Pale Flower (Bungei Productions, Ninjin Club, Shochiku, 1964)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

This morning (Sunday, June 22) I put on Turner Classic Movies at 7 a.m. to watch the repeat showing of Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” presentation of the 1964 Japanese film Pale Flower (乾いた花, Kawaita hana). It was based on a novel by Shintarô Ishihara, who later became a radical-Right politician in Japan and was governor (essentially the mayor) of Tokyo from 1999 to 2012. Pale Flower was a rather grim story about Muraki (Ryô Ikebe), a hit man for the Funada gang who had gone to prison for murdering a member of the rival Yasuoka gang. When the film opens he’s just been released after serving a three-year sentence and is trying to get in touch with as many of his former gang associates as he can. Muraki visits his pre-incarceration girlfriend, Shinko Furuta, and practically rapes her, but later he goes to a gambling parlor where he loses a lot of money in a peculiar Japanese game called Hanafuda which is played with flowered playing cards (though director Masahiro Shinoda decided to make them tiles so they’d make an ominous clicking sound when they were shuffled and dealt), and appears from what we see of it to be a cross between poker and craps. At the gambling party he meets a young woman named Saeko (Mariko Kaga) who wins most of his money (which begs the question of how a man who just got out of prison has so much money to throw around; were we supposed to assume he’d saved it during his time in stir?). The two fall in love, or at least mutual lust, with each other and do a lot more gambling at various secret locations, a lot of driving around at night in her rear-engined 1959 Renault Florida convertible, and a lot of glaring at each other.

Shinoda seemed to be directing Kaga much the way Josef von Sternberg directed Marlene Dietrich in the early 1930’s, telling her to look impassive and do as little “acting” as possible. Her leading man, Ryô Ikebe, had blown his career for freezing on stage during a play, but Shinoda gave him this part as a comeback role and he rose to the challenge beautifully. Ikebe was a handsome man who smolders and glares through much of the movie much the way Jean-Paul Belmondo was doing in France and Marcello Mastroianni was in Italy. Alas, Pale Flower was one of those movies that has some stunning individual sequences but doesn’t really come together as a whole. Among the stunning individual sequences are one in which Muraki is assaulted and nearly killed by the brother of the man he went to prison for killing in the backstory, as well as the final murder. It seems that during the three years in which Muraki was in stir, the Funada and Yasuoka gangs merged to challenge the out-of-town competition from another gang from Osaka, led by a man named Imai (Kyû Sazanka). Now Imai has ordered the death of a member of the merged Funada/Yasuoka gang, and both Funada and Yasuoka have decreed it’s payback time. Ultimately Muraki ambushes Imai and stabs him to death (he’s been instructed not to use a gun for reasons that aren’t altogether clear) in a crowded café in full view of all the customers, while in a stunning use of music Shinoda accompanies the scene with “Dido’s Lament” from Henry Purcell’s 1689 opera Dido and Aeneas. (I wasn’t sure what language the recording of the Purcell aria was in, but it certainly wasn’t English, the language in which Purcell and his librettist, Nahum Tate, wrote it.)

Prior to the assassination Muraki has had an argument with Saeko (whose name is pronounced like the English word “psycho,” by the way) over her drug use. Muraki has already got into arguments with his gang bosses over the appearance of a part-Chinese heroin addict named Yoh, who killed two people in Hong Kong and then fled to Japan, and he’s incensed that Saeko bribed a doctor friend to obtain a dose of heroin and injected herself. Muraki takes Saeko along on his murder run because he says it’ll offer her an even bigger thrill than drug use, and the scene is beautifully staged and fulfills Alfred Hitchcock’s suggestion to stage murders like love scenes and love scenes like murders. But these flashes of brilliance can’t obscure the fact that this movie is pretty dull, partly because so much of the footage shows the characters gambling – either on horse races (shot by Shinoda not from the traditional sideways point of view but with the horses charging directly at the camera) or playing Hanafuda, a game totally incomprehensible to Western audiences. Also there’s virtually no character development; Muraki is glum and depressed from start to finish and Saeko is enigmatic throughout. There’s a Lifetime-esque title after the murder scene, “Two Years Later” – and two years later Muraki is in prison (again) for the murder when he receives word from a fellow prisoner that Saeko is dead, having been murdered by Yoh.

I didn’t actively dislike Pale Flower but I didn’t like it that much, either, and among the others who didn’t like it was one of the screenwriters, Masaru Baba. He complained to the “suits” at the producing studio, Shochiku, about the way Shinoda had cut great chunks out of his script and told most of the story in visuals instead of dialogue. As a result of Baba’s complaints, and also over concerns from the Japanese government that the film glorified gambling, Shochiku’s executives delayed the film’s release by nine months before finally letting it out. It’s a movie that’s been acclaimed by a lot of people, including Miami Vice director Michael Mann (who put it on his all-time ten-best list), but despite some truly impressive scenes, great neo-noir cinematography by Masao Kosugi, and a haunting (and thankfully sparingly deployed) music score by major Japanese classical composer Tôru Takemitsu (best known in the movie world for his scores for Akira Kurosawa, including Ran), it just didn’t do that much for me.