Black Test Car

Yasuzo Masumura has an eclectic filmography that spans many genres. American film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, an ardent champion of Masumura, notes that the Japanese director’s films cover a variety of “groupings”: “…antiwar films, anticapitalist films, kinky sex films, youth films, and films with strong heroines.”¹ Speaking to Rosenbaum about Masumura, Japanese critic Shigehiko Hasumi said: “For Kurosawa, regardless of whether you like the film or not, you can always cite The Seven Samurai (1954). It’s easy. But with Masumura, there’s no representative film.”² Joseph Fahim echoes this sentiment: “The cinema of Masumura defies simple categorisation. His stories, all reliant on largely classically structured narratives, are by turns angry yet clear-headed, pulpy yet sophisticated, broadly drawn yet discernibly controlled, nihilistic yet moralistic.”³ Most of Masumara’s best known features date from the 1950s and 1960s, and were Daiei productions, created and released in quick succession. “It’s paradoxical that Masumura should have been such a company man at Daiei, because his main theme is the pursuit of individuality to the point of madness,” states Rosenbaum.⁴ This “pursuit”, and the resulting “madness”, is clearly evident in Black Test Car.

Rosenbaum notes that Masumura shared a “synchronicity” with several American auteurs of the time, something that: 

…sparked part of my original interest in Masumura: how a Japanese director of the ‘50s and ‘60s whose films echoed in many respects American films of the same period by Samuel Fuller, Nicholas Ray, Douglas Sirk and Frank Tashlin, stylistically as well as thematically, wound up making them without any apparent direct influences running in either direction.⁵

For example, Rosenbaum sees elements of Masumura in the films of Tashlin and Fuller: 

Regarding Black Test Car (1962) and The Black Report (1963), the subgenre of industrial espionage thriller begins in Masumura’s case with a color film, his fifth feature, Giants and Toys (1958), a rather nasty satire about feuding candy companies and their advertising campaigns – a movie that resembles some of the satirical comedies of Tashlin, but without Tashlin’s good-natured humanism… If Tashlin’s movies tend to lack real villains, Masumura’s often consist of nothing but villains who enact institutionalized madness, including both of the car companies in Black Test Car – which is something closer to what one finds in Samuel Fuller’s films, especially those in which crime and war are reverse sides of the same coin.⁶ 

Black Test Car tells the story of Tiger Motors, a Japanese motor company that are testing a new sports car named the Pioneer, with the development of the vehicle overseen by Onoda (Hideo Takamatsu), the Head of Planning at Tiger. The car crashes, though, and surreptitious pictures of the wreckage appear in the newspapers. Matoba (Kichijiro Ueda), a newspaperman and spy for Tiger, reveals that spies working for Mawatari (Ichiro Sugai), a former army officer and current director and Head of Planning for the rival Yamato Motor Company, exposed Tiger’s disastrous test to the papers. Onoda concludes that a spy in Tiger must have leaked the test information to Matawari and, in retaliation, Onoda instructs his team to start industrial espionage of their own. Initially, Onoda’s main concern is his desire to create a sports car, which would differentiate the vehicle from the family cars that dominate the market. Onoda’s interest in creating an original car soon replaced by his rivalry with Yamato, and his campaign of trying to deceive and discredit them, using foul means to put Tiger ahead of the competition. 

If, as suggested by Rosenbaum, there is something of the American auteur films of the time evident in Giants and Toys, Black Test Car, and The Black Report, then are there comparable American films that focus on cars? Notable Hollywood motor movies from around the same decade as Black Test Car include Red Line 7000 (Howard Hawks, 1965) Grand Prix (John Frankenheimer, 1966) and Le Mans (Lee H. Katzin, 1971), all of which focus on racing cars and drivers. Jumping ahead to contemporary Hollywood, films like Ford v Ferrari (James Mangold, 2019), Lamborghini: The Man Behind the Legend (Bobby Moresco, 2022) and Ferrari (Michael Mann, 2023) may feature motor manufacturing, having recognisable brands in their titles (functioning as a form of marketing for the car as well as being a film dramatization of the brands’ development), but they are in thrall to the vehicles. Even if there are tragedies along the way in these films, the racer is revered, and the car is king. Perhaps the most enduring evidence of the latter is a later non-racing film, Back to the Future (Robert Zemeckis, 1985), where controversies around John DeLorean at the time – as dramatized in Driven (Nick Hamm, 2018) – are now eclipsed by the DeLorean’s immortalisation as one of the most iconic vehicles in film history. 

