Scandal (1950) on Netflix
Painter Ichirô Aoye gives the singer Miyako Saijo a ride to a mountain resort, where a tabloid photographs them together and prints a fabricated romance. He sues the magazine.
- Netflix3.5/5
- IMDb7.2/105,335 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes86%
Plot summary
Famous singer Miyako Saijo, who avoids publicity, and Ichirô Aoye, a painter of minor celebrity, meet by chance in Kappazawa, where he is on a painting trip and she is on a retreat. She has missed her bus, so he gives her a ride on his motorcycle to the resort where both are staying, nearly empty in the off season. When he visits her room, a photographer for the scandal sheet Amour shoots them together on her balcony. Publisher Hori prints the picture with a fabricated romance story, confident that celebrities rarely sue. Aoye confronts the magazine's editor and punches him, then decides to take the case to court. The lawyer Otokichi Hiruta approaches him; visiting Hiruta's home, Aoye meets his daughter Masako, bedridden with tuberculosis, and hires him.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Scandal (1950)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Kurosawa conceived Scandal as a protest against Japan's booming tabloid journalism, partly because magazines had implied an unrequited romance between him and the actress Hideko Takamine, whom he had directed in the 1941 film Horse.
- Kurosawa recalled that he had unconsciously based the lawyer Hiruta on a man he once met in a bar, who spoke glowingly of his bedridden daughter while listing his own many faults.
- Kurosawa and co-writer Ryūzō Kikushima were dissatisfied with how the screenplay was developing, and as Kurosawa wrote he grew more interested in the lawyer Hiruta than in the tabloid court case, rebuilding the film around Hiruta's inner conflict.
SPOILER
Scandal's music was used against the image through aural cues to create psychological tension: the popular hit "Happy Tokyo" plays over dramatic scenes, and fanfares accompany the death of Hiruta's daughter, Masako.
