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Love & Crime
[Blu-ray]
Blu-ray A - America - 88 Films Review written by and copyright: Eric Cotenas (21st January 2025). |
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The Film
 Coroner Dr. Murase (Goke, The Body Snatcher from Hell's Teruo Yoshida) has seen a lot of corpses come across his slab, but he is particularly disturbed when his wife Yukiko appears on his slab as a suicide with another man's semen still inside her. This leads him to visit the forensic archives to consult cases of crimes committed by women (for some reason) starting with the Toyokaku Inn affair of 1957 in which ambitious hotel maid Kinue has the ear of proprietress Chiyo and the bed of her husband Kosuke. When Chiyo decides to sell up from under her husband and open up a geisha house, Kinue convinces Kosuke that his wife would be better off dead and enlists hunky, younger lover Shibuya to help. With Chiyo having apparently run off, only one other person stands in between Kinue and her dream of owning an inn… or is it actually two people? Murase delves deeper into Japan's past to 1936 when Sada Abe was found wandering the streets with the severed penis of her lover. Murase questions whether she was really crazy or perverted and then tracks her down in person and finds her bewildered over the fuss. Flashbacks relate how young Sada Abe fell in love with her innkeeper boss Kichizō Ishida. Upon being caught by his wife, the lovers flee and occupy a series of rundown inns and boarding houses. As their money starts to run out, the two become more and more entangled in each other's bodies and minds, and eventually they cross the line where pain turns to pleasure and they take that to its ultimate end. The flipside of the Sada Abe story are a pair of vignettes involving possible copycats, both presented as bad taste comedy verging on parody before seguing into the story of serial killer Yoshio Kodaira who took advantage of wartime food shortages to rape and kill young women. Killing at least eight women between 1932 and 1946, he toyed with his prey, meeting them by offering to share some of his relatively plentiful meal and then offering the means for the victim first through surplus ration tickets and later jobs through his apparent connections with the occupying U.S. army, leading to charges not just for murder but also war crimes. This vignette is illustrated as a series of confessional flashbacks but visualized in stark black and white in contrast to the surrounding tales, as much due to the contrasting mood as perhaps a reference to the lower budget pinku eiga films to which the studio brand of erotic and violent exploitation films were responding with works like this widescreen color Toei production and the Nikkatsu Roman Porno films. The final story is that of Oden Takahashi, the last woman executed by beheading in Japanese history. Forced into marriage at sixteen to man disfigured by leprosy only six months later, Oden finds comfort in a lover who murders her husband and then sells her to a brothel; and so begins a cycle and rescue and exploitation by men dependent upon the use of her body to support them.  Toei director Teruo Ishii had already been pressed into service the previous year helming the sexy and violent omnibus films Shogun's Joy of Torture and Orgies of Edo the previous year, and in 1969 among his seven films he upped the explicit sex and violence with the notorious Yakuza Law and Inferno of Torture along with this lesser-known, more contemporary anthology Love and Crime is the most uneven of the five at that point with its central premise of crimes committed by women diverging with the substantial Kodaira segment and the Sada Abe and Oden Takahashi segments feeling too similar. While there is some splatter, the film's ugly edge really comes from the framing segments which are more misogynistic than anything that appears onscreen as Murase muses on whether women are crazy or just evil, particularly with Kodaira as he ponders whether women's bodies drove the killer crazy or if the evil in women called out to him, after which he pretty much decides that there is no way of knowing why his wife was unfaithful to him or why she killed herself and walks off. For its faults, Love and Crime features not only the only onscreen appearance of Sada Abe herself but also one of the first cinematic depictions predating the more notable and taboo-breaking tellings like Nikkatsu's A Woman Called Sada Abe and Nagisa Ôshima's French/Japanese In the Realm of the Senses – scripted by pinku eiga pioneer Kôji Wakamatsu (Ecstasy of the Angels) – which featured unsimulated sex scenes. While all of them are relatively stripped down owing to the psychological aspect of two obsessive lovers in their own increasingly claustrophobic world, Ishii's version indulges in the look and feel of older melodramas and probably offers the most sympathetic portrayal of her at the time. Ishii would follow these films up by going full ero guru nansenu with Horrors of Malformed Men and Blind Woman's Curse. 
