Pitfall (1962)

This has nothing to do with the 1948 U.S. film noir, let alone the Activision video game series. It's another Hiroshi Teshigahara adaptation of a Kōbō Abe novel. Had I realized as much, I would have put this viewing off longer. Still, this feels pretty different from what I saw last month.

The Netflix description is misleading again. Yes, a stranger in white (Kunie Tanaka) pursues a hapless miner (Hisashi Igawa) in the area of a ghost town near an exhausted mine, but it's not just to "imprison" him there: He murders the miner in the first act, after which the miner is a ghost of the type who can't be sensed by the living or move anything. Despite a warning from a fellow ghost (Ton Shimada), the protagonist wants to find out what the murder was about. The answer is quickly plain enough to me: The miner just happened to look exactly like a union leader (also Igawa), and the killer bribes a witness (Sumie Sasaki) to blame a rival union's leader (Sen Yano). Let's just say there'll be more than two ghosts by the end.

You could make the case that the story is even more depressing than Johnny Got His Gun. Not only was the miner incredibly unlucky at the point of death and unsatisfied with the info he gathers afterward; he wasn't exactly enjoying his life up to then, having fled a mine like a slave while holding out little hope for better employment elsewhere. In this world, posthumous suffering depends primarily on the circumstances of one's death; since the miner died hungry, he'll starve for eternity. Joe from JGHG expected no more than decades of loneliness, and his story presents actionable morals rather than a promise of inevitable unjust doom. (Come to think of it, Teshigahara and Abe would probably have been blacklisted if they'd made such a movie in the U.S. a few years earlier.)

Not that the miner is necessarily innocent. His own son (Kazuo Miyahara) seems completely unmoved by witnessing his murder, which may suggest a lack of compassionate parenting. I'm sure the boy's not too young to understand the seriousness of death.

Really, innocence is in short supply in this picture, which might explain in part why only the union leaders are identified by name. The greedy witness gets the second most of my sympathy. I won't go into all the reasons, but a scene that a documentarian called "close to rape" is more than close in my opinion.

Despite these downers, I actually kind of like the film. It's no less big on artistry than other Teshigahara/Abe collaborations; it even takes a cue from The Blood of a Poet. At the same time, the plot moves along rather well, getting borderline intricate by the third act. I won't call it exciting, what with the protagonist already dead.

I may yet watch more of the director and/or the writer's work. But I'll be careful to space it a bit.