Giants and Toys

Director: Yasuzô Masumura

1958 / 95min / DCP

Maverick filmmaker Masumara’s stinging, glaringly gaudy satire of a ‘50s Japan dominated by a ruthless new corporate culture, capitalist excess, and the figure of the suicidally overworked salaryman, Giants and Toys takes place in the battlefield of business, where three candy manufacturers vie to corner the caramel market through any-means-necessary snares and traps. A porn photographer makes a star out of a snaggletoothed new spokeswoman, and then things only get wilder in the first of Masamura’s industrial espionage films.

“Masumura tended to alter his visual style with every film, according to the needs of the story; this 1958 effort is a heavy-duty satire about three competing candy companies trying to outdo one another’s promotional campaigns, and its garish and ugly color photography seems just as functional and deliberate as the beautiful black and white of A Wife Confesses (1961) and Red Angel (1966). Against a backdrop of hysterical competition and industrial espionage, a slum girl with bad teeth is discovered and transformed into a mascot for one of the candy companies by a cynical porn photographer. The film has rightly been compared to some of Frank Tashlin’s pop-culture comedies, made in Hollywood around the same time, and though it’s probably less funny than Tashlin at his best, its anger is more savage and leaves a more corrosive aftertaste; the apocalyptic ending is worthy of Douglas Sirk.” —Jonathan Rosenbaum

Post-screening conversation with writer Jonathan Rosenbaum and filmmaker Michael Almereyda on Saturday, January 18th