IT’S ALL ABOUT THE EXECUTION
Two directors take two very different looks at capital punishment, from the perspectives of Japan and Hollywood By J Hoberman
Japanese director Nagisa Oshima (1932-2013) was not known for action films, but he was, as his colleague Shohei Imamura called him, a “samurai” — a militant modernist with a taste for razor-sharp social critiques. Oshima began his career with several incendiary movies about juvenile crime, like Cruel Story of Youth and The Sun’s Burial (both 1960), and later created an international furore with his X-rated love story In the Realm of the Senses (1976). But he started a national debate in 1968 with Death by Hanging, which was inspired by a 1958 case in which a Japanese schoolgirl was raped and murdered by a teenage Korean. Through that lens, Oshima fashioned a slapstick philosophical treatise that attacked Japanese hypocrisy in general — capital punishment in particular.
Death by Hanging, which has been reissued on Blu-ray by Criterion, starts by detailing the procedure for execution; it switches to absurd comedy when the condemned man, identified as R, survives his hanging. (As one of the film’s Brechtian intertitles puts it, his “body refuses to be executed”.)
The unsuccessful execution deprives the prisoner of his memory, thus placing the authorities in an awkward position: Their prisoner has become inconveniently “innocent”. The law mandates that he understand why he is to die, so the need to educate him provides Death by Hanging the opportunity to interrogate the state’s motives in prosecuting R’s crime.
Japanese critic Tadao Sato compared Oshima’s strategy to 1960s social unrest. The movie “resembled the dialectical crossexamination by students of their professors on responsibility”. To jog R’s memory, various authority figures — a cynical doctor, an opportunistic prison warden, a hysterical Catholic priest, a crazy education officer and several clownish prison guards — prod him to re-enact his crime.
The death chamber becomes a stage on which R is meant to perform before an impassive magistrate, flanked by imperial soldiers and the Japanese flag. Since R is Korean, the patriotic trappings are additionally significant: He is a former colonial subject and for Japanese extremists, a member of another race. But R no longer remembers that he is Korean, nor does he even understand what “Korean” means. In the movie’s most sardonic sequence, the prison authorities dramatise R’s childhood in an urban slum, yelling suggestions (“Act more Korean — more over the top!”) as he is taken to the scene of the crime.
After the education officer gets so carried away that he commits R’s crime for him, the film takes another leap into abstraction. The murdered schoolgirl turns into R’s nonexistent sister, a militant leftist who, after she explains that his crime is a product of Japanese imperialism, herself becomes an accomplice and candidate for execution.
Ultimately devolving into a sodden drinking party, Death by Hanging is by no means perfect. The movie’s first half has a conceptual lucidity that is later clouded over with ambivalence. Nevertheless, it is difficult to imagine a comparable US movie — Oshima’s essay on race and crime would not only be provocative but also topical.
The 1958 Walter Wanger production I Want to Live! (remastered on DVD by Kino Lorber) is probably the most celebrated anti-death penalty movie Hollywood ever produced; as with Death by Hanging, it was inspired by an actual crime — a 1953 armed robbery resulting in the killing of a 62-yearold Burbank widow — that became a tabloid sensation. But unlike Oshima’s film, I Want to Live! is premised, not altogether impartially, on the innocence of its protagonist.
Rather than didactic farce, the mode is high-powered melodrama — the samurai warrior here is Susan Hayward, who became one of Hollywood’s top female stars by embodying sassy determination in the face of extreme hardship. Announcing itself as a “factual story”, I Want to Live! — directed by Robert Wise — plunges into a wildly expressionistic vision of a San Francisco jazz club. Gerry Mulligan wails on sax, hipsters smoke reefer in the alley, and party girls dance solo mambos to a mad bongo beat. The scene shifts to a sleazy hotel room, where Barbara Graham (Hayward) pops suddenly into the frame, rising from the bed where she spent the night in the company of a man who is definitely not her husband.
After a half-hour of raucous freedom and petty crime, Barbara is busted and seemingly framed for a murder committed by her lowlife pals. Packed off to prison, betrayed by a fellow inmate, tortured by the press and put on trial (with a showstopping turn on the stand), she is railroaded toward the gas chamber.
The movie spends the better part of an hour on death row (where, her taste for jazz undiminished, Barbara listens to Mulligan in her cell). Nothing if not effective in its existential angst, I Want to Live! was endorsed in France by Albert Camus. Barbara is battered by a series of last-minute stays of execution but is valiantly glamorous to the end, going to the gas chamber in a cocktail dress and high heels. (“Are my seams straight?” she asks a sympathetic prison guard.)
I Want to Live! ends where Death by Hanging begins, with an analysis of the execution process. It also won Hayward an Academy Award, after four previous nominations. After the actress accepted her prize, she was, according to Mason Wiley and Damien Bona’s book Inside Oscar, called back out onstage to make a curtain call — a tribute, perhaps, to her character’s will to live.