Black Sun

Quite a while back, there was a post on the Shadow & Act website. They showed a bizarre video of young Japanese women in wigs and heavy make-up trying to look and act black. I don't know if they were specifically trying to act African-American. Apparently this was a fad among a small segment of Japanese youth who desperately wish they were black. The results were rather grotesque and racist. Someone should have explained it to them. They were Japanese and may not have known better.

I thought about that watching Black Sun, a 1964 Japanese film. It's about a Japanese youth (Tawio Kawaji). He lives alone in a room in a condemned church. His walls are covered with photos of black American jazz musicians. And he seems very, very happy.

He becomes even happier when a black American G.I. (Chico Roland) who was wounded in a shoot-out with a white American G.I., finds his way to his room. But the American is in terrible pain, he's on the run from MPs and neither speaks the other's language. And he's waving a Thompson submachine gun around.

An interesting movie. Someone on imdb said that it reminded him of The Defiant Ones and maybe Hell in the Pacific. It made me think of Midnight Cowboy in a couple of respects.

Chico Roland appeared in a number of films over the years, all of them Japanese.