Five Men in the Circus

A brass band plays off-key, parading lazily through rural towns. Against the open night sky, acrobats dangle perilously without nets. “People will laugh if you fall,” the ringmaster tells them. Two sisters, halfway between ballerinas and clowns, struggle to define their lives.

The film is 1935’s Sakasu Gonin-Gumi, or Five Men in the Circus, and this post is for the At the Circus Blogathon hosted by SerendipitousAnachronisms and Crítica Retro.

I know it’s been a hell of a November so far – incidentally, if you want to marry a Canadian girl for immigration purposes, I’d probably do it for a working Hulu account – and I picked a total downer of a movie for this blogathon. So… maybe read about this movie now and then watch it at a later time? Or read about it at a later time. Blog posts don’t expire or anything. They’re not cream.

Also, before I really get going, I’m going to shamelessly plug Serendipitous Anachronisms and Crítica Retro. Both of them have amazing content, perceptive writing, and truckloads of historical information, so they’re definitely worth visiting repeatedly and subscribing to. Love to them for hosting this event, and love to them in general for being Summer and Lê. (Embarrassingly, I’ve always thought of Crítica Retro as my blog’s “cousin” because of our similar titles.)

Okay! Let’s take a trip to pre-war Japan, and the lyrical melancholy of Mikio Naruse!

It’s often bemoaned by fans of 20^th century Japanese cinema that Naruse isn’t better known in the west. Despite the retrospectives and festivals that spotlight his work, he remains largely undiscussed, especially when compared to his contemporaries Yasujirō Ozu and Kenji Mizoguchi.

Part of this has to do with what used to be considered marketable internationally and what didn’t. Men’s films, like Kurosawa’s famous samurai epics and gritty crime dramas, were considered bankable while women’s films and low-key dramas were considered “too Japanese” for export. This second category is, of course, what Naruse specialized in. (Fun fact: Kurosawa apprenticed with Naruse, but a lot of people ignore this because no samurai = no lasting influence.)

Though his films were very popular in Japan during his lifetime, his company man attitude and lack of interest in auteur theory made him a figure of little appeal to contemporary western critics. He was sort of like a Howard Hawks or Douglas Sirk in that respect.

Interestingly, Naruse’s 1935 breakthrough Wife! Be Like a Rose! was the first Japanese talkie to receive an American theatrical release. It didn’t do well at all. Probably because it’s about the unfairness of Geisha culture and the pressure children put on their parents to maintain family reputations, and America was more into screwball comedies at that time. It was the 30’s. People didn’t need to go to the movies to get depressed, they could just stay home and think about their lives.

Five Men in the Circus was the immediate follow-up to Wife! Be Like a Rose! and never got an international release.

It tells the story of a dismally untalented five-man brass band, a group that’s been picking up work here and there advertising for hot springs and local festivals and the like. In between gigs, they steal hotel toiletries and wish they were back in Tokyo. Their next paycheck is supposed to come from playing the fanfare for a rural athletic meet, but when the meet is postponed, they find themselves in a bind.

Word comes to them of a circus set up in a nearby town, and they decide to head over and see if the big top needs some really terrible musicians. (Spoiler: They do not.)

At the circus, we’re introduced to the ringmaster’s two daughters, and it’s here that the Naruse touch is most evident.

Naruse’s films have very few technical signatures, in terms of what we recognize as directorial artistic flourish. He was obsessed with making the camera feel invisible, so there’s none of that Citizen Kane cameraman-in-the-trees style of innovation in his work. There are a few shots at wide, vertiginous angles in order to capture the sensation of looking upwards at acrobats, but even that’s crafted to feel as organic to the audience as possible. His whole technical aim was to create the illusion of one, continuous shot throughout the story. Kind of like a book with no chapters.

Where you can really see his thumbprint – again more like Howard Hawks than anyone else I can think of – is in recurring narrative themes. For Naruse, that meant women. His female characters weren’t accessories to a masculine narrative, nor were they prizes for deeds well done; they were dynamic and human, and more often than not, torn between two conflicting expectations within Japanese society. These characters don’t win, because they can’t win, and this inevitable loss forms the heart of the Mikio Naruse tragedy, but there’s always a flicker of optimism.

