality they certainly came to the right place.  It’s quite funny that Miranda has access in her underwater home to the occasional page or two from Vogue but the extent to which she’s not a fish out of water in well-heeled Chelsea is also an expression of the script’s lack of imagination.  And when it comes to London sight-seeing, she really is half-human, half-sea creature.  ‘I want to go to Buckingham Palace and Billingsgate Market but most of all I want to go to the opera,’ she tells Paul.  On a visit to the zoo, she’s interested only in the seals though she must have seen plenty of them before.

    However … Glynis Johns, with natural wit and music in her voice, does a splendid job of blending Miranda’s mask of naivete and flirtatious intent:  best of all, she’s a very matter-of-fact mermaid.  Griffith Jones is a bit stagy as Paul but Googie Withers’s Clare has stylish presence.  As Nigel, Withers’s real-life husband John McCallum (they married the year that Miranda was released) shows some lovely comic finesse.  David Tomlinson, whose screen partnership with Glynis Johns was famously renewed when they played Mr Banks and his suffragette wife in Mary Poppins (1964), is rather more nuanced than his role deserves.  Sonia Holm is standard issue from the Rank Organisation ‘charm school’ and Brian Oulton, as usual, overacts but Margaret Rutherford does something valuable for the film.  This is thanks less to her trademark galumphing eccentricity, though that’s in evidence too, but to her quality of true (light-hearted) innocence.  Rutherford’s nurse is the right person to be privy to the heroine’s secret.  When she first sees Miranda in the bath, she exclaims:  ‘Oh, the pretty thing – it’s a mermaid:  I’ve always believed in them!’  Margaret Rutherford leaves you in no doubt that Nurse Carey means what she says.

    Miranda gives to each of Paul, Charles and Nigel a pendant containing a lock of her hair ‘as a token of love which might have been’.  The realisation he’s not the sole recipient eventually brings each man to his senses and a rapid reconciliation with the fully human love of his life.  Shortly before diving into the Thames and heading for the sea, Miranda tells Charles she wants to be with her sisters in Majorca the following May.  Paul and Clare wonder why.  The answer is revealed in the closing shot – of a smiling Miranda, sitting on an undersea rock and holding a mer-baby.  This finale (presumably a main reason why some critics in 1948 considered the film risqué) might be thought a proto-Mamma Mia! (2008) concept were it not that Paul’s the only one of the three men who knows Miranda’s anatomy from top to bottom (unless Nigel or Charles is fibbing).

    The supposedly abundant witty dialogue in Miranda is actually pretty sparse.  When one character says, ‘There’s something fishy about that girl’, it may force a good-humoured groan; when, a bit later, a second character says the same thing you sense desperation.  One of the better bad jokes comes last of all; it’s better partly because it chimes with something at the very beginning.  The opening credits are accompanied by a (ropy) title number sung, in English but with a definite French accent, by Jean Sablon.  In a concluding Gallic echo, the screen announces not ‘The End’ but ‘Fin’.  In British cinema, Miranda is a less invisible ‘hidden gem’ than ‘Projecting the Archive’ pictures often are:  it’s certainly one of Glynis Johns’s best-known pictures.  The reason for its selection now was probably on account of a major and imminent anniversary that’s more worth celebrating than the film itself.  According to Jo Botting, Johns nearly drowned early in the shoot:  her heavy fishtail, designed by Dunlop (Tyres), floated better than she did, weighing her down so badly that she struggled to keep her head above water.  She survived in a big way.  On 5th October 2023, Glynis Johns will be a hundred years old.

    27 September 2023

  • Equinox Flower

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Higanbana

    Yasujiro Ozu (1958)

