Tokyo After Midnight: a B-movie Mystery

[The final chapter in the story of my mother LeAnn Bartok’s lost career in Japanese movies in 1959-1960 – and the search to find some trace of it over thirty years later.]

A few months after finally seeing the long-missing Kimi Wa Nerawareteiru, I e-mailed my friend Chris Marker, the legendary French director of La Jetee, Sans Soleil and The Last Bolshevik.  Chris has a long, rich association with Japan – there’s even a tiny bar in Tokyo called “La Jetee” that’s dedicated to him and his movies – so I thought he’d get a kick out of the saga of LeAnn and finding one of her Japanese B-movies. 

After I told him the whole story, he e-mailed back:

“My, my, if that ain’t the greatest story since the Man Who Would Be King … And what a script it could beget:  ‘The case of the lost movie’!  … If you could join to the package a copy of the tape [of ‘Kimi Wa Nerawareteiru’] that would make my day, my week, my year … And having a mother who’s able to carry a pistol hidden in her stockings surely helps to build one’s character.  (My Russian grandmother knew how to roll a cigarette on her boot single-handed, which isn’t bad, but you can’t compare.)”

I sent him a copy of the movie, and he sent back this wonderful little artwork incorporating an image of LeAnn from Kimi Wa Nerawareteiru and his beloved cat, Guillaume-en-egypte:

The image continued to bounce around in mysterious and unpredictable ways.  

Once the genie is out of the bottle it’s impossible to contain.

Jump cut to: 

I’m lying in bed, it’s 2008.  I’m watching Seijun Suzuki’s landmark 1963 crime movie Youth Of The Beast.  It’s close to midnight, my wife and son are both asleep.

It’s nearly half an hour into the movie … I’m starting to get drowsy too … Without warning, Jo Shishido – he of the huge, chipmunk cheeks – bursts into the office of a movie theater holding a rifle.

Suddenly I hear a voice, crying out … I’ve heard it somewhere before, this voice.

In fact I’ve heard it thousands of times.  It’s LeAnn’s voice, calling from half a lifetime away.

I bolt upright like I’ve been shot with electricity.  There on-screen, looming larger than life behind Shishido and the others, is the ghostly B&W image of my mother’s face.

It’s her once more, in a scene from Kimi Wa Nerawareteiru made three years earlier.

The same studio, Nikkatsu, had made both films.  They needed to show a movie projecting in the theater during the gun battle -- and for some reason, someone decided to pick this particular scene with LeAnn.

It’s a crazy world, isn’t it?  You go looking for something, and then you find it -- or it finds you.

And then it keeps finding you, over and over.

In late 2002, as Kinji and his son Kenta were preparing to begin shooting Battle Royale II, Toshiko e-mailed to tell me that Kinji was dying of cancer and didn’t know if he’d be able to finish production.

In fact Kinji was only able to complete a few days of shooting when he grew too weak to continue.

Kinji Fukasaku died on January 12, 2003.  Toshiko e-mailed the sad news:

“Kinji left us about an hour ago, shortly after 1 AM Sunday, Japan time.  He couldn’t pull a miracle for himself, Kenta and all of us.

I am tempted to shout ‘Baka!’ (which means “idiot!”)  He didn’t have to die now if he were more prudent, but who is to say how one should live one’s life also.”

[Fond farewells -- our last dinner with Kinji Fukasaku in the Ginza district.  

Top photo, left to right:  Kenta Fukasaku, Susan Gold, Kinji.

Bottom photo:  Isao Tsujimoto (far left), Toshiko Adilman (far right)]

Toshiko’s husband, Sid Adilman, one of the best-loved film journalists in Canada, died several years later after a long illness … My last memory of Sid is sitting in his bedroom as we watched Kinji’s Virus, the movie that brought Toshiko and Kinji together for the first time, and Sid laughing his ass off at how silly it all was.

Flash forward again, or maybe sideways … Linear time has little meaning now:

I’m standing on the chilly rooftop of Toei Studios in Tokyo, as a Shinto priest conducts a blessing ceremony for the movie I’m there to produce, a segment of the film Trapped Ashes – inspired, in fact, by the haunting memories of the hanged man my wife and I had discovered in Nanzenji Temple in Kyoto.

It’s nearly 47 years since LeAnn came to Tokyo and wound up making movies.  And here I am, following her footsteps.

Our last day of shooting wrapped up at nearly 5:00 AM – ironically at the same soundstages where Kinji had made the very first Battles Without Honor & Humanity, and where his son Kenta was currently prepping his new movie.

The wheel turns, and turns.

I went back to the hotel and collapsed, exhausted.  Two hours later I shook myself out of my stupor, showered, and climbed on a train.  It took me an hour outside Tokyo, where I was met in the cold morning rain by my buddy Yoshiki.

