Secret of the Telegian (1960)

directed by Jun Fukuda

Japan

85 minutes

4 stars out of 5

----

Rewatched this a third time after far too long. Coming back to these movies after having seen more tokusatsu - especially Toho films - is always rewarding, because now I feel like I understand them in their context much better. In particular it's impressive how Jun Fukuda was able to direct a film that fits so neatly with the rest of the Transforming Human series despite never having directed a tokusatsu film before (although he was assistant director for Rodan) and only having solo directorial credit on one other movie thus far.

I just want to talk about how much I love that opening murder scene where we see Sudo for the first time (although we don't know who he is yet). We follow a man entering a haunted house at a theme park, not to enjoy it like all the other attendees but to meet up with someone. He's surrounded by witnesses, who are later interviewed by police and can't describe what they saw happen next. The man reaches the back of the cave and all of a sudden something happens to him: out of nowhere there is another man standing exactly where he had been, and all we the viewers see of this second man is his back - there one second, gone the next - before his victim collapses dead with a knife in him. There are shots like this of Sudo throughout the film and it's something I think is absolutely fascinating: these back shots, other characters framed on either side of his shoulders, no face, nothing to identify with, just this looming presence. The camera almost has the same POV as him, but he himself blocks some of the shot.

Tadao Nakamaru plays this character really, really well. After he saw his own performance in a test screening he apparently realized with some horror that he was "in a ridiculous movie" and didn't want to play his role in The Human Vapor because of that. I think we can reevaluate this character now, because he isn't ridiculous and neither is the movie he's in. Sudo is interesting because he really was at one point a victim: even if he comes off uptight trying to stop some guys from stealing gold bars in the chaos at the end of the war, the fact is that he was murdered for it, and his murderers got away with it. But in the process of reinventing himself into the tele-transmitted man, he's lost most of his humanity. I absolutely love the reveal at the end that he's physically scarred and burned because of the teleporter he uses. It may have been simple revenge but now it's taken him over. It's really the teleporter that's the scary thing, in conjunction with its user - I think both World Wars kind of quashed the idea of technology and science being a basic universal force for good, and now all we can do is be afraid of what people are going to do with the new weapons we keep inventing. 

Also, in the original Japanese, Sudo is never referred to as the "Telegian" or anything like that. The in-universe name for him is "juken-ma", which translates to something like "bayonet demon" or "bayonet devil". This is what the police and reporters call him by.

I read somewhere that Toho didn't do a lot of noir films at this point like some other studios did because they "weren't good at them", but when it comes to noir with a sci-fi element, they really nail it. Aside from Sudo, none of the characters in this have much personality, but everybody fills their various generic cop roles really well and in concert it makes for a riveting investigation into something that looks more and more as the film goes on like a supernatural event. That being said, it's weird that Koji Tsuruta is here. I never get used to him in this movie. From what I understand he was close with Fukuda and was in this as kind of a favor to him since he was a new director (Tsuruta was one of Toho's biggest stars and it was probably very expensive and difficult to get him in a movie). But his character is just some guy, a nebulously-defined "old college friend" who gets in the way at first but eventually is absorbed into the main cast. A lot of Toho movies are like that, actually: the cast of characters is just whoever happened to stick around the longest.

I will say the pacing is also odd - this is one of the only times I've looked to see what time it was and realized I'd been watching the movie for 55 minutes when I thought I'd only been watching it for 15 or 20 at most. And something about the filming occasionally feels a little awkward, like shots are starting and stopping at not quite the right time. But you will never catch me saying a bad word about the practical effects, which are the highlight of the film. Toho is known mostly for large physical work, kaiju suits and vehicle miniatures and things like that, but rotoscoping scanlines onto Sudo undoubtedly took an excessive amount of time and meticulous frame-by-frame effort.

The last thing I want to mention is just this really small detail: in the final scene, where Sudo's teleportation goes wrong and he dies horribly, clutching at his coat collar in agony, Tsuruta's character Kirioka is watching him and holding his own collar as well. This could have been totally unintentional, and since practical effects and drama scenes were filmed in separate locations, they probably weren't even actually looking at each other, but I got a real sense of Kirioka being absorbed in and horrified by what he was seeing.