    Just a couple of hours after finishing the note on Yasujiro Ozu’s Early Summer (1951), I watched his Equinox Flower – similar to Early Summer in terms of subject matter, different in tone and emphasis.  (It was also the first film that Ozu made in colour.)  In an early scene, a group of middle-aged men are drinking together.  The talk turns to a Japanese old wives’ (or husbands’) tale:  if the wife is the stronger partner in a marriage she’ll bear sons; if the husband rules the roost the children will be daughters.  Equinox Flower, which is all about fathers and daughters, has already featured a wedding breakfast, where Wataru Hirayama (Shin Saburi) makes a speech, toasting the happy couple.  Hirayama is a successful Tokyo businessman and longstanding friend of the bride’s father, Toshihiko Kawai (Nobuo Nakamura):  they will be two of the drinking buddies in the sequence that follows.  Hirayama tells the newlyweds they’ve been fortunate to be able to choose each other; he recalls, in contrast, his own courtship and arranged marriage, which he describes as prosaic and unromantic.  The adjectives seem insulting to his wife, Kiyoko (Kinuyo Tanaka), who, seated beside her husband, listens in silence:  Hirayama claims to speak on her behalf too.  Most of what follows in Equinox Flower, adapted by Ozu and Kogo Noda from a novel by Ton Satomi, concerns Hirayama’s failure – as the father of a daughter who wants to marry the man she loves – to practise what he preaches at the wedding breakfast.

    The theme soon occupies centre stage thanks to two unexpected visits to Hirayama’s office that occur in quick succession.  First, Shukichi Mikami (Chishu Ryu), another of his old friends, comes to seek his help:  Mikami’s daughter Fumiko (Yoshiko Kuga) has left home in light of a dispute between them about whom she should marry; Mikami asks Hirayama to try and get her to see sense.  Hirayama goes to the bar where Fumiko now works, to hear her side of the story.  She laments her father’s stubborn insistence on deciding her husband and leaves Hirayama in no doubt of her determination to make a life with the young pianist (Fumio Watanabe) with whom she’s fallen in love.  Hirayama next opens his office door to a young man called Mashiko Taniguchi (Keiji Sada); the purpose of his visit is to ask for the hand in marriage of Setsuko (Ineko Arima), Hirayama’s elder daughter.  Setsuko’s father, who already had a suitable husband in mind for her, is furious that she has tried to make her own arrangements.  He not only refuses to give his blessing but forbids Setsuko, even though she’s no longer a minor, to continue going out to work until she bends to his will.  Hirayama’s hardline policy gets off to a poor start.  Immediately after her dressing-down, Setsuko heads for Taniguchi’s apartment.

    Although Equinox Flower clearly illustrates generational differences in attitude in post-war Japanese society, it also consistently highlights gender differences.  Setsuko is shocked to learn what her boyfriend has done.  She didn’t mean to go behind her parents’ back:  her idea was to tell Kiyoko about her intended, in the hope that her mother would then soften up her father.  Without telling Setsuko, Taniguchi decided to cut out the go-between.  Taking the bull by the horns is a bull-in-a-china-shop tactic (and a red rag to the other bull) but Taniguchi still insists to Setsuko, when she turns up at his apartment in distress, that a direct approach to her father was the sensible option.  As Setsuko anticipated, Kiyoko is less agitated than Hirayama by their daughter’s plans.  When Taniguchi escorts Setsuko back to her parents’ house, Kiyoko meets him briefly and finds him charming.  She gently suggests to her husband that this may be the right husband for Setsuko – to little avail, although Hirayama does make some little attempt to find out more about Taniguchi’s character.  He picks the brains of one of his employees, Shotaro Kondo (Teiji Takahashi), who was at school with the young man.  All Kondo can tell the boss is that Taniguchi was really good at basketball.

    No one accuses Hirayama of double standards until Setsuko’s friend, Yukiko Sasaki (Fujiko Yamamoto), tricks him into indulging them.  She tells him her mother Hatsu (Chieko Naniwa), a widowed innkeeper, is trying to force her into a marriage that Yukiko doesn’t want.  When she asks Hirayama’s advice he doesn’t hesitate to tell her to ignore Hatsu:  the subtext of his reply is that a mother is only a woman after all.  Yukiko triumphantly telephones Setsuko to give her the good news of her father’s views on arranged marriage vs free marital choice;  Hirayama finds himself all the more poorly placed to lay down the law to his own daughter.  His wife reproaches him as hypocritical; their younger daughter Hisako (Miyuki Kuwano) calls him old-fashioned; Setsuko and Taniguchi (although the latter isn’t seen again in the film) insist on getting married.  At the eleventh hour, Hirayama climbs down by agreeing to attend their wedding.

