Ghost Man (1954)

directed by Motoyoshi Oda

Japan

73 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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So this was a treat: A fairly early Toho film that I wasn't aware existed, fully (if a little roughly) subtitled and in decent quality if you don't mind your audio being a bit crunchy. And just look at that poster. There's not a lot of names in this that most people would probably recognize, although Motoyoshi Oda is perhaps best known for directing Godzilla Raids Again*, and this whole movie is based on a Kōsuke Kindaichi mystery. Kindaichi's actor, Seizaburō Kawazu, has a lengthy filmography including multiple solid gold Toho classics, but his role in Ghost Man is essentially next to nothing as Kindaichi doesn't even show up until halfway through the film. Haruo Tanaka, an extremely prolific actor who worked for around 70 years, is also in a supporting role as one of the more interesting of several fairly unremarkable characters.

The film opens with a brief scene of a mysterious three-fingered man escaping from a mental hospital. It's par for the course for this era, but there's no nuance in the film's portrayal of mentally ill people or mental hospitals; this character's status as an escapee is used as shorthand for his evil and dangerous nature. The general public is aware of this incident through newspaper articles concerning the worrying escape of the so-called "Ghost Man" from a local asylum; we then learn that sometime after this event, a spate of murders has begun to occur in which the killer targets young, beautiful women working as nude models and poses them for disturbing photographs after killing them. This has the members of an art/photography club that hires out a group of young women as nude models understandably worried. This club is where the central characters of the film (aside from Kindaichi, but again, he's kind of a secondary concern here) are all located. The real action kicks off when that same mysterious, three-fingered man visits the club looking for a model on behalf of his unseen employer. Unaware of the Ghost Man's appearance, the club lets an (incredibly frightened) model go home with this man to a predictable result.

I want to talk for a minute about the role of women in this movie because there is something interesting about it. I'm in no way claiming that this is progressive or feminist, but I did find it unusual that all of the women we see in this film work in a profession that's generally looked down upon - as either nude models or, later in the film, strippers. There's nothing lewd whatsoever here, even the strip show we see later in the film is very, very classy and modest, and doing work like this that would usually be dismissed as immoral or desperate is... for lack of a better term, it's presented as art. It's also presented as work. These are working women who talk about having to feed their families, and they're good at what they do, but they take jobs that they know put them at risk because they need the money. None of the women are central characters but they are all important characters, always present. Which leads me into my next point.

There's just a ton of people in this movie. Other reviews I've seen have remarked on this as well and it's totally true; this movie has a huge central cast. I guess this isn't relevant to the plot, but it gives the whole of Ghost Man a unique feeling. At one point after everyone has sufficient evidence to be concerned about the wellbeing of the first model who goes missing, four guys from the club and the other four models all pile into the 1950s equivalent of a soccer mom van and go investigate the Ghost Man's creepy old house. In any given scene in this movie there will be at least eight people, and most of them are silent, so the camera's not constantly jumping between them and it's not hard to follow or anything, but really the only time there's a single person focused on is when someone is getting murdered. There's a feeling of safety in numbers - especially with the women - that reinforces the sinister, dangerous tone of the whole film.

There's honestly nothing much that stands out about this movie, which is not surprising considering Raids Again is probably the Godzilla series' weakest point, but I have to say it's one of those things that I knew wasn't outstanding but enjoyed watching very much anyway. It hits all the typical beats for a mystery in which the suspect is completely unknown and motivated by a bizarre obsession, but it's also just a tiny bit darker than I expected it to be. The Ghost Man, his face wrapped in bandages, is somehow not as aesthetically imposing a figure as he's meant to be, but the way he works in the shadows and produces unsettling photographs of women he's done terrible things to makes him genuinely menacing. There's a scene where he's sitting in some dark corner of an attic flipping through a scrapbook of his "works" and it's very effective. His henchman is not particularly interesting, aside from having been played by an actor who was actually missing some fingers, and really seems to be there as a delivery vehicle for a twist that was, similarly, not particularly interesting. But if this movie lacks depth in its characters, it at least makes up for that by having a boatload of them to choose from.

That's about all I can say about this. I liked it. The lighting is really interesting and the film has that "seedy underbelly" feel despite its steadfast refusal to overtly characterize nude modeling and dancing as a shameful profession. A lot of movies might have relegated the models, who are present in all steps of the investigation - it's their lives at risk here, anyway - to the background, a pool of meaningless characters to be picked off, but this one doesn't do that. I do wish this got more recognition, because a lot of '50s Toho films tend to fall by the wayside in favor of their biggest hits from that decade.

*I am dying to see his film "A Texan in Tokyo", which is apparently about "a Texan visiting Tokyo [who] takes medicine that gives him strength".