Crazed Fruit (1956) - Ko Nakahira

Films of troublesome youth were an international trend in the mid fifties. An increasingly Westernized Japan recieved the Hollywood films Blackboard Jungle and Rebel Without a Cause in '55 and '56, and not surprising they had their impact. The shift of consumerism was changing. The youth market was rapidly expanding, and the average film going audience was no longer the family unit, but teenagers on dates. Various studios took awhile to learn this, but almost in a move of pure desperation one time powerhouse of Japanese Cinema Nikkatsu decided to embrace the new youth film, or taiyozoku. The move proved successful, and Crazed Fruit was a powerhouse of the budding new genre.

The film went almost completely unseen in the US however for an extremely long time. Western audiences were still slowly being introduced to the films of Kurosawa and Mizoguchi, and it wasn't until well into the sixties that American audiences even realized that the majority of Japanese films were timely pictures, and generally aimed at the new young filmgoers. Shintaro Ishihara was something of a figure head for this new shift in disembodied Japanese Youth. His books Season of the Sun (1955) and Crazed Fruit (1956), became something of rallying cries for his generation. Filled with disaffected, bored, idle, and immoral young protaganists, they reflected a side of Japanese life that until then went largely undocumented. As his celebrity began to rise, it wasn't too surprising that the film world would soon catch on. In fact the film of Crazed Fruit was made the same year the book was released, which helped to add to its timely appeal.

The film it is said however differs greatly from the book. It wasn't so much a filmed adaptation, as a starting off point, or inspiration. Perhaps this is why the film survives much better today compared to the filmed version of Season of the Sun. The film is not traditional in most ways. The editing is more concerned with punctuation than transition. Cuts match action graphically. It comes off in the beginning as something of a Hollywood clone, but the anti-Americanism present in Ishihara's books comes through in the film. Sure these kids might idolize James Dean and Marlon Brando, but they are still proud to be Japanese, and resent this foreign encroachment. Characters may occasionally utter a phrase in English, but are always willing to retaliate in Japanese.

The story itself is nothing to get too excited about. Two brothers are enjoying a summer of fun, and they meet a girl. The younger brother goes after, and gets her, but of course some jealousy ensues, and the older feels he needs to get a piece of it. The girl is married, and is hardly faithful, but of course the younger doesn't know this. You can see how the over emphasis on sex would dominate the picture, but it is more the morality, or lack of any that makes the picture stand out. Today it may come off as a dated exploitation movie, you can however sense the excitement the picture would have caused in '56. 

Grade C