    The tonal trajectory is almost the reverse of Early Summer‘s.  The latter turns more serious as its protagonist, a marriageable daughter who may soon be on the shelf, develops into a more substantial character.  In Equinox Flower, Hirayama, as he tries and fails to assert his authority, becomes increasingly ridiculous.  He and his wife have no sons.  At first, their situation might seem to vindicate the folklore mentioned early on; as the story progresses, hectoring Hirayama appears weak beside his quiet, more effective wife.  Fooled by Yukiko, Hirayama returns home to find Kiyoko listening to music on the radio:  her happy attitude makes clear she has learned from Setsuko that Hirayama has changed his mind.  He promptly turns off the music.  Kiyoko tries to find out what’s wrong; he’s grumpily silent; she turns the radio back on; he shouts at her to turn it off.  Kiyoko does as she’s told but looks levelly at her husband.  Getting his own way over the radio is just about the only argument that Hirayama wins.

    Red might seem to be the film’s signature colour.  Its original title refers to a red flower which blooms in Japan at around the time of the autumn equinox and Ozu makes striking use of red objects in several scenes.  More muted colours register too, though – not least the dull brown robe that Kinuyo Tanaka’s Kiyoko habitually wears, making her a deceptively mousy figure.  (Even the sacking that, as ever, is the background to Ozu’s opening titles is more striking because – for the first time – it’s gingery!)   The fine use of music includes, as well as the traditional Japanese music on the radio in the scene just mentioned, the tinkling arrangement of ‘Home! Sweet Home!’ that also featured in Early Summer.  Although the melody is heard less often this time, the song’s lyrics feature more explicitly in Equinox Flower.  Once she’s married, Setsuko will move to Hiroshima, where Taniguchi is now working.  When she tells her mother and sister the accommodation there will be very basic, Hisako cheerfully replies, ‘Be it ever so humble there’s no place like home’.

    In the lead role, Shin Saburi shows less variety than he did as the childless husband in Ozu’s The Flavour of Green Tea over Rice (1952).  A heavy-set, saturnine figure, he’s neither as appealing a presence nor as nuanced an actor as Chishu Ryu – as Ryu’s appearance in a minor role in Equinox Flower serves to emphasise.  Since Ryu played father of the troubled bride-to-be in several Ozu films (or, in Early Summer, her elder brother) it might seem surprising that he doesn’t on this occasion but the decision to cast Saburi instead was probably right.  Ryu’s charm and the sympathetic associations of, especially, his character in Late Spring (1949) would have disturbed the balance that Ozu seems to have wanted in Equinox Flower.  After Setsuko’s wedding (which takes place off screen), Hirayama learns from Mikami that he too has agreed to let his daughter choose her husband and from Yukiko that she herself hasn’t got time for marriage.  He’s then bounced by Yukiko’s well-meaning chatterbox mother into visiting Setsuko and Taniguchi in Hiroshima.  The film seems on the point of ending several times before it actually does but the closing scene, with Hirayama on the train to Hiroshima, makes sense.  We don’t need to see him visit the happy couple:  we can be pretty sure, thanks to Shin Saburi’s interpretation, that it won’t bring a smile to Hirayama’s face.  It might have been different (and ended the film on a more sentimental note) with Chishu Ryu in the part.

    Ryu is impressive, though, in the old schoolfellows’ reunion that supplies one of the apparently conclusive scenes – and crystallises the picture of a generation of men that Ozu has built by implication in the course of Equinox Flower.  Mikami’s friends at the gathering – Hirayama, Kawai and the others from the early sequence in the Tokyo bar – urge him to sing a traditional song.  He refuses at first; relents to sing a couple of verses; then tells his friends, although they call for more, that enough is enough.  Mikami is reluctant to perform the song because, he says, its sentiments are now old hat.  Once his solo ends, though, the whole group sings another song with similar lyrics.  These recognise the passage of time but affirm abiding comradeship, the loyalty of sons to fathers, the glory of being ready to give one’s life in war to one’s country (and father-Emperor).  Plenty of British and North American films of the period dramatise the struggles of men who’ve had a ‘good’ war but feel diminished in the civilian life to which they return.  In a Japanese film, of course, the disappointment of such men has the extra dimension of defeat in World War II and, in its immediate aftermath, living in an occupied country.  The theme features in other Ozu films (a scene in An Autumn Afternoon (1962) comes to mind) but the reunion singsong in Equinox Flower has a particular resonance.  In contemporary Japan, middle-aged men like Hirayama and Mikami, are doubly defeated:  they’re no longer able to impose their will even on their wives and daughters.  On the train journey to Hiroshima, Hirayama quietly sings to himself the same nostalgic song.

    21 September 2023

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