Japan Haul: SM (‘Suspense & Mystery’) Magazine (June 1969)

Although it purports to offer readers an experience in “suspense and mystery”, Japanese periodical ‘SM’ seems to have been fairly blatant in aiming it’s contents at an audience seeking an entirely different kind of ‘S’ and ‘M’.

Whilst this isn’t the kind of material we’d normally go out of our way to feature on this blog, what I find remarkable about SM is that it is a magazine entirely dedicated to sexual titillation (often of a slightly questionable nature) that features no photographic or overtly pornographic content whatsoever. Instead, SM - on the basis of this copy randomly discovered in a Tokyo second hand bookshop, at least - chose to illustrate its various stories and articles with an astounding array of original artwork, much of it veering heavily toward the abstract and psychedelic.

A immediate demonstration of this daring  policy comes immediately after the contents page, as furtive browsers get their eyes seared by eight full colour pages of Masao Kawamoto’s mind-melting collage artwork – a “FOR MADMEN ONLY” sign on the door if ever there was one, and, needless to say, a guarantee that this little magazine was going to be leaving the shop with me, regardless of what the rest of it contained.

Unfortunately, I can find very little online about Masao Kawamoto (was he the same Masao Kawamoto who wrote these two seemingly innocuous guides to watercolour painting..?), but searching using his name’s Japanese characters did at least turn up this Tumblr post, wherein another motherlode of his artwork (from a 1968 publication entitled “Crash Comix”) can be enjoyed.

Credits for ‘SM’s other interior illustrations are sufficiently vague and scattered that I’ve been unable to find many of them, but the illustrations themselves are all rather wonderful, with a different artist seemingly being assigned to each of the magazine’s numerous pieces of erotic fiction. Of course, I’m unable to read these stories, but I think the pictures below succeed in giving us the general gist of where this magazine's focus lay.

After all that's over with, the end pages of ‘SM’ widenstheir focus to include a few factual articles and reviews. Worryingly, there is a lengthy piece entitled "Joys of the Torture Chamber" detailing the practices of the Catholic Inquisition, illustrated by faded reproductions of familiarly icky Western wood-cuts. We don’t really need to dwell on that here, but, more interestingly, the magazine also features significant coverage of saucy movies, and particularly those imported from Europe, if the predominantly caucasian features of the pictured actors is anything to go by.

Whilst I don’t immediately recognise any of the productions featured, a special fold out section reproduces variety of publicity shots depicting the kind of grisly exploitation business that, whilst it had become commonplace in European films by the mid ‘70s, was still pretty rare in 1969, leading me to wonder just where the hell these images of close-up gore, weird bondage scenarios and nasty Nazisploitation / WIP type goings on originated.

There are also a few longer text reviews of some comparatively genteel looking movies that I’m equally unable to identify, so, just out of interest, readers who can place any of the following images are encouraged to get in touch via the usual channels.

Even more interestingly (to me at least), ‘SM’ also features a few pages dedicated to reviewing the latest American smut paperbacks – see for instance these no doubt insightful write-ups of ‘Horizontal Secretary’ and ‘Hillbilly Haven’.

To my knowledge, no English language publications ever bothered discussing the content or merit of these books, so the mind boggles trying to imagine what a (presumably) bilingual Japanese reviewer might have found to say about them.

Maybe one day I might find out, but as my darling wife is currently busy with a some rather more pressing translation-related endeavours, I’m reluctant to bother her with demands to tell me what some guy in 1969 thought about ‘Hillbilly Haven’.

Below are a few double-page scans of those Kawamoto collage pages, for all your desktop wallpapering needs.

This Month’s Zatoichi: Zatoichi’s Vengeance (Tokuzô Tanaka, 1966)

As observant readers may have noted, April and May saw my household taking a break from our monthly Zatoichi screenings, partly just to allow our enthusiasm to recharge a bit after a few slightly underwhelming installments (#11, #12). Predictably enough though, it wasn’t long before I found myself missing good ol’ Ichi-san pretty, and perhaps it was this sense of returning to a regular routine after the self-imposed break that helped make film #13, which marks the exact half-way point of the series, seem like the freshest and most satisfactory Zatoichi viewing in quite a while.

