By the mid-1950s the Japanese film industry was facing a growing challenge from international imports. While 1954 had been a golden year for local movies, including break-out hits such as Seven Samurai and Godzilla, studios were finding it more and more difficult to attract Japanese youths to the cinema in the numbers in which they used to come. They would readily go to watch glossy American imports, however local productions were starting to struggle.

One studio that had benefitted enormously from interest in American films was Nikkatsu. The company had ceased production in 1942, merging its studio operations with Daiei at the war-time government’s request, but had continued to operate its nation-wide chain of cinemas. As each studio pretty much ran their cinemas to screen their own product, Nikkatsu had been forced to rely on imported films to support its business. Actor Joe Shishido, who would appear in many of Nikkatsu’s films in the 1950s and 1960s, noted that ‘after the Second World War they weren’t really producing their own movies. After Japan’s defeat, American movies were a lot more popular than Japanese ones. Nikkatsu screened a lot of foreign movies at this time and earned a lot of money through this.’¹

By 1954 company head Kyusaku Hori had decided the time was right for Nikkatsu to head back into the filmmaking business. As American films had provided the company’s income for the past 12 years, it seemed logical to start making films that emulated an American style. With most of Japan’s popular talent contracted to the other five studios – who did not take kindly to Nikkatsu’s return to production – Hori resorted to paying generously for those stars and directors he could secure on one hand, while fostering up-and-coming talent on the other.

Nikkatsu’s new range of films was known locally as ‘mukokuseki akushun’, literally meaning ‘borderless action’, and focused on youthful characters and street crime. In many respects it was American film noir finally reaching Japan, a decade late and subtly re-imagined for a Japanese audience.

Rusty Knife, directed by Toshio Masuda, is an excellent example of mukokuseki akushun. The film came about very quickly, since Nikkatsu had scored an unexpected hit with The Guy Who Started a Storm. The studio was keen to exploit the popularity of that film’s star, Yujiro Ishihara, and so tasked Masuda with directing a quick-and-dirty crime movie on a 10 day schedule. In the end Masuda took 13 days to shoot Rusty Knife, which is still a remarkable achievement. At the time Nikkatsu was churning out as many as 50 films a year to fill its cinemas. Even so, such a short production schedule was uncommon.

The 29 year-old Masuda had only been a director for a year when he shot Rusty Knife. As a teenager he had dropped out of military training; he subsequently studied Russian literature at the Osaka University of Foreign Studies in the hopes of becoming a teacher. Like many directors of his generation he jumped careers at the last minute, enrolling as a junior assistant director with the Toho Studio attached to directors including Mikio Naruse, Nobuo Nakagawa and Umetsugu Inoue.

In 1954 Masuda followed Inoue from Toho to Nikkatsu – Hori’s generous chequebook at work – where he continued as an assistant director under Kon Ichikawa and Seiji Hisamatsu. In 1957 the studio graduated him to directing in his own right. His debut feature, Journey of Body and Mind, was released into cinemas in January 1958. By the time Nikkatsu hired him to direct Rusty Knife later in that year, it was already his third feature.

Rusty Knife was produced due to the sudden popularity of its star, Yujiro Ishihara. He had starred in the film Season of the Sun, and that had become an unexpected smash hit. At the end of 1957 he starred in another Nikkatsu film, The Guy Who Started a Storm, which was even more successful. It firmly re-established Nikkatsu on a strong financial footing and was the third-highest grossing film of its year.

Nikkatsu cinema managers were keen to see his popularity exploited as quickly as possible. He was already contracted to star in Tomotaka Tasaka’s A Slope in the Sun, which was scheduled to open for the “Golden Week” at the end of April. To schedule him into another film in between necessitated a film being shot at breakneck speed – hence Rusty Knife’s extraordinarily truncated schedule.

