White Beast

[Dan Sallitt]

One of the several projects Naruse made after war's end that uses a
current social issue as a container for mild prurience. The topic
this time is the reform of prostitutes, who are herded into a
therapeutic institution and shepherded through crises, many of them
syphilis-related, by kindly administrator Izumi (Sô Yamamura). The
toughest nut for the establishment to crack is the rebellious,
flamboyant Yukawa (Mitsuko Miura, later the unscrupulous sister in
LIGHTNING), who clings to self-justifications that the film intends to
beat out of her. As with his previous film THE ANGRY STREET, Naruse
co-wrote with Motosada Nishiki; though WHITE BEAST improves on the
repetitive, overly explicit dialogue of its predecessor, its script
leaves much to be desired. In addition to its tendentious social
mission, the film seems more interested in devising a series of lurid
incidents - a protracted catfight, flagrant attempts at seduction,
syphilis-induced insanity - than in finding a perspective on the
characters. Yukawa, the film's dramatic center, suffers particularly
from this focus on the sensational, as her erratic attempts to defeat
the system are so exaggerated and sexualized that they fail to come
together into a picture of a person. Of course, even Naruse's best
films are seasoned with exaggeration and caricature; and if the lurid
proceedings throw the film off balance, they don't strand the director
in uncongenial territory. Gradually WHITE BEAST accumulates memorable
moments: an unnerving scene of a distraught Yukawa smashing panes of
glass with her bare hands; the unexpectedly bleak and anti-dramatic
conclusion of a subplot involving one of the prostitutes (Chieko
Nakakita, in the first of more than twenty performances for Naruse)
and the man she had promised to marry before the war; the account of a
minor character's tortured offscreen death from syphilis; the stricken
Yukawa lying in bed with a mysterious vision of rippling water and an
unidentified child; a final long shot of Yukawa silhouetted against an
ambiguous sunrise. But the film's problem aspects never abate, even
as its style piles up points. One bizarre scene transition,
reminiscent of Buñuel, in which the institution's doctor blatantly
reverses her promise of secrecy to a patient, makes one wonder whether
Naruse was chafing under the film's propagandistic mandate; but no
clear pattern of subversion emerges (1950).