Originally released in Japan as ‘Zatoichi No Uta Ga Kikoeru’, which literally translates as ‘The Song of Zatoichi Can Be Heard’, this episode’s title could perhaps more accurately could be read as something like ‘We Hear Zatoichi Calling’. Not wasting time with any of that crap however, whoever who came up with the films’ English release titles cut to the chase and just went with ‘Zatoichi’s Vengeance’ (not to be confused with Zatoichi's Revenge).

Basically, the success of ‘Zatoichi’s Vengeance’ is due largely to the efforts the filmmakers’ take to reassert a sense of dramatic seriousness and moral conflict that more recent episodes in the series have conspicuously lacked. Hajime Takaiwa’s script may be built around a set of by now wholly formulaic plot elements (the struggling small town merchants being menaced by yakuza, the orphaned kid in search of a father figure, the brooding samurai with a chip of his shoulder, the broken-hearted maiden condemned to life in a brothel – all are present and correct), but nothing here feels like mere faffing about or narrative water-treading. Whilst there is little going on that we’ve not seen many times before, these storylines are all played out with an elegant, straight-faced simplicity that, as in so much of best Japanese popular story-telling, imbues their melodramatic form with real gravitas.

Zatoichi’s familiar robin hood act (taking the townspeople’s side against yakuza intimidation, etc) seems to have real purpose this time around, as, for the first time in a while, the villains are presented as a genuinely vile bunch – cruel, petty thugs whose bullying behavior actually makes us angry, rather than yet more faceless extra for Ichi to mow down amid some largely uninvolving inter-gang conflict.

More than just a triumphalist good vs evil beatdown though, the film follows the example set by some of the best early Zatoichi installment in taking the time to question the methods and motivations of our ‘noble’ characters, as embodied both by the conventional jideo-geki conflict faced by Shigeru Amachi’s samurai (which I won’t trouble you with here), and also, more interestingly, via a curious character referred to only as the biwa priest – a blind nomad who, after befriending Ichi on the road, essentially seems to function as a dark shade of our hero’s troubled conscience, dispensing fragments of pithy, oblique wisdom that cast doubt upon his violent way of life.

At first, the priest castigates Ichi for inadvertently corrupting the ideals of the local child who has adopted him as a father figure. Seeing the boy completely obsessed by his new idol’s slick swordsmanship after Ichi pulls a few tricks in non-lethal self-defense, Ichi accepts the priest’s point and suffers manfully through a grueling beating when he refuses to retaliate against the yakuza upon their next encounter. When he does finally give in and draw blood against the baddies though, the priest changes his tune and casually exonerates him, declaring that of course it is only human to fight back against such provocation. Well, demands a confused Ichi, should I draw my sword and take the route of violence or not? Both ways are correct, the priest informs him in full zen pomp, you simply lack the insight to comprehend it.

If all this sounds a tad pretentious, well, what can I tell you – within the context of the film, such musings actually work very well, and the priest, played by Jun Hamamura as a cynical, detached, slightly cruel counterpoint to Ichi’s clumsy, trying-my-best-to-do-the-right-thing benevolence, makes for an intriguing addition to the film’s cast of characters.(1)

Interestingly, the biwa hōshi represented by Hamamura’s character were a genuine part of pre-Meiji Era Japanese culture, their origins stretching far back into the nation’s history. A caste of usually blind musicians who seemingly adopted a persona somewhere between that of Byronic Romantic poets and nomadic zen monks, the biwa hōshi travelled the land dispensing lessons in selflessness and the contemplation of beauty via the recitation of epic ballads and histories, accompanying themselves via the ominous, droning sound of the four-stringed biwa lute (a harsher-sounding, more primitive precursor to the koto and shamisen of traditional Japanese music).

