Crazy Big Adventure (1965)

directed by Kengo Furusawa

Japan

107 minutes

4 stars out of 5

----

Hey, they got the Shobijin in this thing.

I've reviewed a few Crazy Cats (and Crazy Cats-adjacent) movies over on my other blog, but this was the first one I've seen that had real English subtitles. I'd always been surprised that none of the Crazy Cats movie seemed to have been subtitled, but it turns out at least one or two of them are floating around out there with subs. Shouts out to Joey.

There isn't much plot to speak of, but we have some of the Cats playing cops and some playing robbers: Hitoshi Ueki plays Uematsu, the world's most unbothered counterfeiter, and Kei Tani plays Tanii, his inventor/assistant/future brother-in-law. Hajime Hana and Hiroshi Inuzuka play Hanai and Inui, cops assigned (by Tora-san's Masami Shimojō if I'm not mistaken) to investigate a global counterfeiting ring. Ētarō Ishibashi, Senri Sakurai, and Shin Yasuda are less important, background characters.

Uematsu isn't directly involved in the counterfeiting ring, but when his buddy Tanii invents a forgery machine that can reproduce bank notes almost perfectly, he accidentally gets himself roped into it after he tries to run a random note through the machine and realizes that the note was itself a forgery, meaning somebody else out there has access to an even better counterfeiting machine. One of the funniest things about this character is how utterly he lacks a conscience, and how casual he is about it - he doesn't give a rip about whether or not it's illegal to forge money, his only focus is on getting enough money to marry his fiancé (Reiko Dan, underused). Unfortunately, since he's about to expose the international counterfeiting ring - which is just one part of a world domination plot by an underground network of Nazis - the criminals begin pursuing him across Japan.

The movie basically frontloads with plot and then lapses, for the majority of its running time, into one lengthy chase scene. This is where the fun is. The cat-and-mouse game between Uematsu (sometimes Tanii) and the criminals (also the police) goes on for so long and becomes so convoluted and cartoonish that you can't help but laugh about it. At one point Uematsu hops into a truck full of goats to escape the cops, escapes the cops, loses the truck, ends up dangling from a bridge, falls off the bridge and onto a horse, loses the horse, regains the horse, and outruns the counterfeiters' goons. At another point he falls into a truck carrying futon mattresses. The whole time he's just having a ball, constantly cracking wise and, more often than not, singing.

Which brings me to my next point: Hitoshi Ueki has such a magnetic screen presence that he is half of why this movie is so fun to watch. Even Boss of Pick-Pocket Bay, which was a total mess that barely qualifies as a movie, is watchable because it has Ueki anchoring it in the lead. I don't think he's even technically the "frontman" of Crazy Cats - as far as I know that's Hajime Hana, as the band is sometimes called "Hajime Hana and Crazy Cats" - but he's probably the most fun to watch of all of them.

It is mildly terrifying that all of Ueki's stunts seem to have been real. There are obvious places where you can tell they're doing at least the barest minimum to make it safer, such as when Uematsu is clinging to someone's car and if you pay attention you can tell they're actually going really slow despite the edited-in screeching tire noises, but for the most part he is genuinely hanging off of buildings and riding on top of trucks and whatnot.

Crazy Big Adventure also looks great due to that Eiji Tsuburaya secret sauce, with surprisingly detailed sets and some moments of really cool miniature work. Watching '60s Toho movies is like chicken soup for me, and this is the studio and all of its talented artists at their best. I like when it gets meta at the end: Crazy Cats the band performs a 10th anniversary concert at Uematsu's wedding reception, and some of them are in the audience watching themselves onstage. Having seen three and a half movies out of a very plentiful film series isn't exactly a great sample size to base sweeping judgements off of, but I think I'm getting an idea for when the Crazy Cats movies hit their stride and when they seem to fumble it a little. Crazy Big Adventure is an example of a time when everything goes right; they hit all the notes and the end result is a really fun wild ride of a film.