One of the visual thrills I get from watching Japanese films is noting the intricate design of Japanese buildings found in period settings, from the details of the roofs, walls, verandas and gardens to the interior spaces designed for living quarters and reception areas in homes of nobles and officials. Even the simple dwellings of farmers, artisans and craftsmen are designed with efficiency, practicality and comfort.
Since I covered so many cop and crime films, Blaxploitation and kung fu in Part 1, I decided to post a second entry for everything else from 1973: westerns, horror, sci-fi, animation, critical favorites, and some of the great 1973 releases of all genres I discovered much later in revival theaters, on television, or home video. Here are more films I saw in their original release either in 1973 or 1974, when they finally showed up at neighborhood theaters. (There was more of a slow roll-out in those days and films that opened in two or three theaters in Manhattan sometimes stayed there for months.)
Westerns
PAT GARRETT AND BILLY THE KID
One of Sam Peckinpah’s western masterpieces, this one stars James Coburn as Garrett and Kris Kristofferson as Billy, with a high-powered supporting cast of western veterans. The version released to theaters was disowned by Peckinpah and new versions were crafted long after his death, one in 1988 and again, from Turner Entertainment, in 2005. I watched the most recent cut for this piece, which includes scenes that were cut from previous versions. I also remember seeing a TV cut in the 1980s, which doesn’t seem to exist anymore, which had some of the missing scenes.
Inspired by Jean-Luc Godard’s 8-part series, “Histoire(s) du Cinema,” I decided to look over images I’ve compiled from films I saw in childhood and find ways to juxtapose them. I decided to use only movies I saw from the ages of about five to nine, seen either in theaters or on television. Nothing after I turned ten because that’s when I started taking movies more seriously and researching them and eagerly seeking out specific titles. Not that it was particularly random before then, but watching movies was a different experience before the summer I turned ten. Images flowed off the screen and out of the TV and into my consciousness before I was fully able to process and categorize them. Luckily, I remember most of what I saw up till then.
When I was five, I remember standing outside my local movie theater, the Crotona, and seeing a poster for the movie, THE BLOB (1958), with this massive jello-like substance covering buildings and people and it looked genuinely scary. I was intrigued, but it wasn’t the kind of films my parents were likely to take me to.
Leiji Matsumoto, manga artist and animation creator, passed away in Japan on February 13, 2023, at the age of 85. He is arguably the most important figure in manga/anime in Japan after Osamu Tezuka, who was ten years older than him and emerged as a major manga artist after the war while Matsumoto was still a boy. (The two would eventually become friends.) Despite Tezuka’s towering achievements in both anime and manga, covered in a tribute here, I would contend that Matsumoto, who outlived Tezuka by 34 years, contributed the most trailblazing work in postwar Japanese animation history, when he co-created and designed the influential franchise, “Space Battleship Yamato” (1974), a saga of a space crew on an intergalactic mission against time to save a devastated Earth from alien invasion. When the initial TV season was compiled into a 135-minute theatrical feature and released in 1977, creating a bigger splash in Japan than STAR WARS, it enabled Matsumoto and the animators to create two subsequent TV seasons, in 1978 and 1980, and four more spin-off theatrical features, 1978-83. (Reboots and sequels followed decades later.)
The recent Sight and Sound list of The Critics’ Top 100 Greatest Films of All Time and the Variety list of 100 Greatest Movies of All Time got me to think about my own criteria for creating such a list, and the distinctions between “Best films” and “Favorite films.” The problem with the Sight and Sound and Variety lists is that they’re created by committees and are designed to appeal to a variety of different fan bases and constituencies. Choosing 100 gives plenty of room to placate as many different factions as possible, with cultural politics often playing a role and the ranking based on the number of votes the films get. A Great or Best film should be lauded, taught, studied, and viewed repeatedly. But, for me at least, there should be some unifying set of aesthetic principles linking the films and a recognition of their cultural, social and artistic importance within the context of their production and release, making their inclusion on the list obvious. This is hard to do when you’re relying on committee and other input for the choices. I agreed with 16 of Sight and Sound’s choices and 19 of Variety’s. While some of the odder choices, particularly on the Variety list, made me cringe (and I won’t name names), there’s a huge middle ground of films represented that I never felt strongly enough about to include on such a list myself but which I can accept as meeting the various criteria employed by this sampling of critics. And there are numerous non-Asian foreign critical favorites I never bothered to see. I also have much narrower criteria on which to base such a list than the folks involved in the creation of these.