The scene in ‘Zatoichi’s Vengeance’ in which the priest plays his biwa for Ichi whilst the two sit along in a forest clearing – building a slow, droning song of heavy resonance as Ichi listens out for any approaching attackers – is mesmerising, with the instrument’s thick strings and gigantic plectrum producing a dense pattern of sustained overtones that, to my cloddish Western ears, sounds like nothing so much as some kind of medieval doom metal. “You cannot play biwa if you just depend on the strings,” the priest tells Ichi after he breaks a string mid-performance, “and if you depend wholly upon that hidden sword, you will not live long”. Words for our hero to contemplate as he once again strides off into the sunset, amid a more melancholy and ambiguous conclusion than usual.

Tokuzô Tanaka, who previously directed the very good Zatoichi The Fugitive, does an excellent job here too, not only ensuring that the slightly more serious tone of the material is appropriately pitched throughout, but adopting a foreboding and stately pace that serves it brilliantly. Establishing shots and other wide-screen compositions are beautifully rendered by justly-celebrated DP Kazuo Miyagawa, whilst, in Tanaka’s hands, the obligatory fight scenes once again become brutal and exhilarating.

As in ‘..Fugitive’, Tanaka particularly excels at switching back to long shot during action scenes, maintaining the suspense and emotional engagement of his set ups from a greater distance than most action directors would be comfortable with, stressing the physical distances between his fighters and letting landscape elements add to the drama, making his brief returns to close-up all the more effective as a result.

Particularly impressive in this regard is the film’s central set piece, which is played in shadow puppet style silhouette on a narrow bridge, as Ichi’s opponents close in on him from either side, attempting to deafen and disorientate him using the clamour of the town festival's ‘thunder drums’. Of all the hare-brained schemes baddies have used thus far to try to take Ichi down, this I think is the most sensible, and also the most suspenseful for us as viewers. For all of the Zatoichi films’ many virtues, it is often difficult for the filmmakers to generate much excitement within the fight sequences whilst we know that our hero is basically invincible, so to realise here that Ichi is suddenly just lunging randomly, in great pain and unable to sense the enemies around him, is a real shocker that, few a few moments at least, makes us uncertain how things will play out.

As the nature of this finale suggests, ‘Zatoichi’s Vengeance’ is also notable as one of the few films in the series thus far that really makes an effort to explore the nature of Ichi’s blindness on a level that goes beyond mere sight gags and comic misunderstandings. The importance of sound and music is woven into every aspect of the story, and it is their shared blindness that allows Ichi and the biwa priest to build a rapport around the shared experience of the world as revealed to them by their heightened sensory impressions; a development that adds significantly to the reality of the film’s drama.

Throw in yet another epic original score from maestro Akira Ikufube and the return of the always excellent Shigeru Amachi – who memorably played Hirate in the very first Zatoichi film – as a slightly more convincing rogue samurai than usual, and we’re left with the reassuring feeling that the series is really cooking with gas again here.(2) Definitely the best entry since the films hit double figures, ‘Zatoichi’s Vengeance’ is an example of popular chanbara film-making at its finest, and here’s hoping that Kazuo Ikehiro can manage to maintain this standard for film # 14, ‘Zatoichi’s Pilgrimage’, which debuted only three months after this one in August 1966.

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(1) Yet another celebrated character player with more notable credits to his name than you’ve had hot dinners, Hamamura (1906 – 1995) appeared in Kon Ichikawa’s revered ‘The Burmese Harp’ (1956), Kurosawa’s ‘High and Low’ (1963) and Masaki Kobayashi’s ‘Kwaidan’ (1964) amongst others…. not that that stopped him also earning a crust in ‘Watch Out, Crimson Bat!’ (1969) and turning up as “public official” in Fear of the Ghost House: Bloodthirsty Doll (1970).

(2) Interestingly, a quick scan of IMDB reveals that Amachi, in addition to roles in numerous iconic chanbara productions, was actually also a bit of a “horror man”, appearing for director Nobuo Nakagawa in ‘The Ghost of Yotsuya’ (1959), ‘The Vampire Woman’ (1959), and the epic ‘Jigoku’ (1960). Happily for us Euro-horror buffs, he also turned up years later in Paul Naschy’s bonkers Japanese co-production ‘The Beast With The Magic Sword’ (1983).