I was there to see an old family friend.  One I’d never met before.

Yoshiki got on the phone and made a call.

A few minutes later we walked to a nearby coffee shop.  A slight, elderly man with glasses came up to us carrying an umbrella, and smiled broadly.

“I’m Motomu Ida,” he said.  “I directed Kimi Wa Nerawareteiru.”

   

An enormous thank you for all their tremendous help and encouragement over the years to:  Toshiko Adilman; Kinji Fukasaku; Motomu Ida; Isao Tsujimoto; Tadao Sato; Susan Gold; Shari Bartok; Jayce Bartok; Yoshiki Hayashi; Tiffany Bartok; Chris D.; Chris Marker; Stuart Galbraith; Marc Walkow; Christian Storms; Tom Abrams.

Tokyo After Midnight: a B-movie Mystery

[Part 6 in the story of my mother LeAnn Bartok’s lost career in Japanese movies in 1959-1960 – and the search to find some trace of it over thirty years later.]

A few months later in November, 2002, I got a message from my friend Yoshiki in Tokyo:  the long-lost Kimi Wa Nerawareteiru had just screened on Japanese television and he’d taped it for me.

I was dumbfounded … it didn’t seem quite possible.  Nearly 10 years of actively searching for the movie and here it just happened to serendipitously turn up on Japanese TV. 

Thank God for coincidence, I thought.

A few days after that Toshiko Adilman forwarded a letter to me from Mr. Ida:

“Dear Mr. Dennis:

It’s been five years since I last wrote to you, but I am Ida who directed ‘Kimi Wa Nerawareteiru.’

How is your mother?  I really would like to have a chance to see her, but it’s difficult, wouldn’t you think, given we are so far apart from each other.  Today, I have good news.

The film produced 40 years ago was broadcast this month by the Tokyo CS Channel.  It’s ‘Kimi Wa Nerawareteiru.’

In the film your mother’s performance is strong and she looks smashing.  I would like you to see it as soon as possible.”

I started crying when I read his letter.  Sometimes life is very good.

It was also very sad to read his message to LeAnn.  He didn’t know she’d passed away a year and half earlier.

Ida, too, had videotaped the film and was sending me a copy.  (As it turns out I received copies from several other friends in Japan afterwards … I guess I’d talked to a lot of people about it.)

I wrote back to him, sharing his joy at the film finally turning up again, and telling him the news of LeAnn’s death.  I told him more about her own career as a painter and filmmaker, and how she treasured her time in Japan, how she carried it with her her whole life.  I promised to send him a copy of one of LeAnn’s last Mt. Fuji paintings (I’d earlier given one to Kinji Fukasaku as a gift for all his friendship and support.)

Soon after, VHS tapes of Kimi Wa Nerawareteiru started showing up at the American Cinematheque office – first from Ida, then Yoshiki and others.

It took me a few days to actually sit down and watch the movie.  To be honest, I was a bit scared of seeing it after all this time. 

[Above:  Years of searching -- and it comes down to this.]

Kimi Wa Nerawareteiru literally translates as “You Are Being Aimed At,” or probably better, “You Are The Target.”  LeAnn always referred to it “The Man They Tried To Kill” since that was the translation on her script.  It turned out to be a tough, taut little crime movie, barely 55 minutes in length, with more than a passing resemblance to Hitchcock’s North By Northwest.  Motomu Ida later told me the resemblance was no accident:  the head of the studio had apparently seen Hitchcock’s movie, then called Ida into his office and said:  “I want you to make me a North By Northwest.”

Shot in beautiful B&W Cinemascope, the movie opens with shots of Tokyo:  an elevated train track, people bustling in the streets.  The Tokyo LeAnn would’ve known in 1959.  It’s the story of a reporter, played by Yuji Odaka, who gets mistaken for an undercover policeman named “Henry Yamanaka” who’s been trying to infiltrate a Japanese crime syndicate.

Here, finally, was the elusive “Henry Yamanaka” I’d heard about so many times as a kid.

And here as well, playing one of the mob enforcers, was LeAnn’s mysterious agent:  the Turkish/Russian actor and sometime pimp, Osman “Johnny” Yusuf.  The man who claimed he was in love with her.

Watching the film, I feel like I’m looking at a lost member of the family … I only wish I could’ve met the guy.

The movie clips along at a brisk pace with the reporter getting into and out of scrapes with the mob enforcers, helping to rescue an innocent girl (Kyoko Hori) and locking horns with an enigmatic, dark-haired beauty (Hisako Tsukuba) who works for the drug bosses.

