Set in Japan immediately after WWII, acclaimed director Masaki Kobayashi's noir-ish drama unfolds in the shanty town filled with bars and brothels that surrounds an American Naval Air Facility in Kanagawa prefecture.
Naïve new arrival Nishida (Fumio Watanabe), a student, is immediately taken advantage of by the ruthless landlord (Isuzu Yamada) who charges exorbitant rent for a cramped, squalid apartment and misses no opportunity to gossip maliciously about her tenants. After settling in, Nishida gets to know some of his neighbors, including self-proclaimed communist Kin (Seiji Miyaguchi) and Shizuko (Ineko Arima), an innocent waitress whose beauty is her downfall: It attracts the brutish attention of local thug Killer Joe (Tatsuya Nakadai), who rapes her as she's on her way to visit Nishida. Desperate to save face, she begs Joe to marry her; he refuses but claims to love her, and Shizuko is unworldly enough to believe his claim that he only assaulted her because he was overwhelmed by passion. Shizuko becomes Killer Joe's girlfriend, but also still cares for Nishida. As Joe and his gang help the corrupt local officials colluding and property developers who want the shantytown emptied and don't care how it's done, Nishida is drawn into a dangerous triangle that can only end badly.
Kobayashi's angry, pessimistic film works on two levels: It's both a straightforward slum drama and an implicit critique of post-war Japanese attitudes and behaviors. Although BLACK RIVER was all-but unseen outside Japan, Kobayashi later established and international profile with such films as the epic THE HUMAN CONDITION (1959) and KWAIDAN (1964). leave a comment