Video
Unreleased theatrically outside of Japan, Love & Crime was accessible on DVD in the earlier half of millennium on Japanese DVD and a French Ishii triple feature, neither of which were English-friendly. Presumably Arrow did not pick this up with its other Ishii omnibus contemporaries due to its greater obscurity and/or its relative unevenness, but 88 Films' 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 2.39:1 widescreen Blu-ray generally looks as floridly colorful as the other aforementioned films with the usual marks of their lower budget production including an occasional visible splice during an optical transition (with the expected increase in grain), but this one also has a more variable look due to different looks applied to the different stories, the long lens guerilla shooting of the Sada Abe interview, and the intercutting of World War II-era stock footage with the monochrome Kodaira segment. 
Audio
The sole feature audio option is a Japanese LPCM 2.0 mono track that has been nicely cleaned up. Narration and post-dubbed dialogue is clear, and the Sada Abe segment was presumably shot with live sound like a news interview, so ambient noise is evident but never intrusive. The effects track is sparse during the more melodramatic sequences where the score does much of the heavy-lifting while the Kodaira segment does utilize more ambient sound effects which makes the scenes of assault and murder more disturbing. Optional English subtitles are provided without any obvious errors.
Extras
The film is accompanied by an audio commentary by Japanese film experts Jasper Sharp and Amber T. who concede and even poke fun at the film's framing device but also reflect on the distinctiveness of Ishii's films in the context of the concepts of auteurism and the jobbing filmmaker, with Sharp revealing that it was Toei's head of production who had the idea for the studio's Kyoto arm that produced samurai films and historical melodramas to move toward sex and violence, leading to a lot of longtime crew quitting while those that remained were seasoned pros given that the studio earlier in the decade made about a hundred films per year. They discuss Ishii being "forced" to make these kinds of films in the context of his earlier Toei work and his later fuller embrace of the ero guru nansenu and adaptations and borrowings from Edogawa Rampo. They also provide background on the cases, noting that the Toyokaku case was more obscure as far as Western coverage of Japanese true crime and that the principals were decades older than the young, attractive cast members here as well as shedding more light on the Sada Abe case, revealing that she did enjoy a period of celebrity after her release from prison that contrasts with her meek, reclusive demeanor when interviewed here (and that she seemingly voluntarily disappeared from the public eye after this appearance and may have joined a nunnery as there is no record of her death). Sharp discusses the earlier telling of the Kodaira story as a pinku eiga by Kôji Wakamatsu Dark Story of a Japanese Rapist in which writer Masao Adachi recycles the name of his protagonist in Wakamatsu's The Embryo Hunts in Secret "Marukido Sadao", a Japanese transliteration of Marquis de Sade. They also reflect on the choice of stories set at different cultural flash points in Japan and such films as a means of expressing feelings about the violence perpetrated against the Japanese and by them, what with a lot of coverage of actual Japanese war crimes suppressed from popular culture.  "Kiss of Death" (17:50) is an introduction by film historian Mark Schilling who also covers Toei's turn to sexier and violent omnibus films in response of the pinku eiga films, and Ishii being "forced" to make them, the use of actor Yoshida as the bridge in the Ishii omnibus films, as well as the increasing influence of Rampo and ero guru nansenu across the films. The disc also includes a theatrical trailer(3:27) and an image gallery (0:59). 
Packaging
The disc come housed with a reversible cover while the first pressing includes a limited edition OBI strip, the DVD copy – presumably Region 1/2 NTSC in both the U.S. and U.K. editions, and a booklet with notes by Nathan Stuart discussing the Ishii omnibus films and providing background on each of the cases with some of the real names, the Japanese concept of the "Poison Woman", extracts from an interview with Ishii about tracking down Sada Abe, and the contrasting sympathetic portrayals of Sade Abe and Oden Takahashi (despite the film's thesis) and those of Kodaira and the Toyokaku murderess.
Overall
The most uneven and "ordinary" of Teruo Ishii's "Abnormal Love" omnibus films, Love & Crime nevertheless had its role in paving the way for the director's full embrace of ero guru nansenu to come.
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