For a Naruse character, dignity is the hardest thing to hold on to, but the only thing worth keeping.

It’s a simple but powerful underlying theme, particularly in his later, more self-assured stories like 1959’s When a Woman Ascends the Stairs.

Five Men in the Circus sets itself apart from his usual films by being ensemble led, and by weaving its tragi-comic outlook through a variety of seemingly unresolved subplots. (I’ve mentioned before that I really enjoy unresolved stories; but if they drive you nuts, opt for a later Naruse comedy called Travelling Actors. It’s about two guys in a Kabuki troupe who dress up in a horse costume re-evaluating their lives after learning they’re being replaced with a real horse. It’s unexpectedly poignant and also very, very silly.) Most notable is the violinist who gets his dreams crushed because he won’t listen to circus wisdom about demographics. Rural audiences don’t like European classic music, they like tunes with some pep.

The story is based on a novel that had a lot of then-popular crude humour, especially in regard to periphery female characters. It makes for a vivid contrast between what films were expected to do in 1930’s Japan and what filmmakers like Naruse wanted them to be able to say.

"None of us play this music because we like it," one of the band members sulks as he drinks at an inn.

"None of us are bar hostesses because we like it," his server replies, pouring his next sake with her job-required simpering smile.

So, yeah. Five Men in the Circus might not be the best movie to watch while you’re feeling cruddy, but I hope this post has inspired you to check out the work of Mikio Naruse! And if you already knew him from his films of the 1950’s, or the collection of his silent films released by Criterion, then I hope this has encouraged you to check out some stuff from his middle-period!

And go look at everyone else’s circus posts! They’ll cheer you up!

The United States Steel Hour 03x06: A Wind from the South

This is some really hoity-toity TV.

I feel like a Damon Runyon character giving a Smithsonian tour.

For St. Patrick’s Day, we’re watching Julie Harris in a 1955 live play for The United States Steel Hour called “A Wind from the South.”

So let’s start with a little about Julie Harris, an actress who can reasonably be called the first television star. Not the first star on television, in the early days many personalities were making the great migration from radio, and movie stars like Dick Powell and Barbara Stanwyck were already noting the boost the new medium could give to their stalled careers. Julie Harris, though, was the first personality forged in the public consciousness by her appearances on TV.

As her career grew, she became one of the great figures of American live theater, but for a white hot decade she was television and to the average member of the public who couldn’t get to Broadway to see a play, television was how she was best known.

She played Joan of Arc in The Lark, Nora in A Doll’s House, Sally Bowles in I Am a Camera, Queen Victoria in Victoria Regina, Mary Todd Lincoln in The Last of Mrs. Lincoln, and basically a ton of powerful yet fragile women trapped in cages of circumstance and society. She was effectively predicting the pending feminist revolution with most of her early television performances, including the one we’re looking at today.

East Side/West Side

In 1963, CBS has several problems.

The big one is George C. Scott, a Broadway actor turned electrifying film sensation. For some baffling reason, somebody at CBS decides to try and get Scott to commit to doing a TV show. Under normal circumstances, getting a solid character actor to make a show for you isn’t a bad idea, but Scott has been very vocal about his derision for TV. And he is what is euphemistically known as “difficult.”

They send him a series overview about a war correspondent having dramatic adventures.

He hates it.

Meanwhile, there’s James T. Aubrey, a man nicknamed The Smiling Cobra, and president of CBS from 1959 to 1965. Aubrey is the man who thinks busty country girls falling in streams is the best thing ever. His shows include Petticoat Junction, Gomer Pyle USMC, and The Beverly Hillbillies. His motto is: “broads, bosoms, and fun.” And that is an actual quote.

Unfortunately for Aubrey, it can’t all be talking horses and exploding toilets. CBS is still holding on to a reputation for high quality, intelligent programming. A reputation that goes all the way back to its radio days, and one that’s guarded by network chairman William Paley. (Picture the old knight at the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade faced with the undeniable ratings crush of Gilligan’s Island.) Paley’s tenure has brought us Perry Mason, The Defenders and Route 66.

