A Fugitive from the Past

Tomu Uchida's 1965 crime film runs past three hours and stands among the darkest in Japanese cinema. Three robbers flee, one kills the other two, and the bodies wash ashore amid the wreckage of a maritime disaster, drawing a policeman's attention. The ferry catastrophe that opens the film is fictional but fed by a real typhoon that struck Hokkaido in 1954, and Uchida cuts newsreel footage of it into the picture. Shot using Toei's coarse-grained W106 process, the film has a grainy, almost documentary surface. The story spreads across a decade, and its real subject is not the solving of a murder but how solid a new life can be when it is built while running from an old one. Rentaro Mikuni's Inukai stays comprehensible as both victim and perpetrator, uncomfortably so. The sex worker played by Sachiko Hidari sits close to the film's moral centre. Who it's for: viewers who like long-form Japanese crime cinema and social detective fiction in the Seicho Matsumoto vein. Who it's not for: anyone who cannot take the length, the deliberate pace, or a tone in which poverty and violence are never separable.