“Eight Hours of Terror” Japanese Theatrical Poster
Director: Seijun Suzuki
Cast: Nobuo Kaneko, Harue Tone, Sumiko Minami, Kenjiro Uemura, Minako Katsuki, Kan Yanagiya, Hiroshi Kondo, Hideaki Nitani, Masao Oda, Taizo Fukami, Ryutaro Nagai, Fumiko Fukuda, Keiko Shima, Eiko Misuzu
Running Time: 78 min.
By Kelly Warner
Now this is more like it. I enjoyed watching Seijun Rising, the first Arrow Video box set showcasing five of Seijun Suzuki’s earlier films. As a big fan of the director, I loved getting the chance to see these obscure movies. However, they were youth movies and, with only a couple exceptions, did not represent Suzuki’s bold style or inspired chaos on film. Well, now we come to a second helping of early Suzuki films, this time focused on crime and action movies. And if the oldest film in the collection is any indication, I’m going to enjoy this collection considerably more. Released more than 60 years ago, Eight Hours of Terror is a fun spirited, tightly wound thriller with absolutely no fat in its lean 78 minute running time.
A storm causes a landslide, cancelling the scheduled train that would take civilians from the country on an overnight trip to Tokyo. A collection increasingly testy customers hang out in the train station, desperately looking for any way to make it into Tokyo before morning. It’s a roundup of archetypes; the detective and his handcuffed fugitive, the business president and his holier-than-thou wife, the students who think communism is the way forward, the wannabe actress, the sex worker, and the annoying salesman. A solution presents itself when a rickety old bus shows up to take the travelers to Tokyo. Right before they take off, though, the police let them know to be on the lookout for a couple of bank robbers who may be hiding in the mountains.
We get to learn a little bit about each passenger as the bus careens over the high mountain roads (the film screen of the road speeding past the windows makes the driver look like a maniac). Almost everybody is freaking out, jumping at shadows, apparently thinking the bank robbers could just show up at the window and let themselves in. The threat becomes more immediate when someone reads in the newspaper about the military doctor who returned home and murdered his wife and her new lover. The man in the story’s photo is the same man cuffed to the detective’s wrist in the front row of the bus.
The killer doctor is just one of the many scandalous figures on the bus. However, the film has a way of making us feel a little more for the pitiful passengers than it does the more upstanding higher class characters, which I think goes some way to tell us Suzuki’s feelings on things. The wannabe actress is smirked at, the sex worker is shunned, the driver is constantly shouted at, the prisoner scares people, and the students are considered fools… but these are our heroes. The higher class folks are assholes, always looking down their noses at people, rarely ever showing any sympathy. On the long journey, a depressed new mother takes a leap from a bridge, and at least half the passengers are annoyed that any rescue attempt could further delay the trip. Eight Hours of Terror is as much a satire looking at classism in Japan as it is a thriller. It packs a group of Japanese into a tight space and puts them at each other’s throats. And then, when we’ve just about forgotten about them, the bank robbers show up and force their way onto the bus. Now the passengers, who’ve found one reason or another to turn on each other up until this point, must work together to survive the hijacking.
Eight Hours of Terror is like Wages of Fear meets Mr. Thank You. Or, perhaps more accurately, it is like Suzuki’s bus-based take on Stagecoach, the John Ford/John Wayne classic. The tone of the movie is all over the place, from cartoonishly comical to shockingly violent (somebody gets thrown into a bear trap and a gun is repeatedly aimed at a baby’s head). And it works? It works really well. The bank robbers are less interesting to me than the bitter social satire at works within the bus but the crooks are ultimately there to further splinter the group, so it adds something nice to the mix.
It’s a shame, however, that the bank robbers are the two least convincing performances in the bunch. Hiroshi Kondo (Wolf Guy) is so over the top that it’s grating. And the older of the two crooks played by Kenjiro Uemura (I Am Waiting) is so calm that he becomes uninteresting. It appears to be a purposeful contrast between the two villains, one hot one cold, but I think the actors took it too far to the extremes.
Most interesting among the cast is Nobuo Kaneko (Battles Without Honor and Humanity) as the military doctor turned murderer turned prisoner turned hero. It’s an early example of the man in cuffs who might be our best hope when things go south. At first I first thought Kaneko was playing the squirmy business executive in the film (actually that’s Taizo Fukami, I think), because that’s a part more in tune with what the actor would frequently play in later years. But here, in his mid-30s, Kaneko plays the leading man and it’s a nice change. He’s very good in the part, even if frequent revisits to such a character in cinema over the years have made the prisoner-turned-hero role something of a cliché. Other notable standouts in the cast include the young Hideaki Nitani (Tokyo Drifter) as the communist student in one of the actor’s earliest roles, Zenji Yamada (Danger Pays) as the bus driver, and the brave, confident prostitute who I believe is played by Sumiko Minami but I may have incorrectly identified the actress.
Seijun Suzuki does a great job of keeping the good times rolling, especially considering much of the film is stuck inside of a bus. He does cheat, however, in the filming of the bus interiors, by plainly moving the camera through a space where there should be a wall, repeatedly drawing attention to the set. Honestly, though, I don’t really care. The movie is fun and brisk, fitting a whole lot of character into its short runtime. And just when you feel like maybe the director is going to allow us to get off the bus, he throws more threats at the characters and keeps the story going just a little while longer. It’s a thriller that has something to say but never takes itself too seriously and I had a hell of a good time watching it.
Kelly Warner’s Rating: 8/10
