Corporate warfare - Black Test Car

Fantoma continues to reissue the films of Yasuzo Masumura, this time with the splendid film Black Test Car, released in 1962. Hideo Takamatsu stars as Onoda, a corporate official who works for the Tiger automobile company. He is asked to create an espionage division, to find out what car the rival company Yamato is creating, as well as protecting Tiger's assets. Both companies are competing to develop a sports car, Tiger's the Pioneer, and Yamato's Mypet. The opening scene of the movie shows a car wrapped in black fabric performing a test drive, which ends badly with a crash on the test road. It is the Pioneer, and its development has been uneven, as there has been great pressure on every department to make this car work. Yamato has sent agents to find out about the rival car, bribing engineers and threatening contractors into revealing Tiger's secret information of the car. Onoda has two of his best men, Ashahina and Hiraki, set up a task force to find out about what car Yamato is making. They employ tactics that are no better than Yamato's -- kidnapping contractors and bribing company men involved with the car's production. Even worse, Ashahina coerces his girlfriend into being a bar hostess where Yamato's executives hang out, and date the head executive. She and Ashahina are engaged, but his obsessive drive to help out his company, and his increasing immoral acts begin to drive them apart, her being his moral conscience which drives doubt into his soul. The schemes and action on both companies escalate, rivaling yakuza tactics. Yamato's new car looks exactly like the Pioneer, to the Tiger company's dismay. Ashahima learns that the corporate executives on both sides -- including Onoda -- were soldiers in Tojo's army during the war, many of them committing many war crimes, which explains their callousness. Finally, the Pioneer is put into production, trying to come out before the Mypet, and there immediately ensues a price war. Tiger makes the mistake of settling on a price, which Yamato matches, minus an x amount to be determined on the day of its release. Ashahina, in a desperate final attempt to find out the price, bullies his girlfriend into sleeping with the executive to find out what the amount is. She does, at the cost of ending their relationship. The Pioneer sells well early on, but a rigged car crash of one model owned by a corrupt official causes controversy. Yamato conducts a secret campaign against the Pioneer, only to have it backfire as their attempts are exposed, and the company disgraced. Ashahina, finally seeing the amoral ways of his boss and coworkers, leaves the company, and in doing so regains his girlfriend.

This is an excellent film by Masamura, whose place in cinema has increased with each dvd reissue. Voicing the moral conscience against an increasingly corrupt world, Masamura's films explore the mindsets, strategies and relations of people in modern Japanese society. Directors like Juzo Itami must have been influenced by his work. It was filmed in black and white, which lends a kind of noir aspect, as a lot of action was done at night or in claustrophobic interiors. Cinematographers have to take a look at this film; every scene is composed masterfully. If you like films like Kurosawa's The Bad Sleep Well, or Itami's Taxing Woman, this is a must see.