Cash Calls Hell (1966) [Film Review]

I never imagined you would be so stupid when I chose you...
            Now,  to save a little girl,  I decided to be stupid.

This week’s review will be about one of the earliest and a somewhat forgotten movie from Hideo Gosha’s rich directorial repertoire. A black-and-white picture from 1966 about a decadent lifestyle of the citizens of post-war Japan as well as an unexpected bond formed between a stranger and a child.

Release Info

Directed by: Hideo Gosha Starring: Tatsuya Nakadai, Yukari Uehara, Kunie Tanaka, Kaneko Iwasaki
Language: Japanese Original Title: Gohiki no shinshi Runtime: 92 min

Plot

Oida (played by always amazing Tatsuya Nakadai) used to be a lower-class guy who through a hard work managed to get at the top. He is due to marry a wealthy woman and takeover a prosperous company. However, one night, Oida causes a traffic accident in which a bystander and his daughter die. Thus, in a split second, he loses everything he struggled so long to achieve and gets sentenced to prison. After serving his time, on the last day of his stay, Oida decides to accept an interesting offer from his cell-mate: kill three specific people and get 15 million yen for the job. When finally out, Oida reluctantly tracks down his first victim, but it turns out that somebody else already killed the guy. Oida has found himself in the middle of a dangerous mystery and the key to unravel it is to find the two other listed men and discover what happened on a certain tramway depot two years earlier.

Blood Money 
Cash Calls Hell may be neither a crime film, nor a noir one, but certainly it is a night movie, for the majority of the action happens under cover of darkness. Tatsuya Nakadai’s Oida is a standard everyman who by a malicious twist of fate becomes an ex-convict. He finds himself on the run through dark and devastated back-allies of Tokyo, shabby cabarets, old docks, and dilapidated buildings; all of which are inhabited by people just like him, individuals who had a shiny future before them, but fell from grace right at the very bottom of the social ladder.

Oida feels quite uncomfortable with the job he has to do, but nevertheless, he knows that there is no coming back to luxurious lifestyle for the ones of his kind. He makes a shy attempt to kill the first victim, but fails to do so. Instead, mobsters from Hong Kong do the job and leave Oida with the victim’s orphaned daughter who constantly follows our hero and calls him “Uncle”. Oida realises that he can’t bring himself to kill anyone despite his new role of a criminal in the Japanese society, but he resolves to press on and find out into what exactly he got himself involved.

The truth is quite unnerving. Three ordinary men, who used have big dreams in the past, committed a robbery. As a result, these men end up exactly like Oida. Even more so, they are ruthlessly murdered by mobsters who want to reclaim their stolen commodities. Hideo Gosha’s presentation of visually morbid murder scenes became an irreplaceable trademark throughout his films, but those scenes always served a certain purpose. Gosha provides a comment on the socio-economic situation of post-war Japan, through stories of people who in order to escape the constraints of their degrading lives commit a crime and thus end up dead in abandoned, almost post-apocalyptic, back-streets and gutters. Even Akira Kurosawa didn’t manage to make his moralistic points so clear in, for instance, Stray Dog (1949) or The Bad Sleep Well (1960).

Interesting in Cash Calls Hell is also the parallelism of Oida’s life. At the beginning of the movie, he accidentally runs over a father and his daughter, whereas, towards the end, he himself becomes “a father” for orphaned Tomoe. Needless to say, these little moments between Oida and Tomoe throughout the film are the true highlights of this picture. The little girl becomes a sort of a redemption, atonement for the past misdeeds of Oida, which is visible especially in the scene when witnessing a heated argument between Oida and one of the men who participated in the heist, the girl throws a shoe so as to defend her Uncle. To me, this film provides the best depiction of a relationship between an adult and a child, even surpassing such an immortal classic as Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid (1921).

Recommendations

If you want to see morally conscious cinema with a bit of action and drama, Cash Calls Hell is the movie for you. Unlike Gosha’s other flicks, this is not a chambara film, yet it is by no means an inferior picture. Give it a go and you won’t be disappointed. Just remember to prepare a packet of tissues beforehand.

Overall score: 8/10