Film Review: I Will Buy You (1956)

I Will Buy You. (1956). In Eclipse Series 38: Masaki Kobayashi Against the System [DVD].  USA:  Criterion Collection, 2013.

The title alone suggests this is not your typical adulatory sports film.

The protagonist is a youthful talent scout charged with acquiring the services of Japan’s hottest university baseball prospect.  Other teams and scouts are soon in the hunt and the film chronicles their escalating efforts to bribe their way into the hearts and minds of the talent’s suspicious and equally amoral agent, as well as the talent’s impoverished rural family, who literally murder one another over promises of riches.  The talent himself appears to be above the fray, but in the end is revealed equally capable of using others for self enrichment.

The story is suspenseful, written so that the viewer is never sure who might be lying or engaged in a double-cross, and the main characters have a measure of depth that keep them from being mere caricatures. While the protagonist develops a degree of self-awareness, he finds it too little, too late, trapped in the drama he and the rumor-mongering media have created.  The only element that escapes director Kobayashi’s withering criticism is the sports consuming public, whose spending on tickets, newspapers, and merchandise fuels the industry and the corruption on which it depends.

This is not a film that will make you feel happy to be a sports fan, or even a human being.  At times it feels too didactic and too cynical, but from today’s distance it may be difficult to judge.  Perhaps this film cuts close to the Japanese experience in the decade of impoverishment following Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  The Dominican talent hunt of the past two decades suggests such behavior is not behind us.

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