Conduct Report on Professor Ishinaka (1950) User Reviews

Lighter than air comedy about life in rural Japan

[pscamp01 · 7/10 · 28 May 2017]

Conduct Report on Professor Ishinaka is an anthology comedy that has three stories that are connected by the peripheral presence of the title character. Professor Ishinaka is a novelist who is vacationing in a small town who enjoys watching the foibles of the people around him. In the first story he helps two men who are looking for some barrels of gas that were buried in a field. In the second story, two families are torn apart over a quarrel that is started when a burlesque show comes to town. The final story is about a young woman who gets flustered when a fortune teller tells her she is going to meet her husband within the next 24 hours. For someone who has a movie named after him, Professor Ishinaka actually plays a minor role. He is more of a bystander, although he always gives crucial advice to the characters at just the right moment.

The movie is directed by Mikio Naruse, many of whose later movies would become world classics. This movie is nothing like those movies, but it is not without its charms. The location footage is sometimes quite beautiful, and there are various cultural items such as parades, village dances, etc. to keep a viewer's interest. (One bizarre but interesting incident that stood out for me was when a police officer was called to fill out an authentication of virginity certificate.) There is also a young Toshiro Mifune playing against type as a young lunkhead farmer. With a goofy haircut and clothes that seem to be too small for him, he looks like an overgrown nerd.

Overall, this movie is not a world classic, but it is certainly an enjoyable piece of fluff.

Naruse goes country

[topitimo-829-270459 · 6/10 · 17 December 2019]

This Naruse film, that has its literary basis in the writings of Ishizaka Yojiro, is not a female-led melodrama set in the working-class neighborhoods of Japan's big cities, as you would expect from the director. Instead, we get a quiet, mundane country comedy made in the sunshine of the summer months. This is not necessarily a bad thing. We have seen the director succeed in similar lighter films before, such as "Tabi yakusha" (Traveling Actors, 1940). Rural, optimistic and life-embracing humor can work for the director, though he seldom chose to implement them in his films. This is not even a literary first for him, since Naruse had adapted Ishizaka before in "Magokoro" (Sincerity, 1939).

"Ishinaka sensei gyôjôki" (Conduct Report on Professor Ishinaka, 1950) is much too serious a name for this film. It makes you expect drama, and mostly, professor Ishinaka, both of which are sidelined in the production. The core merit is the charming presentation of the Japanese country-side in the film. It is very pleasant, appealing and welcoming and not forced as in some films of this sort.

The film itself is an anthology, divided in three parts. I find this solution to rarely work for comedies, because the narratives of the genre are light as it is, and shorter segments easily fail to establish proper characters, needed for the jokes to land. It's the case with this film as well. The stories themselves are not very interesting, and you can kind of see, that the film was split into three segments, because none of them could carry it alone. All of them take place in the same country village, all of them briefly feature the titular character, who serves as witness for the stories, and possibly writes them down (as movies?) - the adaptation part does not really make sense, you have to pretend you are watching a book. Considering he's the title character, he is not around much.

In the first segment, a young man walks to a house, and informs the family there, that as the war was ending, he buried gasoline containers in their field, so that the allied would not get their hands on them. People start to search for them, giving the boy time to romance the daughter of the house. In the second story, a traveling striptease show comes to town, and all of the men go watch it, causing shame for their adult children.

The final one is the most interesting for modern audiences, since it includes Mifune Toshiro. The actor, who made "Rashomon" (1950) that very year, received mostly rogue, villainous parts from the studio after his turn in Kurosawa's "Drunken Angel" (1948). His participation in this film seems like a conscious act of rebellion towards the screen image that he had established for himself. Mifune plays a shy, laconic country-boy, who accidentally takes a woman to his home farm, after she fell asleep in his hay-carriage. A fortune teller has told the woman, that she will meet her future husband within the next 24 hours.

None of the episodes is particularly good, but not one of them is downright terrible either. Naruse seems to be on a summer holiday, and he really needn't have filmed it, but since he did, the end result is a passable execution of mediocre material.

An Anthology Film

[boblipton · 6/10 · 16 September 2019]

Mikio Naruse's movie is an anthology of three comic stories, based on the writings of Yôjirô Ishizaka (1900-1986). Based on my brief Internet research, he was a leader in the "New Japan" literary movement, and very popular in the Post-War era.

In the first story, the Professor and some friends go to dig up some barrels of gasoline buried on the last day of the War. In the second, two old friends go to see a touring burlesque show, and their children quarrel over whose idea it was. Everyone sneaks off to the Professor to judge who is right. In the third, a young girl gets on the wrong haycart going home, and winds up in a strange village. Before she leaves the next morning, the household's mother has a cop come buy to issue a certificate that she has not been molested; he brings the Professor along to write the certificate.

It's a mild and amusing trio of stories, full of old-fashioned bits and pieces, with many actors who were or became better known. Toshiro Mifune appears in the last story, and he is well cast as a forbidding and silent doofus who falls in love with the young girl. Naruse does not invest the stories with much depth, but handles them as simple, charming fables of small-town life.