Black Rose Mansion [Kuro bara no yakata][1969]
Direction: Kinji Fukasaku
Featuring: Akihiro Maruyama - Eitaro Ozawa - Masakazu Tamura - Kikko Matsuoka
Language: Japanese
Subs: English .srt
Run Time: 1h 30m
IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064556/
Youtube Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdejQtTk05A
Reviews:
The owner of a private gentlemen’s club is intrigued by the arrival of a mysterious, weirdly beautiful young woman. Three different men show up in the course of several evenings, each claiming to be either her husband or her current love; two of them soon end up dead, and her supposed husband wises up and leaves town. Soon however the owner of the club convinces the exotic beauty to become his kept woman (his own wife having been crippled in a car accident), and he puts her up in her own place nearby. But the man’s wayward, ne’er-do-well younger son shows up, falls for the woman, and convinces her to run away with him. But how are they going to live, since neither of them has money? Well, a friend of his has been trying to talk him into being the driver during some sort of heist. It all goes badly, of course, and the young man is shot by the police. Confronted by their betrayal, the young man and the mysterious woman attempt to leave Japan in a boat with the stolen loot – but the boat crashes and they die. The millionaire club owner is left with his invalid wife, his remaining (cynical but loyal) son, and the memory of the mysterious woman who entered his life for so short a period of time.
This movie was a weird, unique sort of melodrama (the Japanese even use this word, though they convert it to something like merodurama) in that it dealt mainly with the emotions of the main characters and the impact of the actions on their fortunes – in other words, a ‘mainstream’ pic and not a genre movie. Every irony-dripping moment, every facial tic was lovingly shown by director Fuakasaku; dream and memory sequences usually took place in monochrome to the accompaniment of haunting music. The gentlemen’s club and its members seemed fairly gothic, or even Victorian; this contrasted mightily with the dance-club sequences featuring the wayward son.
The movie was fairly interesting; I kept thinking, though, that something supernatural was going to happen – I thought the ‘black rose mansion’ of the title would turn out to be haunted or something. But, no. It was a (more or less) straightforward melodrama with no otherworldly goings-on. So, why is this weird little import available on Region 1 DVD when so many other, presumably more deserving, titles are not? Why is this film remembered when so many others from its era are forgotten?
Well, one reason might be that it’s a dude, dude! Yup, the actor behind the enticingly weird main character of Black Rose Mansion, Akihiro Maruyama, was a cross-dresser.
Black Rose Mansion
Director Kinji Fukasaku had, to everyone’s surprise, had a recent hit with the film Black Lizard, also starring Maruyama. The script was written by Yukio Mishima, a homosexual political activist who wrote novels and scripts, and occasionally did some acting. Mishima would commit ritual suicide in 1970 after he and his small private army took over the headquarters of the Japanese Self-Defense Forces. Lizard had been a moody piece about a female gang boss that matches wits with a clever detective.
The director, script writer, and transvestite star attempted once again to find box office gold with this not-quite sequel to the first film. It didn’t work – the box office for this second film was pretty weak – and no other collaborations were attempted.
From DVD Talk: The mysterious chanteuse Ryoko Fujio arrives in town and begins to perform at Sako Kyohei's Black Rose Mansion. She appears and leaves at the same times every day. No one knows her past. No one knows were she lives, but everyone it seems is bewitched by her presence. Men who claim to be former lovers and husbands begin to arrive, each with a different story, a different view of her, and each one she rejects and says she doesn't even know. After the death of one of her proclaimed ex-lovers and her assistant, Sako takes her in and renovates the mansion for her. Then, Sako's son, Wataru, the families black sheep, returns, and he too is under Ryuko's spell, willing to jeopardize everything, his family and his life, to be with her.
Black Rose Mansion (1969) is a tepid, predictable melodrama, even by the worst soap opera and romance novels standards, and remains remarkable because the lead vixen is a man, Japanese drag queen Akihiro Maruyama. Director Kinji Fukasaku had previously worked with Maruyama the year before in the funky exaggerated 60's caper film Black Lizard. In Lizard's high camp setting, a drag queen cast as a nefarious criminal worked quite well and lent a bit of fun to the already over the top proceedings, but in Black Rose Mansion the drag queen as a lusty sex object, some deadly siren, is just downright creepy and far less effective. Instead of being some insightful bit of subtext, it is just distracting. I doubt anyone with a good pair of sober eyes and ears will question that Akihiro Maruyama is very obviously a man, so as various men fawn over him and he flashes a forced not-feminine giggle, it is weird. And, I mean, in a bad way weird, setting up an unconvincing air over the entire film from the start, and is neither fun, nor adequately surreal enough to merit the casting of a drag queen as this supernatural object of desire.
Fukasaku was one of Japans great cult directors. Best known for his crime films/yakuza pictures, like the Battle series, Yakuza Graveyard, Sympathy for the Underdog, Triple Cross and Cops Vs. Thugs, he also delved in sci-fi with Message from Space and The Green Slime, samurai pictures like Shogun's Samurai, Legend of the Eight Samurai and The Fall of Ako Castle, the Japanese segments of Tora, Tora, Tora, and saw success recently at the end of his life with the controversial, cannot be ignored Battle Royale. Black Rose Mansion definitely ranks as a lesser work and a bit of a misstep though some of his trademark visuals show through. It is also fair to argue that among his 60+ films there are quite a few that pale in comparison.
AVI Information
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