The similarities to Hitchcock’s film are apparent in a number of scenes.  Here, the reporter played by Yuji Odaka brings the police back to the house where he was drugged – just as Cary Grant does – only to be met by caretakers who claim the place is empty:

And here, mimicking the famous scene at the United Nations, Odaka is trapped in an elevator with a man who’s just been knifed – a crime he’ll be mistakenly blamed for:

For all its influences, Kimi Wa Nerawareteiru stands on its own.  Ida’s eye for composition is especially strong, framing his characters in simple, unobtrusive Widescreen shots that increasingly throw a noose around Odaka’s trapped reporter.

The only problem was, it was nearly 35 minutes into the movie … and I still hadn’t seen a sign of my mother.  I started scanning every scene for her profile – was it possible that after all these years, we’d gotten it all wrong?  That LeAnn didn’t appear in the movie after all -- or she was just some walk-on part, visible so briefly even I didn’t recognize her?

Finally in Act III, there’s a big meeting of all the syndicate underbosses at a resort in Hakone.  They all gather in one room, but the seat at the head of the table is empty, reserved for the mysterious Boss of Bosses.

The door opens, they all turn around … and my mother walks in.  Wearing a white sequined gown, with bleached blonde hair and dark eyebrows, looking like a cross between Veronica Lake and Frida Kahlo. 

Then she starts to talk – in English! – and she’s the cocktail waitress from hell, swearing and cursing and just beating the hell out of the poor underbosses for their failure to capture “Henry Yamanaka.”

Big plot twist:  Henry Yamanaka turns out to be a woman, the dark-haired beauty played by Hisako Tsukuba.  Exactly like North By Northwest where the double agent is Eva Marie Saint.

LeAnn chews scenery right and left, she shoves people around, she whips a little pistol out of the top of her stocking … She’s loud and abrasive and menacing as all get out.

In the end there’s a big shoot-out and the police burst in.  She’s hauled off to jail, still wearing her white fur wrap and string of pearls.  Still Mr. Big.

I can’t say she’s a good actress in the film – she’s way over the top in fact, screeching like some harpy from a roadside diner in an Edgar Ulmer poverty row movie.  But in her way, she’s utterly fantastic. 

If you watch Kimi Wa Nerawareteiru, the thing you’re most likely to remember is that outrageous, beautiful, ballsy blonde that everyone’s afraid of.

That’s my mother, LeAnn.

A few weeks later, my friend Isao Tsujimoto from the Japan Foundation e-mailed to ask if I’d seen the movie.  When I said yes, he replied – wonderful, wonderful, our friend Tadao Sato will be so happy … he’s the one who arranged to have the film shown on Japanese TV for you.

I was dumbfounded – what was he talking about??  Of course I remembered meeting with Sato in Tokyo a few months earlier.  I’d given him some pages from the script and he’d promised to look into it – I never heard anything else and thought he’d forgotten about it.  It was just pure coincidence the movie ran on TV.

Not at all, said Isao.  Sato had called an old friend of his at Nikkatsu who researched the film and confirmed that yes, there was an original negative in storage.  When Sato explained it was for the family of an American woman who co-starred in it, his friend said I’m sorry, but the film has never come out on DVD and I could lose my job if I made you a copy.  

But what I can do, he added, is to arrange to have it shown on our own TV network, so you can tape it and send a copy to your friend in Los Angeles.

So through this incredible, roundabout way, Kimi Wa Nerawareteiru was broadcast on national television in Japan so it could be taped and sent to me.

Somewhere, LeAnn was laughing her ass off.

(Next chapter:  A lost movie that won’t stay lost)

Tokyo After Midnight: a B-movie Mystery

 [Part 5 in the story of my mother LeAnn Bartok’s lost career in Japanese movies in 1959-1960 – and the search to find some trace of it over thirty years later.]

In January 1998, I received another letter from Motomu Ida, the director of Kimi Wa Nerawareteiru:

 “Dear Dennis –

Thank you for your letter … I was surprised to learn, after so many years, that your mother was an American actress.  No wonder she was so good in the film.  I was told by the Nikkatsu casting department only that she was married to someone who worked at an American military base.  Had I known that she was an actress I am sure I would have asked her to appear in several more of my films.  I used to be very fond of using foreigners with Japanese subtitles on screen.  What a shame.  I can still remember her moving speech with menace in her voice.

As Nikkatsu has since gone bankrupt, there is no hope to do anything further.  I have been told that no one knows where the positives and negatives might be stored.

I am sorry to hear that your mother is not feeling well.  I wish her a speedy recovery.

Although your kind words were heartwarming, I did not do anything out of the ordinary.  I am just happy that I could be of some use …

These days I teach performers and technical staff at a film school.  After all I am getting old, you see.

Motomu Ida”

This wasn’t a complete surprise to me.  The little I’d heard about Kimi Wa Nerawareteiru led me to believe it was one of the quickie, hour-long B-movies that Nikkatsu churned out to fill the bottom half of their weekly double-bills.  The film had never been released on VHS or DVD in Japan; none of the film archives or libraries I’d contacted had ever seen a copy.

