TANGE SAZEN AND THE MILLION-RYO POT is a fantastic, heartwarming 1935 comedy from director Sadao Yamanaka. Tange Sazen is a one-armed samurai who bears a fascinating resemblance to Popeye — he has one eye, is tough-talking but sentimental on the inside, and is indomitable in battle. He also takes care of an orphink — excuse me, orphan — and had his origins in a newspaper strip in which he was not originally the main character. Just like E.C. Segar’s character, but in a kimono.
Yamanaka has clearly benefitted from Japan’s late adoption of sound technology (which was in part probably due to the popularity of the benshi film-describers of the silent era). He could have boned up by watching seven years of slowly-evolving American talkies, and five years of European ones. So there’s no sense of primitive clunk — sound is used elegantly to stitch scene together, including very early use of what screenwriter Terry Rossio calls “the Gilligan cut” — where a character is vocally adamant that he’s not going to yield to another’s entreaties, and then in the next scene we see him instantly doing just that.
I was thinking that this technique, depending as it does on the instant and unambiguous changing of scenes, must have originated with talkies, but it could just as easily have started in the comic strip…
Yamanaka has also digested the fact, pioneered by Jean Grémillon in LA PETITE LISE (1930), that although the big innovation is synch sound, asynchronous sound is where the director gets to be really creative.
Yamanaka’s case is a tragic one — of his 26 films, directed in a wild burst over just seven years, only three of his films are known to survive in more-or-less complete form (and none of the other 1930s Tange Sazen films seem to be available either). The others are HUMANITY AND PAPER BALLOONS and PRIEST OF DARKNESS, both classics.
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