Franco Files:Tender & Perverse Emanuelle (1973)

AKA: ‘Des Frissons sur la Peau’ (‘The Shiver of Fear’, France), ‘Le Chemin Solitaire’ (‘The Solitary Way’, France?), ‘El Ultimo Escalofrío’ (‘The Final Chill’, Spain), ‘French Emanuelle’ (UK), ‘Sicarius: Febbre di Sesso’ (‘Sicarius: Sex Fever’, Italy).

In several interviews conducted for DVD releases of his films, Jess Franco expressed a strong dislike for the work of ‘Emmanuelle’ director Just Jaeckin, claiming (if I recall correctly) that Jaeckin’s erotic films were cold, soulless affairs in which the director arranged his female cast like shop window dummies – in contract, presumably, to Franco’s own somewhat earthier and more emotionally engaged approach to dirty movie-making.

As such, one imagines Franco must have been less than thrilled at the prospect of making movies with ‘Emanuelle’ (one ‘m’, you’ll note, to avoid legal action) in the title, as seemingly became obligatory for all purveyors of euro-smut in the decade following the success of Jaeckin’s film. Perhaps we could read a certain black humour into the fact that this, Jess’s first ‘Emanuelle’ cash-in, features the titular character (here played by Norma Kastel) falling to her death from a clifftop balcony within the opening half hour, after which the movie becomes a flashback-heavy investigation into her murder… although, that reading of events is rather torpedoed by the fact that this film was actually shot BEFORE Jaeckin’s 'Emmanuelle', and was first screened in France in 1973, under the title ‘Des Frissons sur la Peau’.(1)

As has been mentioned in these pages before, Franco was pretty much on fire through the years 1972-74, producing an absolutely staggering quantity of work, much of it amongst his very best, the director working so fast that his films from this period almost seem like the result of cellular multiplication, with themes, locations, casts, costumes and script ideas all blurring into one another to create a sprawling sea of cinema that arguably represents the creative peak of Franco’s career.

Perhaps shot sometime between ‘La Comtesse Noire’ (Female Vampire) and ‘Les Nuits Brûlantes de Linda’ (Hot Nights of Linda), if the clues provided by locations, cast members and hairstyling are anything to go by, ‘Tender & Perverse Emanuelle’ (or whatever you want to call it) certainly isn’t amongst Franco’s best efforts from this period, but it nonetheless absorbs enough of the good stuff from the films surrounding it on his CV to make it a keeper for his ever-growing cult of devotees.

Like Lorna the Exorcist, ‘Tender & Perverse..’ begins with a contextless but intoxicating lesbian love scene, featuring an extended version of some footage that memorably appeared in the aforementioned ‘Hot Nights..’, featuring Lina Romay and a partner blowing cigarette smoke around a moodily lit, red-hued night club void, before (in this version) getting down to some serious softcore business. As the cry of Lina’s orgasm echoes over a swift cutaway to a clifftop shot of waves crashing against the shoreline far below, we know we’re in safe hands.

After this promising opening though, there is an unavoidable feeling of shoddiness to the way the rather slapdash melodrama / murder mystery plotline unfolds, not helped by one of the worst English dubs ever inflicted upon a Franco film. Regrettably for the dubbers, who seem to be making it up as they go along, there are a great many dialogue scenes and much procedural faffing about, making me wonder whether the French or Spanish versions might have featured a somewhat more compelling storyline than we get here - a distinct possibility, but I wouldn’t count on it based on the tedium that often resulted when Franco tried to make straight thrillers during the ‘70s. (See The Devil Came From Akasava for but one example.)

In places, Franco toys with the idea of expanding the murder mystery angle into full-on giallo territory – a hastily shot scene in which a woman playing piano in a bar is attacked via a garrote-wielding killer POV shot prefigures the slasher hi-jinks of Bloody Moon – but he never really follows this stylistic twist far enough to merit much interest.

‘Tender & Perverse..’s Citizen Kane-derived flashback structure recalls Franco’s excellent ‘Sinner’ (’73), but whereas that film was skillfully and deliberately constructed, the juxtaposition of scenes here seems fairly random, with flashbacks and sub-plots often feeling like flimsy excuses to mesh together a bunch of unconnected footage and sex scenes that one suspects could even have been shot for other projects.

