Setsuko Hara's sketch of Toshiro Mifune in "Tokyo Sweetheart"

I finally came across the perfect companion to the 2021 post Hideko Takamine caricature from "Kita no san-nin." Maybe I'll start a subcategory of drawings shown in mid-century Japanese dramas.

In the 1952 film Tokyo Sweetheart, directed by Yasuki Chiba, actress Setsuko Hara portrays Yuki, a street sketch artist who has a meet-cute with Kurokawa, a good-hearted man portrayed by Toshiro Mifune. Yuki does the sketch of Kurokawa that's shown above. It's a pretty good sketch, though it only gets about three seconds of screen time; some artist definitely did their job well behind the scenes.

Tokyo Sweetheart is a fun film overall. It's full of misunderstandings, machinations and switcheroos, mostly involving a valuable ring and its less valuable replica. It's not all screwball comedy, though. This is devastated post-war Japan, so there are money troubles, the reemergence of the Yakuza (though they're comically portrayed) and a storyline involving a dying sex worker who wants only to reunite with her mother.

The scenes involving Hara and Mifune are the most enjoyable. They didn't appear in many movies together and this might be the film in which they have the most shared screen time. (I haven't seen Kurosawa's The Idiot, though.) It's fun to imagine an alternate timeline in which Hara and Mifune co-starred in a series of Thin Man-like films, or had their own Bogart-Bacall or Grant-Hepburn energy. 

A review of Tokyo Sweetheart on Japanonfilm notes: "Neither Hara nor Mifune were known for romantic comedies, so the arrival of this is a welcome extension of our understanding of both those stars. ... One extra layer of interest is the way it adapts the tried and true romantic comedy formula of western film into the context of Japanese society." 

Here are a few more images from the sketching scene in Tokyo Sweetheart:

Find someone who looks at you

the way Setsuko Hara looks at Toshire Mifune here.

Mifune does not enjoy behind laughed at.

And there are a few more images here.

Thursday shelfies

BONUS (Snugs, looking a bit evil, a few days ago)

Old ad for "The Black Cat" on WBKB's Shock Theatre in Chicago

This nifty old advertisement for 1934's The Black Cat popped up in one of my Facebook groups. Channel 7 in Chicago was known as WBKB from 1953 to 1968. Its "Shock Theatre" was one of many such shows that launched around the nation when Universal sold its syndication package of 52 classic horror films — called Shock! — to local television stations in 1957 (through Screen Gems). 

Thus was spawned the phenomenon of local TV horror hosts. WBKB's version ran from 1957 to 1959 and featured Marvin, his companion Dear and hunchback Orville, along with a band called the Deadbeats. Dear's face was never seen until the final episode, according to Wikipedia. "Shock Theatre" was remembered fondly by one commenter in IMDb.com in 2014:

"For early television played late at night, this show was the best. The goofy music and the scary things on the show scared a little kid like me half to death but I loved it. Especially Marvin's humor. The movies were old time horror classics like Dracula and Frankenstein, etc. I wish I could get some of the episodes. I don't know if WBKB in Chicago kept any of them or not. Any show named Shock Theater in any other town just copied what was already done in Chicago. Marvin even took some of the show on the road to local ballparks like Comiskey. His band was great also. It even had a guy playing accordion in the band. I would love to see episodes of Shock Theater, even online somewhere."

Here are a couple stills from The Black Cat, including Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff playing chess, and Karloff leading a pre-Code satanic ritual in a German Expressionist setting.