Kurutta kajitsu (1956)

Director:

Kô Nakahira

Writer:

Shintarô Ishihara (writer)

Release Date:

12 July 1956 (Japan)

Genre:

Drama

Plot:

Spending their summer on an exotic beach, two brothers fall for the same beautiful girl, whose charm and looks may hide more than they they bargained for. |

Plot Keywords:

Beach | Generation Gap | Young Love | Japan | Ukulele

Cast

Ayuko Fujishiro	...	Mother
Taizô Fukami	...	Father
Mie Kitahara	...	Eri
Harold Conway	...	Eri's husband
Masumi Okada	...	Hirosawa Frank
rest of cast listed alphabetically:
Youko Benisawa	...	Kamakura Housekeeper
Eiko Higashitani	...	Michiko
Shintarô Ishihara
Yûjirô Ishihara	...	Takishima Natsuhisa
Hiroshi Kondô	...	Harbormaster
Yôko Takeuchi	...	Kamakura's Tenant
Masahiko Tsugawa	...	Takishima Haruji
Noriko Watari	...	Eri's Friend
Zenji Yamada	...	Fisherman

Also Known As:

Crazed Fruit (USA)
Juvenile Jungle (International: English title)

Runtime:

86 min

Country:

Japan

Language:

Japanese

Color:

Black and White

Aspect Ratio:

1.33 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono

Certification:

Canada:G (Quebec)

Filming Locations:

Hayama, Kanagawa, Japan

Company:

Nikkatsu Film Company

Trivia:

François Truffaut was so taken with the film that he recommended it to the Cinematheque; this was the first Japanese film awarded that honor.

Goofs:

Continuity: Haruji is loading groceries into a car outside a small grocery stall. Eri rides up on her bike and starts talking to him. Right behind Haruji can be seen a wall clock, the hands of which indicate a time of 4:35. The camera switches to Eri's face for a few seconds, then back to Haru, but now the clock indicates a time of 4:29.

Movie Connections:

Remade as Kuang lian shi (1968)

Soundtrack:

Sobre las olas (Over the Waves)

Crazed Fruit

Ko Nakahira's Crazed Fruit is, to put it mildly, an immensely welcome addition to the Criterion roster. It is uniquely modernist, impressionistically rendered, sensual in its physicality, and absolutely unlike anything to precede it in Japanese cinema. To put it bluntly, Ko's film is as significant a break from aesthetic (and moral) traditions as Godard's Breathless would prove to be two years later. The story – nominally an attempt to cash in on the "sun tribe" fashion, whereby children of the wealthy would wile away their summers sun bathing and boating (an unthinkable luxury before the 1950s) – follows the travails of two selfish and licentious brothers whose love of the same girl yields to hyperbolic tragedy of epic proportions. Whether the ending is meant as a conservative suggestion of the moral repercussions precipitated by the making idle of one's hands, or something more bleakly Sartrean, is up to interpretation. What is clear is that none who see it shall ever forget. An epochal masterpiece, based on a book by the current mayor of Tokyo!