Whereas the sex in most of Franco’s early ‘70s erotic films fits in quite naturally, feeling very much in keeping with the nature of the characters and the drift of the story, here it veers more toward the path taken by clumsier practitioners of the genre, with characters often seeming to get it on with each other at random intervals, for no terribly compelling reason. Not quite “the director blows the whistle and off they go” territory, but closer to such than Franco films of this vintage normally venture.

Whilst the resulting scenes are explicit enough to ensure that the film probably remained unseen outside of ‘specialist’ cinemas – sometimes playing the cheeky trick of adding anonymous insert shots to more chaste footage of the film’s lead actors - they are also sufficiently short and thinly spread out amongst straight crime/thriller footage that the movie would likely arouse nothing except frustration amongst the patrons of such establishments, raising the question of precisely what kind of contemporary audience the film could possibly have hoped to attract, even if it was an effective thriller (which for anyone other than us brain-scrabbled Franco devotees, it almost certainly isn’t).(2)

Cast-wise, Kastel herself is no great shakes as the ostensible lead, whilst as her husband, played by Spanish exploitation mainstay Alberto Dalbes, spends the whole picture just looking alternately bored and grumpy – an aura Dalbes continued to cultivate through his entire film career, insofar as I can tell.

More welcome is the presence of the ever-wonderful Jack Taylor, here looking at his very best, matching up his ‘Female Vampire’ mustache with some exquisitely classy threads to create the perfect exemplar of a dashing ‘70s gentleman. I don’t recall whether or not I’ve taken time here in the past to wax lyrical re: Jack Taylor, but needless to say - from his deep, soulful eyes and natural sense of style to the strange sense of innocence he seems able to bring even to roles in the very sleaziest movies, he is tops as far as I’m concerned, and it’s always a pleasure to spend time in his company.

It's also always a pleasure of course to spend time with Lina Romay, who here adopts a bit of a beatnik look for her first in-character scene as Jack’s wife / Dalbes’ sister, wearing shades and what appears to be a black nylon body-stocking. Through most of the rest of the film, she opts for a pair of fetching, thick-framed granny glasses, and, whilst the appalling dubbing makes it difficult to really get much of an angle on her performance, it is nice to see her in a slightly more subdued, naturalistic role than was usual in this era, wearing little make up and shunning the frenzied weirdness that characterized her appearances in ‘Comtesse..’, ‘Lorna..’ and ‘..Linda’, even though she remains the instigator of much of the film’s gratuitous hanky-panky.

Amongst the other familiar Franco faces popping up here, we’ve got rotund French comedian ‘Bigotini’ (who added inexplicable comic relief to ‘Hot Nights..’ and ‘73’s ‘Plaisir à Trios’) playing a rare straight role as a cop, and Antonio Mayans, who became Franco’s go-to male lead and general right hand man from the mid ‘70s right through to the director’s death in 2013, making what I believe may be his very first Francoverse appearance, as a minor character rejoicing under the perfect punk name of "Richard Scary".(3)

Meanwhile, the movie’s obligatory night-spot, ‘Yvonne’s Bar’, doesn’t have quite the same je ne sais quoi as the psychedelic dives of other Franco flicks, despite the application of some extremely blurry, freaked out camerawork, but it can at least boast Alice Arno (who appeared in almost every film I’ve thus far mentioned in the review) working behind the bar, so that’s ok.

In addition to a quintessential Franco cast, ‘Tender & Perverse..’ also benefits from the use of some quintessential Franco locations – some of them probably so familiar to the director’s fans by this stage that we’re quite liable to get confused and begin to believe we visited them during childhood or something. From the towering Alicante skyline to that familiar harbour with the big rock that Franco always films with exactly the same pan shot, it’s all here, whilst the clifftop villa with the red-tiled roof in which most of the action in ‘Hot Nights..’ took place stands in here as Kastel and Dalbes’ pad.

