I've long wanted to see one of Toho's oldest monster movies, a black and white flicker from 1955 called Half Human. This is the first fantasy movie Ishiro Honda made after the success of Godzilla, and I've always wondered what it must be like. The movie was adapted to Western screens in 1957 with John Carradine and Morris Ankrum among a few others supplying a talky frame for the action shot by Honda. Toho's original clocks in at over ninety minutes and the adaptation trims at least thirty minutes off that. It's not ineffective as monster movies go, but it's not the movie that Honda and others made for Japanese audiences.
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In the original we follow the travails of an assembly of students. Some of their number go missing on a ski outing and turn up dead while a third remains missing. Giant footprints in the snow and strange hair on a nail are the only clues. This mystery takes up the first thirty minutes or so of the movie and it's what mostly got cut out for U.S. audiences. When spring comes, an expedition goes to look for the missing man and also perhaps the creature who might be responsible. A carnival operator gets wind of this and mounts his own trip following the students now led by a respected scientist. There is an encounter where the Snowman comes into the camp and is chased out by our hero. He runs into the carnival camp and is beat up and left for dead. He's found by a beautiful girl and taken to her village which is made up of isolated people of low caste. There is lots of turmoil but eventually we see the creature's gentle nature before the carnival crew find him and all hell breaks loose. When a young creature is killed the "snowman" gets well and truly "abominable".
Now the English-language version takes this story, strips out most of the beginning mystery and jumps right into the antics following the creature's first appearance on screen invading the student camp. John Carradine waxes on with actually a pretty decently done narration which takes the place of all of the dialogue from the original. There is one scene shift in the Carradine portions of the movie and that is to head down to the morgue where Morris Ankrum is doing an autopsy on the body of the child creature. So Carradine's listeners have absolute proof of the "Abominable Snowman's " existence right there on the table. (I think Toho actually sent the suit of the small creature to America for these shots.)
Now for the controversy. The reason I cannot buy a copy of the original Japanese version of Half Human is the presence of the "Burakamin". This is what remains of a low caste society in Japan made up of people who did jobs deemed unworthy for filthy somehow. These folks were looked down upon and it's the notion that this bigoted notion informs the film in regard to the villagers that keeps Toho from making it available for home viewing. It's not at all unlike what Disney has decided to do in regard to Song of the South, a movie adapting Uncle Remus stories to the screen., Having now finally seen the movie, I think releasing the movie with provisos would be fine. The critique seems a bit overblown. Whatever poor decisions were made in 1955, they can be well left in the past.
I'd love to have a copy of Half Human, but I'll settle now for just getting to see it. If you'd like to see the movie, then go to this link for the original Japanese version and this link for the Westernized Carradine version. Thanks to the Internet Archive for making these rarities available.
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When I was a little kid I had a book about Disney films which contained Song Of The South and I didn't know that Disney had banned it in America. According to Wikipedia the film is available to watch in other countries but I don't know if that's the case here in the UK.
ReplyDeleteI rather like the Uncle Remus tales and have a collection of them around here somewhere. They are legit American fables, but lost now because of this understandable but regrettable sensitivity.
DeleteIt's strange to think that modern day Japan with its largely homogeneous society still has this cast system in place . Even stranger is that they don't release the film as this was ( and still is to a lesser degree) the situation in Japan at that time, why whitewash history distasteful as these things are, to any right thinking person . Thanks for the link I will have a look at it.
ReplyDeleteI think all societies have castes systems to greater and lesser degrees. In the U.S. we've always pushed against the idea because of the idea of self-governance, and the myth of the "American Dream". Now that said, we also had slavery in place for decades before it was outlawed and systemic racism after that. But I detect a desire among some to create a system here, one more formalized than merely defined by access to money.
DeleteJapan has never been as homogenous as their image projects. "Burakamin" is a catchall term for people who weren't part of the majority Japanese Yamato ethnicity. In Hokkaido, it includes Ainu people whose lands were annexed and colonized much like Native Americans here. In outlying areas it includes Ryukan peoples such as native Okinawans (a point of note in Godzilla v. Mechagodzilla). Basically the caste exclusion of Burakamin was a form of racism/ethnicentrism.
ReplyDeleteThanks. As in the U.S. it seems at least some folks in Japan are ashamed of their racist history.
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