Ôatari sanshoku musume

ON WINGS OF LOVE (aka OHATARI SANSHOKU MUSUME, 1957) is the third in a series of three "Sannin Musume" (Three Girls) movies starring Japan's biggest female pop stars of the postwar era, Hibari Misora, Chiemi Eri and Izumi Yukimura. It's also the first Japanese film produced in TohoScope, the Toho Pictures version of Cinemascope. (Check out the screen grabs I posted here in the film's photo gallery.) I've reviewed the previous two films for IMDb (JANKEN MUSUME and ROMANCE MUSUME, 1955-56), as well as a later film starring all three, HIBARI CHIEMI IZUMI SANNIN YOREBA (1964).

The new widescreen process means there are far more dialogue scenes shot in long takes from a distance, which tends to make the film much slower and talkier. There are also fewer location shots. It's not clear where this film takes place, since there are no Tokyo or Kyoto landmarks of the type we saw in the other films. It's clearly a small city out in the countryside, with no tall buildings in sight and no seaports or waterways. As a result, it's much less picturesque, relying more on studio sets for most of the scenes. Two of the girls live in large, western-style houses, so we have fewer images of classical Japanese architecture.

There are also fewer musical numbers. There are ten numbers total, but one is strictly a solo dance number and one is a song performed on TV by one character's mother, which leaves the three stars with only eight songs, adding up to two solos each and one group song at the very beginning and another at the very end. In the earlier films we got the spectacle of the girls watching themselves perform on stage, but here we only get a sequence where the girls go on a rowboat outing in a lake and fantasize themselves performing solo love songs, all with the same guy, Hiro (Akira Takarada), as the object of their affections. As in the previous film, ROMANCE MUSUME, there are a good number of American songs, hits of the time, performed either entirely in English or partly in English and partly in Japanese. These songs are the highlights of the film, for me at least. Walking down a country road, Chiemi joins four male bicyclists in the Calypso-style "Marianne," from a hit by Terry Gilkyson and the Easy Riders in early 1957. Rehearsing at home, Izumi sings "Cindy, Oh Cindy," originally performed by Eddie Fisher in 1956. In her fantasy number, Chiemi sings Jo Stafford's "On London Bridge," also from 1956, on a stylized "London" stage set. All these are partly performed in Japanese and partly in English. But then, in her fantasy number, Izumi sings "Be-Bop-A-Lula," a rockabilly song first recorded in 1956 by Gene Vincent and His Blue Caps, entirely in English on a studio set with a full complement of backup dancers in American-style teen outfits. As with the previous film, Hibari sings only in Japanese, including her fantasy number, a Madame Butterfly-themed song about "Cio-Cio San" in two costumes, period western dress from the 19th century and full Japanese kimono.

The girls perform together as a trio in a pre-credits number on a stylized kitchen stage-set where they seem to be singing about domestic chores and hold up plates they've been washing, finally throwing them to the floor at the end of the song. In the final sequence, the girls go water skiing on a lake and sing the title song, with solo sections for each of them and a finale where they all sing together, while water skiing side-by-side with their boyfriends operating the motorboats they're attached to. Long shots of stunt doubles in the boats and on the skis are supplemented with close shots in a studio against a nondescript background that gives no indication of where they are. This echoes the final songs in the previous films. At least in JANKEN MUSUME, they sang in front of actual roller coaster background footage. Here and in ROMANCE MUSUME, where they sang while riding bikes, the backgrounds are just a generic blue-sky with no sense of movement.

Since I saw this without subtitles I have only a vague idea of the plot lines that come into play. It all seems to be about the girls finding boyfriends. Initially, they all like the same guy, who basically just drops into their lives. (He is played by the aforementioned Akira Takarada, best known as the romantic lead in the original GOJIRA and numerous subsequent Godzilla films.) The girls frequently mention "James Dean" in the dialogue and I'm guessing they're comparing Akira to him. Eventually, potential mates emerge out of the blue for the other two after Akira sort of makes his choice. There doesn't seem to be a lot of effort involved either, which is odd, considering that this is basically all that happens in the film, as far as I could tell. None of the girls seems to work or go to school. They did both in the previous film. (They all turned 20 the year this film came out.) Only Hibari seems to have an outside activity when, late in the film, she suddenly pops up onstage at a theater to give a traditional dance performance-no singing--while all but one of her friends sit in the audience watching. There had been no scenes of rehearsal, no interaction with a theater manager or director or anything to give us a visual hint this was coming. (Perhaps there was some dialogue along these lines.) I liked the musical numbers that we do get and it's always fun to see these three delightful stars in action even if this is the weakest of the four films featuring them. Would subtitles have helped? Possibly. But the other films were much more compelling, even without them.