Apparently the first (surviving?) movie made on Okinawa, THE VINDICTIVE SNAKE has some interesting, lived-in cross-cultural elements going for it, but little else.
Following much travelogue footage of the island of Oahu (one wonders if, like a lot of Asian silents, the film was constructed this way to give traditional live narrators time to make introductions), we meet our protagonists, a couple who just moved to the island to start a plantation. All seems to be going well for the two, until the wife is stricken with leprosy. Sneaking away under the pretense of finding a doctor in Japan, the husband simply absconds, abandoning his wife for the next several years. When she's finally given money by a pair of kindly neighbors to make the voyage, she ends up on the streets, begging for money while her husband romances a dance hall girl and takes her as his new bride. When hubby finally bumps into his old wife on the street, he begs her forgiveness, though that's just a ruse so he can take her somewhere and push her off a cliff. Thinking himself rid of her, a surprise awaits that night, as the husband and his new mistress are visited by a pair of very angry serpents.
Very little about this movie hangs together, and it moves at a glacial pace. It's really about 15 minutes of legend dragged out to a patience-testing 70, and everything takes ten times longer than it should. An opening scene by a lake, where the couple discusses their good fortune and then takes turns finding excuses to worry about it (followed by admonishing their partner not to do so) threatens to cross over into self-parody it becomes so cyclical. And just when you think it's done, it adds a coda with the husband noticing his wife's fever - the first symptom of her impending diagnosis.
Much of the film is like this, needlessly languid and pointlessly drawn out - the dance hall scene where the husband meets his new wife seems like something out of an exploitation film, padding the runtime with endless musical numbers. It's quite clear where the film is going with every beat, but in each instance it takes much way longer than necessary getting there - why couldn't the wife just die on Oahu, for instance, rather than having to come all the way to Okinawa just to get killed? But if the narrative had been streamlined, we'd have a one-reeler rather than a feature, and that probably wasn't the filmmakers' intention.
Unfortunately, writer/star Seizen Toguchi, while handsome, generally brings thespian skills to match his scriptwriting. While he's fine enough in regular scenes, the second things get dramatic, he begins pulling silly faces. Even for a silent film dilletante like me, it underscored the elegance of good silent acting, because that's not what's on display here. The climax is decent, if arbitrary, with some snakes and the wife's ghost appearing to terrorize the couple in their bedroom, but it's 5 minutes of horror after an agonizing 65-minute slog. Maybe viewers in 1914 were willing to put up with that, but it's a tall ask of anyone today.
Following much travelogue footage of the island of Oahu (one wonders if, like a lot of Asian silents, the film was constructed this way to give traditional live narrators time to make introductions), we meet our protagonists, a couple who just moved to the island to start a plantation. All seems to be going well for the two, until the wife is stricken with leprosy. Sneaking away under the pretense of finding a doctor in Japan, the husband simply absconds, abandoning his wife for the next several years. When she's finally given money by a pair of kindly neighbors to make the voyage, she ends up on the streets, begging for money while her husband romances a dance hall girl and takes her as his new bride. When hubby finally bumps into his old wife on the street, he begs her forgiveness, though that's just a ruse so he can take her somewhere and push her off a cliff. Thinking himself rid of her, a surprise awaits that night, as the husband and his new mistress are visited by a pair of very angry serpents.
Very little about this movie hangs together, and it moves at a glacial pace. It's really about 15 minutes of legend dragged out to a patience-testing 70, and everything takes ten times longer than it should. An opening scene by a lake, where the couple discusses their good fortune and then takes turns finding excuses to worry about it (followed by admonishing their partner not to do so) threatens to cross over into self-parody it becomes so cyclical. And just when you think it's done, it adds a coda with the husband noticing his wife's fever - the first symptom of her impending diagnosis.
Much of the film is like this, needlessly languid and pointlessly drawn out - the dance hall scene where the husband meets his new wife seems like something out of an exploitation film, padding the runtime with endless musical numbers. It's quite clear where the film is going with every beat, but in each instance it takes much way longer than necessary getting there - why couldn't the wife just die on Oahu, for instance, rather than having to come all the way to Okinawa just to get killed? But if the narrative had been streamlined, we'd have a one-reeler rather than a feature, and that probably wasn't the filmmakers' intention.
Unfortunately, writer/star Seizen Toguchi, while handsome, generally brings thespian skills to match his scriptwriting. While he's fine enough in regular scenes, the second things get dramatic, he begins pulling silly faces. Even for a silent film dilletante like me, it underscored the elegance of good silent acting, because that's not what's on display here. The climax is decent, if arbitrary, with some snakes and the wife's ghost appearing to terrorize the couple in their bedroom, but it's 5 minutes of horror after an agonizing 65-minute slog. Maybe viewers in 1914 were willing to put up with that, but it's a tall ask of anyone today.