The question Oshima

pp. 145-164

in: Stephen Heath, Questions of cinema, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1981

Abstract

The night of 25/26 February 1936. Tokyo under a layer of snow. A reception takes place at the American Embassy in honour of Viscount Saito Makoto, recently Prime Minister and now something like Lord Privy Seal. As a treat, Ambassador Joseph C. Grew has had a copy of Naughty Marietta — the Van Dyke musical starring Nelson Eddy and Jeannette MacDonald — brought over from Hollywood. Will Saito like it? He stays, delighted, to the end of his first sound film, leaves later than expected, full of gratitude. In the early morning, he is assassinated by a group of young officers in the course of an abortive putsch, part of the history of the growth of Japanese militarism in the 1930s.