It usually goes something like this: William Paley happily greenlights The Twilight Zone. Jim Aubrey, noticing the lack of jiggling mountain girls, takes away all of its money and gives it to Andy Griffith, who doesn’t need it because nobody ever leaves Mayberry and all the sets are already built. Everybody thinks Andy is happy as a clam, but they don’t know that he’s started going to all of the production meetings to make sure his show isn’t hijacked by Ellie May 2.0 moving into town and holding a beauty contest to raise funds for a water tower. Rod Serling is bitter, Andy Griffith is working seventeen hour days, and nobody is doing what they really want.

And now, into the mix, comes the potential for a serious legal case with George C. Scott, if they don’t figure out something – anything – to fulfill the terms of this contract.

A show is put together. It’s like Naked City, but with social workers instead of cops. Social workers in Harlem. Scott’s character answers to a female boss and shares and office with a black co-worker, played by none other than Cicely Tyson. (This was the first time a black actress was co-starring in an hour long drama. She’s magnificent, of course, but she’s Cicely Tyson, so obvs.)

Scott wants realism. He wants it so badly, he’s being as obnoxious as possible at all turns. Aubrey wants a harem of beautiful women and Park Avenue mysteries. The pilot script is written in five minutes flat, and looks like a pretty conventional social drama, with a courtroom scene and a tidy finish. It’s called East Side/West Side. It gets the go-ahead, despite not really having a plan for a full season, or a functional production team.

Other scripts don’t come in. The people assigned to write them are, uh, I don’t want to say flake-tastic beatniks, but history implies that that’s what they were. The only solution CBS has time for is to just film whatever script they get, with almost no revisions.

This was the collision of reckless mistakes, strange clashes of personality, and desperate scrambling that allowed this show to twice make episodes that were masterpieces. And, almost impossibly given the realities of the era, both stories are about black lives.

“Who Do You Kill?” is upsetting and raw. It stars James Earl Jones, then unknown outside of theatrical circles, and Diana Sands. Sands had played Cicely Tyson’s role in the pilot episode of the series, but had quickly dropped out because of all the backstage drama. They play Joe and Ruth Goodwin, a couple doing their best to get by with limited job opportunities for Joe. Their struggle is intensified when a rat bites their sleeping infant. They can’t get her to the hospital, and the bulk of the story concerns the aftermath of their loss.

The cut of the episode available on YouTube is missing the section that actually contains the rat, but it’s the best anybody can do. MGM has yet to release the series on DVD.

In “No Hiding Place”, Ruby Dee and Earle Hyman play a couple who have made it out of the slums, only to face a different set of problems. They move in to Maple Gardens – “A Friendly Community” – to find mistrust and cruelty from their white neighbours. Not only that, they become the center of a blockbusting scheme. (I feel like it would be responsible to warn you that this one has a more depressing ending than the above episode about a dead baby, so you are now warned.)

These high points couldn’t last, of course. In an era of limited channel selection and fervent letter writers, the worst of humanity alerted Jim Aubrey to his biggest fear. He had accidentally created edgy, controversial television that unflinchingly tackled social issues. This had to be stopped.

The hounds were released in the form of directors from the rural comedies taking out all of the serious content, finally moving George C. Scott’s character to Park Avenue, and having giggling debutants turn up for no reason. Some people weren’t comfortable with Cicely Tyson’s character being so prominent, so Aubrey’s people demanded she be turned into a hat stand. No longer a professional equal, no longer the kind of character who places autistic children in specialized education programs, she was now a token. Ten episodes in, there was talk of renewal only if Tyson was replaced with a white actress.

By episode nineteen, they were all out of Harlem.

In a twist that sounds like it came from a Simpson’s episode about cynical television executives, George C. Scott’s character gets a job with a congressman. The show becomes about how a hotheaded cynic has to conform to bureaucracy and learn to appreciate Kennedy era political optimism.

It should come as little surprise that there was no second season.