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Shooting on location in China, Tomotaka Tasaka presents a low-key but stirring account of the day-to-day travails and camaraderie of Japanese soldiers, swapping individual heroics for devotion to the group spirit. Tasaka’s typically clear-eyed treatment, which includes an extraordinary battle scene and an assault on a farmhouse, was so documentary-like in its feel for detail that when Americans later captured a print of the film, it was edited into a training reel for U.S. troops. Tasaka’s Mud and Soldiers (Tsuchi to Heitai, Nikkatsu, 1939) is very loosely based on Hino’s novel dealing with the first days of the China Incident. Since the original “novel“ had no real plot to speak of, Tasaka draws on its psychological milieu, preaching a doctrine of resignation to the impersonal “rhythm“ of events. One curious quality about Mud and Soldiers is the way that it avoids explicit bloodshed. A soldier gets shot in the thigh, but we do not see the actual act. As someone who lusts for this type of cinematic act, I was a little disappointed. Soldiers fire upon enemies, but we see very few of them. Presumably, because this was made in 1939, there was a shortage on extras and squibs. There was surely no shortage on propaganda. The film does, after all, rely on newsreel footage. There is a banal and repetitive quality to the soldiers’ banter. And this pabulum stretches into the soldiers’ actions. Director Tomotaka Tasaka is certainly committed to showing how mind-numbingly dull war can be.
