‘Fires on the Plain': Haunting imagery in restored 1959 war film stands the test of time

Japan Times

2 days ago

When I interviewed Kon Ichikawa in 2000 for a retrospective of his work presented by Cinematheque Ontario (now known as TIFF Cinematheque), he told me that his World War II masterpiece 'Fires on the Plain' (1959) would never be made today. 'If I were to take it to a production company, they would turn it down flat,' he said.
Seeing the film's new 4K restoration, which is currently on release, made me understand why that statement still holds. Based on Shohei Ooka's 1951 novel of the same name, the film, shot in stark black-and-white, strips away the heroism of the usual war movie and the moralism of the typical antiwar movie. (Indie veteran Shinya Tsukamoto made his own, similarly bleak version of 'Fires on the Plain,' released in 2014, but had to self-finance the film after unsuccessfully pitching the project to film companies.)
'Fires on the Plain' tracks the wanderings of a tubercular Japanese soldier, played by a rail-thin Eiji Funakoshi (who fainted on the set after starving himself for two months to prep for the role) as he struggles to survive during the Japanese army's retreat from the island of Leyte in the Philippines early in 1945. Weakened by disease and stumbling down hillsides with arms flapping, Pfc. Tamura looks both pathetic and faintly ridiculous. And when his squad leader berates him for returning to his unit after a short stay in a military hospital ('You're coughing blood ... you think your TB is cured?'), he gazes at him with doe-eyed resignation.
But instead of being the film's designated victim, Tamura turns out to be wily and lucky enough to escape American bombs and bullets, while scouring the countryside for sustenance and comrades who can ease his fear of being alone in a hostile land, with sudden death a constant threat. There is a grandeur in the tall columns of smoke he sees in the distance — 'fires on the plain' that have been set by farmers — but he knows he can trust no one, including the Filipinos who regard him and other Japanese soldiers with everything from screaming terror to seething hatred.
Scarier, finally, are the fellow soldiers Tamura encounters on the long trudge to Palompon, a seaside town from where they expect to evacuate. The first are three stragglers from another company, who look at him with wolfish eyes when he reveals he has salt, a scarce and desperately desired commodity, but after sharing it with them, he senses that they are trustworthy, at least for the moment.
Not so with Nagamatsu (Mickey Curtis) and Yasuda (Osamu Takizawa), soldiers from his unit he meets farther along on the march. The former is even more emaciated than Tamura, while the latter is a glint-eyed older man with a bad leg who has the compliant Nagamatsu trade Yasuda's carefully guarded tobacco for food and hunt for what both men call 'monkey meat.' Tamura begins to suspect that they see him as their next 'monkey.'
Working from a script written by his wife, Natto Wada, Ichikawa filmed this story with touches of his trademark dark humor and visual beauty, but 'Fires on the Plain' depicts Tamura's journey with a reality-grounded detail and primal psychological depth that makes it a one-of-a-kind feature in his lengthy filmography.
More than six decades after its release, the film still incites compulsive viewing, like dreaming of one of the oldest scenarios of our species — kill or be eaten — with a modern war supplying the subtext and a master director the ever-haunting imagery. But it is Funakoshi's eyes, with their softness that can instantly harden into rightful suspicion, that have stayed with me the longest.