Synopsis
Two detectives begin a stakeout based on the slim chance of catching a murderer whom they suspect will try to reunite with an old flame.
Stakeout
1958 ‘張込み’ Directed by Yoshitaro Nomura
Cast
Minoru Ōki Takahiro Tamura Seiji Miyaguchi Hideko Takamine Kin Sugai Masao Shimizu Ryôhei Uchida Kamatari Fujiwara Kumeko Urabe Hizuru Takachiho Tomoko Fumino Miki Odagiri Tanie Kitabayashi Shinsuke Ashida Toshiaki Konoe Jun Tatara Seigo Fukuoka Kentarô Imai Zenichi Inagawa Tamae Isobe Taku Itô Hiroyuki Kasugai Nobu Kawaguchi Kazuo Kobayashi Tokuji Kobayashi Tsuruko Kusakata Yōko Machida Takeo Matsushita Shinichirō Minami Show All…
Director
Writer
Original Writer
Editor
Cinematography
Art Direction
Composer
Studio
Country
Language
Alternative Titles
The Chase, Harikomi, 监视, Stake Out, Le Guet-apens, Засада
Releases by Date
Theatrical
-
Japan
Releases by Country
Japan
15 Jan 1958
- Theatrical
Popular reviews
More-
“Listen, I’m sorry that I urinated on you. You’ll forgive me, won’t you?” According to Takamine Hideko, this is how she broke the ice when she met now-director Nomura Yoshitarô after nearly thirty years. Takamine's highly successful debut film, Mother, made in 1929 when she was five-years-old, was directed by Nomura's father, Hôtei, who used to entertain "Deko-chan" (her nickname) by having her play with his then ten-year-old son, who obviously got more than what he bargained for.
Nomura was primarily a genre stylist best known for his noirish crime dramas, which were often based on the socially conscious fiction of Matsumoto Seichô. Though he started his career at Shochiku in the early Fifties as an assistant to Kurosawa on…
-
84/100
I love films taking place in scorching summer heat. There's something really poetic about seeing people sweat profusely. But here it was really nice seeing them getting momentary relief with a thunderstorm. This is pretty much as sweaty as Stray Dog.Anyways this is a terrific crime procedural. A very neat concept executed extremely well. The opening 5 minutes are masterful with the train journey, nothing is explained, it's lovely. (also perfect title card drop bit later on, one of the best). It starts off as sort of a voyeuristic slice of life with the cops following the daily life of wanted murderer's ex girlfriend. The influence of Rear Window is clear but here the voyeurism isn't perverse. The…
-
In 1959, Shinobu Hashimoto's screenplay for Stakeout won the Kinema Junpo Award, the Blue Ribbon Award, and the Mainichi Film Award--a trifecta of the most esteemed film awards in Japan at that time. In the intervening years he won 13 more major screenwriting awards from these same big three. Besides working with Yoshitaro Nomura on Stakeout, and 4 other features, many of his scripts were directed by Akira Kurosawa (Rashomon 1950; Ikiru 1952; Seven Samurai 1954; I live in Fear 1955; Throne of Blood 1957; The Hidden Fortress 1958; The Bad Sleep Well 1960; Dodes'ka-den 1970), as well as master directors Masaki Kobayashi (i.e. Hara-Kiri 1962), Mikio Naruse (i.e. Summer Clouds 1958), Kihachi Okamoto (i.e. Samurai Assassin 1965, and The…
-
Stakeout feels like a very strange body in Japanese crime fiction from the period, it has a hard-boiled surface but doesn't play at all like the B thrillers that start to come out around that time. It shares with them a desire to getting pulse of daily Japanese life but the treatment is far more upscale with a certain preference for a literary wait, slowly filling in its ambiance with character detail. This is one of the first movies clearly influenced by Rear Window, but Nomura seems less interested in voyuerism as analogue to film watching experience, but sees the interplay between the characters watching and the forms of fiction happening around them in a more sociological context.
-
More of a meditative domestic drama than a crime film, this contains a bingo card of post-war Japanese cinema tropes, including a morally conflicted character with tuberculosis, guilt and conflict about leaving home for the city (or vice versa), and an anxiety about denying one’s desires in order to fulfill obligations to family, this movie starts and ends with the train, especially “getting a seat on the train,” as a prominent symbol of social mobility as fixed, sweaty, rigid, and overcrowded. Trains are all over the Ozu Noriko films as suggestive of these tensions, and here the plot concerns a slow-to-commit bachelor cop spying and becoming emotionally invested in the dull domestic life of an accomplice, convinced that she’s in…
-
I read about it last nite randomly, and can't remember where, and it wasn't here, but I immediately had to see it.
Classic concept movie. Two cops stakeout the ex-girlfriend of a criminal. And that’s it.
Took me a sec to realize it flashbacks.
“Never hide your true passionate self.”
A review states: a movie about boredom that's never boring. Can't add anything more, but that it's also about perception. Totally my jazz.
-
Great commentary, and some excellent scenes, but the editing and sound design are pretty rough. At times distractingly so. The kid playing god bless America at the end was a nice, and incredibly subtle touch.
-
I haven't seen a lot of Japanese movies like it… from this era at least. Slow burn procedural in the countryside. Nothing to do but wait until the storm passes. Bong Joon-ho: I see you lookin'. And hey… I get it. Nomura's staying on my radar.
-
JAPANESE NOIR COLLECTION on CRITERION CHANNEL (4 of 17)
This has one of the greatest titular lines of all time! "So begins out stakeout." Then the music swells and the title screen comes into frame. This is twelve minutes into the movie. More movies should do that! Stakeout is about a detective duo, one young and one old, who are watching a woman in hopes that a perp will come to her. In the meantime... the younger one, Takao Yuki played by Minoru Ôki, becomes obsessed (?) with her and falls in love. I got Hitchcock vibes along the way. I imagine the slow vibe here is accurate of a..................... STAKEOUT.
-
The title sequence of Yoshitaro Nomura's debut film, "Stake Out" (1958) lays its claim to the tradition of hard boiled cinema through its full screen display of one man's eyes, intently staring off into the distance, with the film's title scribbled across the image. It's an opening worthy of Sam Fuller or Robert Aldrich. But the rest of the film is specifically Japanese... and completely in line with Nomura's penchant for 'proceduralism' coupled with the devastating personal consequences that law and order often bring upon the individual.
But, in the hands of Nomura, that devastation is parceled out carefully and distinctly. After a lengthy opening sequence in which two men travel by train through an oppressive heat to an unknown…
-
I've re-watched this many times. This film is the base of "The Castle of Sand". And this is the film about "train".
-
A police procedural about two detectives waiting to ensnare a murderer, although it manages to avoid the cliches that plot synopsis conjures. An appropriately sweaty film for a day that feels like 93° F