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Crazed Fruit



Two brothers compete for the amorous favors of a young woman during a seaside summer of gambling, boating, and drinking, in this seminal Sun Tribe (taiyozoku) film from director Ko Nakahira. Adapted from the controversial novel by Shintaro Ishihara, and critically savaged for its lurid portrayal of the postwar sexual revolution among Japan's young and privileged, Crazed Fruit is an anarchic outcry against tradition and the older generation.

Special Features

- New, restored high-definition digital transfer
- Audio commentary by renowned Japanese-film scholar Donald Richie
- Theatrical trailer
- New and improved English subtitle translation
- Plus: A 16-page booklet featuring new essays by critic Chuck Stephens and film scholar Michael Raine

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Jun-Dai wrote:Kurutta kajitsu directed by Nakahira Ko

Apparently has a great score by Toru Takemitsu.

"The film falls into a 1950s genre dubbed the "Sun Tribe," portraying the aimless lifestyles of teenaged delinquents who hang out at the beach. Featuring two brothers sexually involved with the same girl, the film outraged many Japanese audiences, but impressed French New Wave directors with its raw energy and innovative style."

from Tony Rayns' essay included with Criterion's Fighting Elegy:

The desires, ambitions, and frustrations of young people had been on Japan�s cultural agenda for at least a decade already. Crazed Fruit (1956, directed by Nakahira Ko) had launched the cycle of movies about delinquent, pleasure-seeking kids that made a star of Ishihara Yujiro, and Oshima Nagisa had given the genre a political spin in his debut feature A Town of Love and Hope (1959).

(edited some previously posted material)

From Donald Richie's A Hundred Years of Japanese Film (2001):

Crazed Fruit (Kurutta kajitsu, aka Affair at Kamakura/Juvenile Passion/Passion Juvenile/This Scorching Sea, 1956), Nakahira Kô. One of the seminal films of the fifties, a well-made atmospheric picture that made the taiyazoku flaming-youth genre respectable. Older and younger brother (Ishihara Yujiro and Tsugawa Masahiko) become involved with the same girl (Kitahara Mie) at a summer resort with disastrous results. Takemitsu Toru's first film score as well. 86 mins.

Hiroshi Komatsu wrote:This [Crazed Fruit] represented an attempt to establish the 'angry youth' film as a genre, after the model of Nicholas Ray's Rebel without a Cause and Ingmar Bergman's Summer with Monika. There was a bourgeois idealism inherent in the literature of Ishihara which was mirrored in these adaptations [Crazed Fruit and Season of the Sun] of his work. The films lacked any dimension of class-consciousness but represented rebellious youth in an imaginary world. This tendency towards a lack of realism of setting was to constitute an important element of Nikkatsu's youth films and action films for years to come.

someone else wrote:But it is with the composition, in collaboration with Masaru Sato, of his first full-length feature-film score - for Ko Nakahira's Kuratta Kajutsu ('Crazed Fruit') in 1956 - that Takemitsu embarked on the production of the particular form of 'incidental music' on which his reputation in this field today largely rests. This was to prove the first in a long list of film scores to which Takemitsu continued to add right up to the year preceding his death.

I'm going to be a complete ass for just a moment and ask, who the hell is Richolas Ray? Good info though.

Ishihara, it appears, is currently the governor of Tokyo (first elected to the position in 1999) Also, there is a TV series based on he book. I'm guessing this guy did the subtitles.

A page for a retrospective on Ko

Original poster art



(a still from the remake:
)

This sort of sounds like a Bret Easton Ellis book, which makes it very interesting for me.

Anyone know who Michael Raines is? I've never come across the name before. I haven't been able to find out anything about him, and I'm assuming it's not the same guy whose home page announces:

My Three Favorite Movies of All Time:

1. Field of Dreams
2. The Rookie
3. Bull Durham

Google tells me that he gave a lecture at UoC on Japanese films (with Crazed Fruit in the title) back in January.

Pinback wrote:Anyone know who Michael Raines is? I've never come across the name before. I haven't been able to find out anything about him

Michael Raines is a professor of Japanese film at the University of Chicago.

According to Amazon.com slated for June 28th. The 3 others for the 14th

I really looking forward to this one. I hope they continue bringing out obscure gems from the Japanese vaults. So much great films from Japan that is rare to see in the west. This one looks like one of those perhaps Donald Ritchie suggested they release and easily assessable from Nikkatsu.

Is this anything like anything by Wakamatsu? Or is not quite as over the top as that?

Tribe

Dunno how useful or interesting this tidbit is, but Crazed Fruit is briefly mentioned in the commentary track on Tokyo Story (about 50-55min. into the film).

Maybe that's where I've heard of it before. Ever since this title was announced I've been tortured because I just KNOW I've heard of it before somewhere.

Just some trivia: Nakahira, under the pseudonym Yang Shuxi, remade this as Summer Heat for Shaw Brothers in 1968. It's available on R3 DVD. A review of the movie here. It'd be interesting to compare the two when the Criterion comes out.

boy maybe this is just some bizarre connection i'm only making in my mind, but the title of this sounds like a strange rip off of a more famous film... anybody heard of a little flick called 'Wild Strawberries'? did Bergman have any sort of influence on this, or is this just an homage to a great film? I was going to see this one anyway, but Wild Strawberries is one of my favorite films... this better be a good homage if it indeed is.

'Crazed Fruit' was released a year before 'Wild Strawberries'

In David Desser's book Eros Plus Massacre he quotes Oshima Nagisa about this film (which contains a spoiler):

Spoiler

"I felt that in the sound of the girl's shirt being ripped and the hum of the motorboat slashing through the older brother, sensitive people could hear the wails of a seagull heralding a new age in Japanese Cinema"

First review in from DVD File, of all places.

Criterion DVD also has the spine and back cover up.

I'm actually really eager for this one. It sounds like a fascinating bit of cultural debris - Kevin and Perry Go Large but 50 years earlier in Japan. Plus it's from Nikkatsu, who can always be depended upon for the more bizarre and tawdry bits of Japanese film heritage.

The ever-excitable Bill Gibron at DVD Talk seems to like it too

Narshty wrote:The ever-excitable Bill Gibron at DVD Talk seems to like it too

Bill Gibron wrote:Why is it, then, that we view our youth in such salient, salad terms? If it is such a horrible, hampering time, filled with disappointment, disparities and dissolution, why do we romanticize it so?

Whatsamatter? You never viewed your youth in salad terms before? You know, smothering them in vinegar and oil, throwing some croutons in their hair. . .

Or maybe he was thinking of a crazed fruit salad.

Bill Gibron wrote:It is a homage to the emerging French New Wave

Am I wrong to question the validity of this statement ? Were films paying homage to the FNW in 1956 ?