In the summer of 1982, the Public Theater in Manhattan ran a film series called “Summer in Japan,” which programmed a number of Japanese films that hadn’t previously been screened in the U.S. While that memorable summer also saw the highly touted premieres of five Hollywood sci-fi films now considered classics, E.T., BLADE RUNNER, THE THING, STAR TREK II: THE WRATH OF KHAN and TRON, the biggest impact on me was wielded by the two sci-fi films I saw at the Public as part of that series: GOJIRA (1954) and SPACE FIREBIRD 2772 (1980). Both films were shown in Japanese with English subtitles.
I’d heard of Japanese science fiction illustrator Shigeru Komatsuzaki before, since he’s mentioned in Ishiro Honda: A Life in Film, from Godzilla to Kurosawa (Wesleyan University Press, 2017), by Steve Ryfle and Ed Godziszewski, as well as in the audio commentary the two authors did for the Sony DVD release of Honda’s BATTLE IN OUTER SPACE (1959). He’s also mentioned in the subtitled translations provided for the audio commentary done in Japanese by noted special effects supervisors and film directors Koichi Kawakita and Shinji Higuchi on the Tokyo Shock DVD release of Honda’s THE MYSTERIANS (1957).
However, it wasn’t until I read some passages on him in a new book by J.L. Carrozza that I was actively compelled to look up the work of Komatsuzaki and find remarkable examples of his stunning illustrations of futuristic scenes of spacecraft, high-tech transports, military hardware, giant robots, and alien invasion. The book is Japanese Special Effects Cinema: Godfathers of Tokusatsu, Vol. 1 (Orochi Books, 2022) and it credits Komatsuzaki with production designs used in THE MYSTERIANS, BATTLE IN OUTER SPACE and ATRAGON (1963), also from Tokyo Shock.
Life Magazine recently published a special issue devoted to Godzilla, which I found in the magazine rack at my local Walgreen’s. After thumbing through it, I decided to purchase it despite the excessive price of $14.99, since it seemed to be a rare instance of a high-profile mainstream American media outlet covering a Japanese pop culture phenomenon. Granted, it was timed to promote the recent Warner Bros. release of the latest Hollywood Godzilla movie, GODZILLA VS. KONG, but there were enough pictures of the original Japanese Godzilla in the magazine to pique my interest. (Last I checked, Life Magazine and Warner Bros. were both part of the same corporate empire, although that may have changed recently.)
I recently watched VOYAGE INTO SPACE (1970) on Amazon Prime, a feature compilation of episodes of “Johnny Sokko and His Flying Robot,” an English-dubbed live-action Japanese series that aired in syndication on American TV beginning in 1969. This compilation was never released to theaters but was sold to TV stations as a movie by American International Television, the TV distribution arm of American International Pictures (AIP), which ruled the drive-ins and grindhouses of the 1960s with all manner of low-budget genre and exploitation films.
I had seen VOYAGE INTO SPACE on television around 40 years ago and seeing the AI-TV logo again triggered a memory of quite a few other Japanese films I’d seen from that era that bypassed theaters completely and went straight to TV. Foremost among these were five Japanese movies featuring Gamera, the giant turtle, that had been retitled for American television, all of which I’d seen on TV back then, usually on Channel 7’s 4:30 Movie (WABC), with four of them completely omitting “Gamera” from the titles: WAR OF THE MONSTERS (GAMERA VS. BARUGON, 1966), RETURN OF THE GIANT MONSTERS (GAMERA VS. GYAOS, 1967), DESTROY ALL PLANETS (GAMERA VS. VIRAS, 1968), ATTACK OF THE MONSTERS (GAMERA VS. GUIRON, 1969), GAMERA VS. MONSTER X (GAMERA VS. JIGER, 1970).
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