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.