There are Hollywood films where car production is the focus, like Gung Ho (Ron Howard, 1986), with factory foreman Hunt Stevenson (Michael Keaton) fighting for workers on the production line (and comically contrasting American and Japanese work practices, with the two sides eventually finding equilibrium), and Tucker: The Man and His Dream (Francis Ford Coppola, 1988), where inventor Preston Tucker (Jeff Bridges) realises his vision of building an innovative car, but ends up having to defend himself against attacks from the American automobile industry establishment. While these mainstream films show the  struggles in the auto industry, the main characters emerge as decent people in the end. In contrast, Masumura films like Giants and Toys and Black Test Car seem more caustic and cynical productions, depicting, in Rosenbaum’s words, “…the ruthless unpacking of corporate greed and competition…”⁷ 

There is no plucky foreman or inspirational visionary in Black Test Car. Instead, Masumura’s film is a tale of one-upmanship between companies, where battles escalate and betrayals accumulate, with everybody tainted by corruption, either directly or by association. A closer American film equivalent to Black Test Car may be Blue Collar (Paul Schrader, 1978), where a corrupt union exploits auto workers, which destroys friendships, livelihoods, and lives, but keeps the assembly line running. However, according to David Grote, there is a Japanese film, directed by Kihachi Okamoto, that is equivalent: “Masumura’s Black Test Car follows much the same route as Okamoto’s Blueprint for Murder by dealing with the rising Japanese car industry, but its cynicism cuts much deeper, more like Kurosawa’s The Bad Sleep Well.”⁸ 

Black Test Car views the competition between Tiger and Yamato as war, being one side of the coin mentioned by Rosenbaum:

The military backgrounds of the characters (such as Mawatari) are important, because Masumura sees a continuity between wartime madness and peacetime madness. At least two of his movies in the mid-60s, Yakuza Solidier (also known as Hoodlum Soldier) and Nankano Spy School, virtually equate patriotism with insanity and view wartime violence almost exclusively as something that Japanese soldiers and Japanese patriots inflict on one another. So it’s not surprising that in Black Test Car, one of the companies, Yamato, is named after a Japanese battleship. (The other company is called Tiger, which points towards the bestiality of competition.) There’s also continuity between the dingy locations of secret meetings, the cramped camera angles, and the corrupt nature of those meetings (e.g., the payoffs to a newspaper for printing certain kinds of news stories about the auto industry). Many of the camera angles are unusually low, shot from the floor – not simply to follow meetings whose members are seated on the floor, but also to introduce us to a worm’s-eye view of certain bars.⁹ 

Marya E. Gates also notes this militarisation of business practices: 

…in the pitch-black film noir “Black Test Car,” we see how ex-military men brought their same deadly methods to corporations…Masumura asks his viewers to think critically about the pitfalls of placing loyalty – in this case, to one’s employer – over one’s humanity.¹⁰ 

The other side of the coin mentioned by Rosenbaum is crime, which is the seen in the industrial espionage of Black Test Car: “In terms of genre styling, industrial spies are basically the same as gangsters, terrorizing, threatening, bribing, and blackmailing others with the same sort of brutality.”¹¹ At one point, Matoba reveals a secret vantage point that would allow Tiger Motors’ planning team to spy on Yamato. This hidden view is from a toilet window in a building opposite a Yamato conference room: if this is not crawling in the sewer, it could be the nearest equivalent. There is no healthy competition here, no spirit of fair play. This is business reduced to the gutter. 

