Stakeout (Harikomi, 1958) by Yoshitaro Nomura

Though often compared to Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) by critics such as Midnight Eye’s Nicholas Rucka and Alexander Jacoby of Sight & Sound, the prolific director Yoshitaro Nomura’s Stakeout (1958) actually begins like a travelogue film, unlike the Hollywood filmmaker’s studio-confined voyeuristic murder mystery that takes place within a single apartment complex, and shot from one vantage point of the “rear window” of James Stewart’s flat.

In Nomura’s Stakeout, a pair of police detectives from Tokyo (Minoru Oki and Seiji Miyaguchi) sets out on a long-winded train journey from the crowded Yokohama station to the southern island of Kyushu. Upon their arrival there, the detectives settle in a second floor ryokan room in order to “stakeout” a seemingly unsuspicious housewife (Hideko Takamine) living in a house across the street, who’s married to an elder banker with three children from the latter’s previous marriage.

As the audience comes to learn through a series of intricate flashbacks, this unassuming woman turns out to be the former lover of a TB-suffering murder suspect (Takahiro Tamura) whom the cops from Tokyo have been chasing after; from their perfect vantage point, they await day after day in anticipation for the arrival of her ex-lover who has fled the Japanese capital and tipped to be on his way to meet his old flame for one last time.

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Rather than being a spatially circumscribed experiment like Hitchcock’s Rear Window, Nomura’s often dynamic mise en scène and his flair for the slow-burning film noir atmosphere in Stakeout have more in common with Akira Kurosawa’s Stray Dog (1949), particularly in the film’s striking flashback sequences of Tokyo’s squalid working-class milieu; moreover, Oki and Miyaguchi’s classic young cop-veteran cop combo appears to emulate Toshiro Mifune and Takashi Shimura’s partnership representing youthfulness and experience in Kurosawa’s earlier postwar policier. (Indeed, the distinctive noir quality of Stakeout, skillfully woven together by Nomura’s impeccable direction – a genre that is highly specific to Hollywood cinema – once again confirms critic Shigehiko Hasumi’s dictum that Japanese cinema is “the national cinema that most resembled American cinema”.)

Although Nomura’s choice to deliberately restrict the midsection of Stakeout – its centrepiece – to the confines of the microcosm of one Kyushu neighbourhood is quite ingenious – where Nomura even ventures into the Ozuian domain of shomingeki – Stakeout is, instead, a film of Deleuzian trip/ballad, its setting freely transposing from Tokyo’s neon-lit downtown to Kyushu’s countryside, while the pair of detectives becomes the eyes and ears to observe – through their cross-country investigation which is but a MacGuffin device – the ordinary lives of men and women living in the late ’50s Japan.

Furthermore, this manhunt for the murder suspect undertaken by two detectives is commanded by the locomotion of the steam train, while Nomura takes full advantage of the film’s stellar black-and-white Scope format, its horizontal width made-to-order to shoot the locomotives in motion (it is little wonder then that Nomura should begin and end the film with the striking shot of the departing train).

In this sense, Nomura’s Stakeout is another important reflection on the cinema’s close affinity with the mechanism of the locomotives, which is one of the medium’s preferred subjects beginning with the Lumière brothers’ L’Arrivée d’un train à La Ciotat (1886), all the way up to Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited (2007) and Tony Scott’s Unstoppable (2010).

It is for this reason that Stakeout is interlaced with the visual motif of “circular” or “round” objects: not only the circular shape in the form of the wheels of the train that motor the film’s narrative, but also the round shape of the white parasol with which Hideko Takamine’s housewife is seen at all times (see the above still). (Here, Nomura’s use of this little prop is reminiscent of the Chinese fan that accentuates Catarina Wallenstein’s coquettish titular character in Oliveira’s Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl [2009].) 

In fact, the trajectory of the film takes a sudden flight – speeding up its pace and opening up the film’s previously closed setting of the small town in Kyushu – once Takamine’s married woman runs away from her husband on a whim with her criminal lover; this acceleration is signified visually as Takamine spins her white parasol in a gesture of unconcealed excitement on her way to a rendez-vous with her old flame, before she disappears from the detectives’ view into the crowd during a summer festivity. It is as if this very motion of the spinning of the parasol triggers – like the wheel of fortune – an opening of the film’s spatial restriction as the lovers make a getaway to Kyushu’s countryside.