It was just a commercial little action film that came and went, and was now lost in limbo somewhere.

I never expected that if and when Kimi Wa Nerawareteiru came to light, it would turn out to be some lost classic of Japanese cinema. 

My reasons for finding it were purely selfish.  My mother was in it.

In 2001 I took my first trip to Japan traveling with my Cinematheque colleague Chris D. and my best friend Tom Abrams.  I took Xeroxed copies of the script pages for LeAnn’s movie with me and handed them out to whoever I met at film archives, film clubs etc., on the slender chance someone somewhere would have come across a print of the movie.

In Osaka we met with a wonderful guy who ran a movie theater the size of a shoe-box with a projection booth you could barely squeeze into.

Upstairs his office was filled with stacks of film prints leaning haphazardly everywhere.  It was the kind of place I recognized from film collectors in L.A.  

When I asked if he’d ever seen a print of Motomu Ida’s Kimi Wa Nerawareteiru, he scrunched his face for a moment then shook his head.  No, never seen it.

I even met with someone from Nikkatsu who took the Xeroxed pages I offered, said they’d look into it, with no result.

We had lunch with Kinji Fukasaku and his son Kenta, fresh off their incredible triumph with Battle Royale (which Kenta had written).  Kinji looked great.  He was already prepping for the sequel Battle Royale II which he hoped to get into production soon. 

No one knew it then but time was running short for him, too.  He’d been secretly battling cancer for several years which had gone into remission, and then returned.

With Chris and Tom and our chanbara-loving buddy, Yoshiki, we bummed around Tokyo and Osaka, seeing as much as we could, buying as many Japanese movie posters as we could carry.  We made a midnight visit to one of Japan’s oldest movie studios with the mild-mannered head archivist, who turned out to have a very odd addiction (more on that in another blog.)

It wasn’t the Japan that LeAnn knew in 1959 any longer.

But it was killer.

I came back to the U.S. loaded down with stories and souvenirs for her.

Two months later my mother LeAnn died.  She was at home in her New York apartment with my sister Shari and younger brother Jayce.

Her last conversation was talking with Mark Toscano, then at Canyon Cinema, about her films of the Skyworks multiple-mile drops.  Right up until the end, she was still talking about the movies.  She hung up the phone and moments later she died.

She never got to see Kimi Wa Nerawareteiru again, but she did get to hear from the director, Motomu Ida, and that was something pretty amazing.

Much more important, LeAnn’s love for Japan never left her. 

She’d gone many places and done many things but Japan was always someplace special.  When she taught herself to paint in the late 1960’s, some of her first works were a copy of a fierce temple guardian she’d seen in Japan, from the 9^th or 10^th century, and a primitive, lovely image of the baby Jesus, Mary and Joseph, all with Japanese features.

[Above:  LeAnn Bartok -- painter, conceptual artist, avant-garde filmmaker and actress in Japanese movies -- in New York City, late 1980's]

The last great cycle of paintings she did before her death were over 150 views of Mt. Fuji, with the mountain, golden and radiant, surrounded by her red Skyworks mile streaming overhead:

[Above:  two of LeAnn Bartok's Mt. Fuji series of paintings with close-up details]

I was beyond heartbroken, as were my two brothers and sister.  I woke up the morning after she died and the world seemed like a cold, unfamiliar place that I no longer recognized or wanted to be a part of.

I returned to Japan in March, 2002, this time with my then-girlfriend (now wife) Susan.  The sakura cherry blossoms were blooming early that year.   We had some wild adventures, culminating in a haunting, disturbing episode where we found the body of a man who’d just hanged himself, in the forest behind the cemetery in Kyoto’s Nanzenji Temple, and then led the Kyoto Homicide Squad back to where the body was hanging.

There were strange spirits in the air.

During the trip, my friend Isao Tsujimoto at the Japan Foundation had arranged for me to meet with Tadao Sato, an elegant and thoughtful man who is one of Japan’s best known and most influential film critics.  (In December 2010 he was given the 38^th Japan Foundation Award for Arts & Culture in recognition of his efforts to introduce films from across Asia to Japanese audiences.)

Over coffee I told Sato the oft-repeated story of LeAnn and Kimi Wa Nerawareteiru.  In some ways I was more determined than ever to find the movie – it was a link to her past, one that she was no longer around to share with us.  Sato listened to the story with polite interest and took the Xeroxed pages of the script I offered to him.

I thought nothing more would come of it.

(Next chapter:  Kimi Wa Nerawareteiru, the lost movie)

[All photos of LeAnn Bartok and artworks:  Copyright, courtesy Estate of LeAnn Bartok.]