Black Test Car

Two car companies are preparing to launch a new sports car at the same moment. Learning the other's price and technical details matters more to each of them than anything else. So the companies plant people inside each other, buy information and use people. A young employee, trying to save his job, crosses the line step by step and ends up putting the woman he loves into the same calculation. Yasuzo Masumura made this for Daiei from a novel by Toshiyuki Kajiyama. The telling moves like a crime film although nobody is carrying a gun; the company men start behaving like yakuza within a very short time. It is a direct criticism of business ethics in Japan's years of rapid growth. The coldest thing about the film is that nobody doing any of this feels bad about it.