Event

STAIRWAY TO THE DISTANT PAST

Dir. Kaizô Hayashi, 1995
101 mins. Japan.

Movies-wise, Mike Hammer - the hard-boiled private dick antihero created by master pulpist Mickey Spillane - was most memorably rendered by Ralph Meeker in Robert Aldrichs atomic-anxiety noir classic KISS ME DEADLY. There was also I, THE JURY two years prior (starring Biff Elliot) and the ill-advised Armand Assante remake three decades later. But less famous is Japanese auteur Kaizô Hayashi's surrogate Maiku Hama, hardheaded as ever but occasionally lacking one in the chamber - running his office out of an ancient movie palace, where clients have to buy a ticket (no exceptions!) to get in. This March, Spectacle is pleased to present three unsung classics of Japanese neo-noir: this is MAIKU HAMA, #1 PRIVATE EYE, embodied immortally by the rubber-faced Masatoshi Nagase (most famous for his starring turn in Jim Jarmusch's MYSTERY TRAIN), who would reprise the character in a made-for-TV followup decades later.

(Special thanks to Film Detective Pictures.)

In Japanese with English subtitles.STAIRWAY TO THE DISTANT PAST is a mile-a-minute tragi-comedy in the cinema du look vein of Luc Besson and Jean-Jacques Beneix, wherein Hama and his kid sister (Haruko Wanibuchi) go on the hunt for their long-missing parents among the flotsam of Yokohama's underworld. While Hama continues spending more time getting his ass kicked than solving mysteries, long-denied traumas and disappointments have a way of reasserting themselves, while street toughs on sea-doos remind Hama his every move is being watched. After switching from comedy to mystery in THE MOST TERRIBLE TIME OF MY LIFE (to rib-bruisingly funny effect), STAIRWAY ups the ante to include to a surprisingly heartfelt story of family reconciliation (against the usual mob-warfare backdrop.)