For all that it fails as both a thriller and a sex movie, ‘Tender & Perverse..’ does at least hit the spot as a pure Jess Franco movie, making extensive use of some of Jess’s favourite in-camera techniques to evoke a sense of drifting, dreamlike unreality. Focus is treated as optional  luxury throughout, and the aforementioned bar/night club scenes in particular degenerate almost completely into a psychedelic mess of fuzzy, over-saturated  wide-angle blurring.

For many other scenes, the lens seems to be smeared with more Vaseline than can possibly be sensible, whilst ‘Emanuelle’s solitary wanderings early in the film are enlivened by the same kind of extreme over-exposure that graced Janine Reynaud’s journey through the streets of Lisbon in Necronomicon, giving the scenes a kind of intense, unearthly glow, as, in some moments, she and her husband seem to disappear entirely into a sea of pure, blinding white.

This dreamlike, distorted atmos is only enhanced by Daniel White’s characteristically lugubrious piano score, the woozy tones of which seem to be launching a calculated assault against the audience’s attention span. White’s music for Franco’s films is certainly an acquired taste, that’s for sure - whilst some may claim it achieves a similar ambient sublimity to Badalamenti’s score for Twin Peaks, others may simply find it soporific and banal. I can’t decide where I stand on it really – it probably depends on how far after midnight it is, and how much I've had to drink. Count me as being on the fence for the moment, and maybe I’ll give you an opinion once I wake up, because the combination of White tinkling the ivories, the English dubbers spouting a load of improvised bullshit about dreams and nightmares and Franco playing hell with the focus knob has got me drifting off toward sleepy-time pretty damn quick….

Rest assured though, my dreams will be happy ones. Whilst most aficionados probably wouldn’t place ‘Tender & Perverse Emanuelle’ even within the top 25 horror-tinged erotic thrillers Jess Franco signed (one of) his name(s) to over the years, I nonetheless found it very enjoyable way to break the married life-imposed Franco abstinence that I have heroically undertaken over the past nine months or so. Whilst far from top drawer, it is still a picture that successfully invokes all of the most distinctive characteristics of the great man’s work, leading to a cinematic experience that, love it or hate it, couldn’t possibly have been created by any other human being – which certainly counts for something.

With Stephen Thrower’s long-awaited book finally arriving very soon (touch wood), a ticket to a whole evening dedicated to Mr. Thrower’s thoughts on Franco in my pocket and exciting new blu-rays on the way soon from both Kino/Redemption and Severin, it looks like I could be falling off the wagon for a good long while this time, perhaps following Emanuelle off that cliff into the shimmering Iberian waters below, as Lina moans distantly somewhere in the intermittently dubbed background. Bon voyage!

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Kink: 3/5
Creepitude: 1/5
Pulp Thrills: 2/5
Altered States: 3/5
Sight Seeing: 3/5

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(1) From what I can gather, the ‘Emanuelle’ hook was only added when the film was dubbed into English, and even then, the dubbing “artists” (I use the term loosely in this case) seem unsure, as the title character’s name changes back and forth between Emanuelle and the script’s original Barbara from scene to scene. (The fact the English title card misses the ‘e’ off ‘perverse’ also suggests things were done in a hurry.)

(2) Of course we only need point toward ‘Lorna the Exorcist’ or ‘A Virgin Among The Living Dead’ to demonstrate how little of a fuck Franco gave about satisfying audience / producer expectations in the early ‘70s, but the lack of commercial potential seems particularly glaring in the case of a film like this ‘Tender & Perverse..’, which seems more like a misguided genre exercise, largely lacking the singular vision and crazed artistry of the aforementioned projects.

(3) ‘Bigotini’, we should note in passing, possesses a truly intimidating soup-strainer moustache that puts Taylor’s in the shade. In fact, all in all, ‘Tender & Perverse Emanuelle’ must rank as one of the most moustache-heavy films in Franco’s catalogue, with almost every male cast member luxuriating in designer facial hair of one kind of another. Scenes in which Bigotini and another moustachioed cop take in Jack and Dables for questioning actually approach some kind of ‘70s mustache critical mass…. all it would have taken is an additional picture of Maurizio Merli pinned to the wall, and the consequences for the time-space continuum could have been unthinkable.