Producer Takiko Mizunoe approached Masuda with a screenplay written by Ishihara’s older brother Shintaro, who had written the original novel Season of the Sun. This crime thriller, Rusty Knife, followed the story of two young hoodlums who witness a murder and go on the run to escape being murdered themselves. ‘When I looked at it,’ said Masuda, ‘I saw it was really long – it would take from March to the fall or winter to shoot, but I only had ten days to make it. So I had to re-do it and even then I couldn’t shoot it in ten days. It took me twelve or thirteen days to make it with Yujiro.’²

Toshio Masuda and Yujiro Ishihara had an enormously successful working relationship: they would ultimately make 25 films together, starting with Rusty Knife.

To play Ishihara’s fellow ‘chinpira’, or ‘aspiring gangster’, Masuda cast newcomer Akira Kobayashi. The handsome 21 year-old got almost as much attention in the film as Ishihara; by the end of the year Nikkatsu was promoting him as one of its biggest stars, and from 1959 to 1962 he starred in the studio’s highly successful Wanderer series of urban westerns.

Also worth noting in the film’s cast is Joe Shishido as a blackmailer who meets with an abrupt and violent end. It was an early role for Shishido, but shows him right on the cusp of film stardom.

Joe (born Jo) Shishido had been a contract player at Nikkatsu since 1954, when he was a winner of a nation-wide talent search for young actors. At the time studio heads demanded that he change his surname, since Shishido was also the name of a villain in the stories of samurai Miyamoto Musashi. The 21 year-old actor refused, and gradually developed a career playing romantic leads in the studio’s melodramas. He was keen to break into edgier fare, however, and in 1957 he paid for cheek augmentation surgery to give himself a more rugged, masculine look. The gamble paid off handsomely and he soon transitioned to darker, more violent films including Rusty Knife and, as we shall discuss later, Seijun Suzuki’s Branded to Kill. He also starred in Nikkatsu’s Wanderer series, playing antagonist to Akira Kobayashi’s heroic cowboy.

To be truthful, the hasty production process of Rusty Knife does show. It’s a comparatively scrappy film, shot using whatever takes were serviceable rather than ones that were the best they could possibly be. It feels a little thrown together, but at the same time that forms part of the film’s appeal. It tells a rough, jagged story about small-time criminals, and it’s produced in a fashion to suit. Parts of the screenplay feel cliché-ridden and tedious. Some of the performances are wooden and stilted. More often than not, a punch to the face will visibly miss its target, despite the victim doing their best fall to the ground and shout of pain. ‘We didn’t know how to stage acrobatic fight scenes,’ Masuda explained, ‘or elaborate action sequences, so the most important thing for me was to focus on the story and the relationship between the characters. So what I was aiming at was more human drama.’³

Despite the shortcomings there remains so much to recommend in Rusty Knife. Much of its cinematography is striking in how contemporary it feels, more than 50 years after it was produced. A climactic knife fight circles around the actors in a manner that seems completely out of place for a 1950s potboiler. A no-budget truck chase is wonderfully and effectively staged. It is also all shot in the pretty standard Cinemascope ratio of 2.35:1, giving everything a wonderfully ‘big screen’ feel, despite the limited budget.

The film has a great jazz soundtrack, reflecting the unexpected trajectory of Japanese youth culture. In the United States, American teenagers rebelled against the tastes of their parents with rock’n’roll. In Japan, youths latched onto the jazz records imported by American soldiers. The sound was different, but the sense of rebellion was identical. Rusty Knife uses a youthful energetic score to match its cast, and together they made the movie a smash hit with teen audiences. 1958 was the most successful year ever for Japanese cinema, with invigorated local productions drawing audiences back in the theatres, and Rusty Knife was one of the year’s greatest commercial successes.

1. Jasper Sharp and Stefan Nutz, “Jo Shishido and Toshio Masuda”, Midnight Eye, 25 August 2005.
2. Mark Schilling, No Borders No Limits: Nikkatsu Action Cinema. FAB Press, 2007.
3. Sharp and Nutz, 2005.