Threat, The (Blu-ray Review)
- Review Date: Jan 02, 2025
- Format: Blu-ray Disc
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Director
Kinji FukasakuRelease Date(s)
1966 (September 24, 2024)Studio(s)
Toei Co., Ltd. (Arrow Video)- Film/Program Grade: B
- Video Grade: A-
- Audio Grade: A
- Extras Grade: B
Review
Japanese director Kinji Fukasaku’s The Threat (Odoshi, “Blackmail,” 1966) is an obvious fusing of two relatively recent hit films, William Wyler’s The Desperate Hours (1955), about escaped convicts terrorizing a wealthy suburban family whose home they hole up in; and Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low (1963), in which a company executive becomes morally responsible for an unrelated kidnapping victim and, later, even its kidnapper. Fukasaku’s film isn’t within light years of Kurosawa’s masterpiece, and it has a singularly Toei-flavored take on the story and its characters. In Japan the film is not particularly well regarded; there’s no Japanese-language Wikipedia entry for it, for example, one of the few Fukasaku films not to have one; and Cinema Club, a kind of Japanese-language equivalent to Leonard Maltin’s long-running TV Movies, gives it two stars out of four—average.
In another nod to Kurosawa, the film opens at a lavish, heavily corporate wedding reception, very much like Kurosawa’s The Bad Sleep Well, where mid-level toady Misawa (Rentaro Mikuni) delivers an overly effusive congratulatory speech to the newly-marrieds. After returning home to his wife, Hiroko (Masumi Harukawa), and son Masao (Pepe Hozumi), two escape convicts barge into their remote suburban Tokyo home. (In a nice touch, Misawa and Masao are naked in the bathtub when the convicts bust in.) Kawanishi (Ko Nishimura), is the more methodical leader, on death row, while excitable, perhaps psychotic Sabu (Hideo Murata) arrive with an infant they’ve kidnapped, the grandchild of a prominent physician, they planning to use the ransom money to buy their way out of the country via a boat being arranged for them in Niigata.
Kurosawa’s great film was a tense moral drama about income inequality (decades ahead of its time), and the responsibilities of the wealthy to those far less fortunate. Fukasaku’s film isn’t concerned with such matters, though it is more character driven and a somewhat unusual production for Toei. Nevertheless, the picture has very Toei-like concepts of masculinity, the arc of its story following spineless salaryman Misawa forced to “man up” to protect his family and the kidnapped baby.
This takes curious forms. When Misawa is away, Sabu sexually assaults Hiroko, an attempted rape stopped only by his untimely return. How does Misawa react? He violent strikes Hiroko. Later, he effectively rapes her himself, though in the Toei manner she eventually succumbs to his sexual prowess, or something, and seems to be enjoying herself. While such contradictory reactions are, apparently, not all that unusual, it seems to go completely against everything the audience knows about Misawa who, for all his venality at work seems a doting husband and father at home.
How everything is resolved is not particularly believable, unaided by eccentric actor Mikuni’s performance—glassy-eyed, his face becomes an expressionless mask for most of the film’s second half. Even during the climax he, in tandem with the film’s screenplay (co-written by Fukasaku) don’t have him react to events with expected rage or worry. Instead, for long stretches he kind of psychologically checks out, wandering Tokyo’s busy streets (on errands related to the kidnapping) like a zombie.
Fukasaku’s directorial growing pains don’t help. Around this time he developed a fondness for shaky hand-held camera shots, which generally works in his later yakuza films but which is overused and works against him here. The Misawa family, for instance, are supposed to be upper middle-class, if over-extended, with a spacious detached home in the suburbs, but Fukasaku’s hand-held camera, combined with tight compositions and use of long lenses (flattening everything) give no sense of spatial relationships within the house, which ultimately gives it the appearance of a cramped, one-room apartment. Likewise, the director goes overboard during Misawa’s wanderings, with again too much shaky camerawork, combined with a gimmicky, almost avant-garde use of multiple exposures, negative printing, and freeze-frames that only call attention to themselves when not inducing motion sickness.
There’s a strange moment when, at a train station, Fukasaku furiously cuts between Misawa’s gazing at two events happening simultaneously nearby: a mother breastfeeding her baby and crying child on some steps, unable to help his presumably drunk father. Writer Hayley Scanlon, in the accompanying booklet essay, reads this moment as Misawa’s moral quandary, whether or not will Misawa get off the train and assert his paternal obligations. That’s how I read this scene as well, but found it uncharacteristically pretentious and pseudo-arty for the usually straightforward Fukasaku.
Scanlon also reads into the film, correctly I think, an underlying theme of Japan’s white-collar workforce neck-deep in consumerism, Kawanishi noting how most of the family’s possessions, including the family car (a rare possession for a Tokyoite), are all on the installment plan, and how this forces Misawa into an unhappy cycle of lifelong debt and obligation.
All this is not to say The Threat is a bad film—it’s not. It’s a decent little thriller and, at just 84 minutes, moves at a decent clip. But The Threat is really not much more than that.
Arrow Video’s presentation of The Threat sources an HD master provided by Toei, with additional tweaking completed by The Engine House Media Services in London. The black-and-white, 2.35:1 Toeiscope presentation looks a tad dark to my eyes but generally impresses. The uncompressed PCM mono audio (Japanese only, with optional newly translated English subtitles) is good, and the U.S. release is Region “A” encoded.
Supplements consist of a new commentary track by Japanese film expert Tom Mes; Warning Warning Danger Danger, a 20-minute appreciation by Japanese film critic Mark Schilling; a Japanese trailer and image gallery; a fold-out poster with new art by Tony Stella; and a 20-page booklet featuring an essay by Hayley Scanlon.
The Threat disappoints in some respects, but holds considerable interest as an offbeat, second-quarter career work by its director, still finding and shaping his personal style.
- Stuart Galbraith IV