Masumura’s corporate world of Black Test Car is a stark monochrome landscape, a murky world of noirish shadows that reflect the grey business morals. Whereas Giants and Toys was colourful, expansive, and comic, Black Test Car is frequently grim, confined, and severe. Shots cram characters in tight spaces, crush them through high or low angles, push them to the edges of the frame. Even a meeting in a park between Onoda’s planning protégé Asahina (Jiro Tamiya) and his girlfriend Masako (Junko Kano) isolates the two. Despite being in the open, the bench they sit on, along with the nearby playground and surrounding trees, boxes them in. Even though the couple are pushed together in the scene, a shameful Asahina cannot face Masako when asking her to sleep with Mawatari to obtain the price of the Yamato car. 

Referencing Giants and Toys, Jessica Kiang states that: “…its reflection of the anxieties of this historical moment, as cutthroat corporate values began to invade the private sphere, is invaluable.”¹² These same anxieties surface in Black Test Car, where company business invades the private space of Asahina and Masako and poisons their relationship. After Masako has slept with Mawatari and surreptitiously obtained the car price, she returns to Asahina and shows him a ring given to her by Mawatari. She kisses the ring in front of him, mocking his subservience to work, reminding him of what he pushed her into doing, and showing how she has been commodified. While Asahina is loyal to Tiger Motors, with Onoda dangling the prospect of a promotion over Asahina’s head, he seems to gradually lower his gaze in shame with each successive, disgraceful act. 

Rosenbaum sums up the madness of the Tiger and Yamato rivalry thus: 

Like it or not, the message of Black Test Car is that the ultimate logic of capitalism is a form of insanity. Even the argument that competition leads to better products on the market is completely undermined here when it turns out that both companies wind up manufacturing different versions of the same car.¹³ 

This is shown when newspaper adverts for the Tiger car and Yamato car are displayed on facing pages: the companies simply mirror each other in product and conduct. In a Chicago Reader piece, Rosenbaum again equates capitalism with madness, and situates Masumura’s films within the wider culture: 

What Masumura was primarily interested in was a defiance of certain fundamental traits of Japanese culture, creating a cinema of crazy people, aspects of which can be found particularly in Giants and Toys and Black Test Car (where capitalism is depicted as a form of insanity) and Blind Beast (where a mad sculptor uses female bodies as his raw material).¹⁴ 

The suggestion here is that the art of creation in Blind Beast is perverted, but this could also apply to Black Test Car, where the aspiration to innovate is replaced by the desire to win at all costs.

Referencing Rosenbaum’s point, Tom Mes explains that one of Masumura’s “tropes”: 

…is formed by corporate life and the sacrifices, both human and moral, demanded by the post-war economic miracle… As applied by Masumura, this total subordination of individual wishes, qualities and personality is a mechanism shared by capitalism and militarism alike, and is very much fundamental to Japanese society at large.¹⁵ 

This trope is not unique to Japan, of course. It applies the world over and is embedded in 21st century culture, resulting in a “synchronicity” of companies that cross borders and cultures, where corporations, for better or worse, dominate the globe. The wheels keep turning and the products keep coming, but, as Black Test Car asks, just what has gone into the creation of those products that entices people so much?

Kuro no tesuto ka/Black Test Car (1962 Japan 95 mins)

Prod Co: Daiei Dir: Yasuzō Masumura Scr: Kazuo Funahashi & Yoshihiro Ishimatsu, based on an original story by Toshiyuki Kajiyama Ed: Tatsuji Nakashizu Phot: Yoshihisa Nakagawa Mus: Shigeru Ikeno 

Cast: Jiro Tamiya, Junko Kanô, Eiji Funakoshi, Hideo Takamatsu, Bontarô Miake, Yosuke Takemura, Ichirô Sugai, Kichijirô Ueda, Toshiko Hasegawa

Endnotes