Musical comedy YOU CAN SUCCEED, TOO takes a playful look at U.S. and Japanese business practices
YOU CAN SUCCEED, TOO (KIMI MO SHUSSE GA DEKIRU) (君も出世ができる) (Eizo Sugawa, 1964)
Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
Friday, April 8, 7:00
Festival runs April 8-23
212-715-1258
www.japansociety.org
Japan Society’s 2016 Globus Film Series, “Japan Sings! The Japanese Musical Film,” opens April 8 with Eizo Sugawa’s riotous, robust 1964 delight, You Can Succeed, Too. With the Tokyo Summer Olympics approaching, Towa Tourism is locked in a heated battle with Kyokuto Tourism for big travel clients. While Yamakawa (Frankie Sakai) has developed a can’t-miss plan to succeed at Towa — either marry the president’s daughter, become a union leader, or find the president’s weakness and exploit it — his friend Nakai (Tadao Takashima) does not enjoy the urban rat race and would rather settle down in the countryside. When the president, Nobuo Kataoka (Yoshitomi Masuda), returns from a trip to the United States with his daughter, Yoko (Izumi Yukimura), he puts her in charge of the foreign office as she extolls the virtues of efficient American business practices over the old-fashioned Japanese ways. Yamakawa sets his sights on Yoko despite restaurant owner Ryoko’s (Mie Nakao) obvious desire to marry him and move to the country for a more simple life, but Yoko is more attracted to the oblivious Nakai, who soon finds himself in the middle of the president’s untoward relationship with the much younger, hot-to-trot cocktail hostess Beniko (Mie Hama). It all comes to a head as a pair of American tourists (Ernest and Marjorie Richter) and a prominent U.S. executive seek the right Japanese tourism company to do business with.
You Can Succeed, Too has a ball skewering the world of business, centered around the hysterical antics of comedian Sakai (Shogun, Mothra), who wears striped pajamas that resemble prison clothes (as if he is trapped by his need to succeed), putt-putts around in a tiny, checkered Mr. Bean–like car, and stretches his elastic face into hysterical expressions that recall early silent film comedy. Tatsuo Kita’s sets are spectacularly mod and endlessly imaginative — just wait till you see Beniko’s pink apartment — while Etsuko Yagyu’s costumes, particularly Yoko’s candy-colored, Audrey Hepburn–like outfits, are oh-so-fab, all wonderfully captured by Masaharu Utsumi’s splendid cinematography. The story takes some silly sitcomlike plot twists that become rather frustrating, but that can mostly be forgiven as Sugawa (The Beast Shall Die, River of Fireflies) includes numerous subtle and not-so-subtle digs at America and changing attitudes in postwar Japan; there are metaphors comparing business to battle, one of Yamakawa’s plans involves screaming out “Banzai!,” and a key scene takes place at the American-style nightclub Charade, as if this is all fake anyway. And the songs are a hoot, featuring a Hollywood-influenced score by Toshirô Mayuzumi (The Pornographers, The Insect Woman) and crazy choreography, all coming three years before How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying. You Can Succeed, Too is screening April 8 at 7:00 and will be introduced by series curator Michael Raine, followed by a karaoke party with singer and musician Yasuno Katsuki, emceed by Brian Walters. “Japan Sings! The Japanese Musical Film” continues through April 23 with such other rarities as Umetsugu Inoue’s The Stormy Man, Kengo Furusawa’s Irresponsible Era of Japan, Nagisa Oshima’s Sing a Song of Sex, and Takashi Miike’s The Happiness of the Katakuris.
In Tony Girardin’s debut feature-length documentary, Marinoni: The Fire in the Frame, friends and colleagues of Giuseppi Marinoni’s describe the Italian Canadian cycling legend as “explosive,” “authentic,” “iconoclastic,” “hard-headed,” and “cantankerous,” and the film shows him to be all that and more. Born in Bergamo, Italy, in 1937, Marinoni became a champion cyclist in his home country, then moved to Montreal in the mid-1960s after participating in races there. After he retired from racing, he turned his attention to building bicycle frames, training in Italy with Mario Rossin before opening his own business in Montreal in 1974, where he gained renown as a master craftsman. But he doesn’t necessarily like to talk about his life and career; it took the Montreal-based Girardin three years to convince Marinoni to agree to be filmed, and it’s clear that the septuagenarian is never fully comfortable being onscreen, whether building one of his coveted frames — he’s made more than thirty thousand, all by hand — or training to break the hour record for his age group, seventy-five to seventy-nine, a solo competition in which a cyclist attempts to go the farthest distance in sixty minutes. “Marinoni embodies what I love most about cycling: passion,” Girardin says at the start of the film. “It’s a culmination of life, love, and many things, but ultimately the challenge is to ride as far as is humanly possible.” Marinoni might never warm up to the camera — “You watching me is stressful!” he says to Girardin in French (he also speaks Italian but not English) — but other cyclists, promoters, and bike shop owners can’t wait to gush over how much they admire the man and his frames. Among those singing his praises are Andy Lamarre, Colette Pépin, Ken MacDonald, Julie Marceau, Federico Corneli, Marian Jago, Charle Lamarre, Marissa Plamondon-Lu, and Rossin.
Sam Peckinpah cemented his reputation for graphic violence and eclectic storytelling with the genre-redefining 1969 Western The Wild Bunch. When a robbery goes seriously wrong, Pike Bishop (William Holden), Dutch Engstrom (Ernest Borgnine), Freddie Sykes (Edmond O’Brien), Angel (Jaime Sánchez), and brothers Lyle (Warren Oates) and Tector Gorth (Ben Johnson) set out to get even, planning an even bigger score by going after a U.S. Army weapons shipment on a railroad protected by detective Pat Harrigan (Albert Dekker) and his hired gun, Deke Thornton (Robert Ryan), who is given nothing but “egg-suckin’, chicken-stealing gutter trash” to work with, including the hapless Coffer (Strother Martin) and T.C. (L. Q. Jones). The aging Pike, who sees this as his last score, is worried about being in cahoots with the unpredictable General Mapache (Emilio Fernández), a local warlord battling Pancho Villa’s freedom forces. But at the center of the film is the cat-and-mouse game between Pike and Thornton, the latter determined to capture his former partner, who left him to rot in jail years earlier. It all comes to a head in Agua Verde, which might translate to “Green Water” but will soon be bathed in red blood in one of the most violent shoot-outs ever depicted on celluloid.