Giants and Toys (1958)

3 1/2 Stars (out of 4)

Bad Companies

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

Director Yasuzo Masumura is known by a much smaller fraction of film buffs than his Japanese contemporaries. At first I thought he might have been considered a "B" filmmaker, slapped aside to the fringes of film history. But even if he was, he counts among his fans filmmakers Michelangelo Antonioni and Nagisa Oshima.

He studied film and filmmaking in Italy, wrote about Italian master Luchino Visconti and the history of Japanese cinema. Returning to Japan, he assisted the great Kenji Mizoguchi and Kon Ichikawa at Daiei Studios before becoming a director himself. He enjoyed working with the same collaborators again and again, over the course of his 50-odd films. He was interested in characters at the extreme of human behavior, which resonates universally, but especially in Japan.

Masumura's Giants and Toys (1958) is a colorful, high-strung look at Japanese commerce as three caramel candy companies compete for the top spot in Japan's marketplace. One company hires a flighty, hyperactive girl with bad teeth to be their spokesmodel, but she falls in love with the ad executive who hired her. He, in turn, is in love with a female executive at a rival company. The DVD box copy rightly compares this film to the work of both Billy Wilder and Frank Tashlin. Masumura drives the intensity of his comedy right up to the edge, asking his characters to give up their hearts, their dignity and their very lives for the Company.

San Francisco's Fantoma Films has released Giants and Toys along with three other Masumura films on DVD for the first time: Afraid to Die (1960), Manji (1964), and Blind Beast (1969). All four are presented in color and "Daieiscope" widescreen, and though the colors might not seem as bold as you'd expect, we have to remember that color from this period is notoriously difficult to restore (various shades fade and shrink faster than other shades). Fantoma has done a remarkable job refurbishing these great films to DVD.