Frank Nagai -- Nishi-Ginza Eki Mae（西銀座駅前）

 

Oh, Nishi-Ginza Station (West Ginza Station)? Heck, I know that subway station...not too far away from the main intersection, eh? 

Ahhh, no. Sorry, that wouldn't be correct since there is no station known as Nishi-Ginza Station on the Tokyo Metro. There is a Higashi-Ginza Station（東銀座駅...East Ginza Station） on the Toei Asakusa Line and the Hibiya Line that I've gotten off at, but putting in Nishi-Ginza Station into the search engines will only get you the title of an early film by the late Shohei Imamura（今村昌平）titled "Nishi-Ginza Eki Mae" (In Front of Nishi-Ginza Station) which was released in 1958.

Just from my observation, it seems as if the less-than-one-hour comedy has been given short shrift by about everybody including Imamura himself, according to this review at "Blueprint: Review". There's not even a J-Wiki article about the movie. Only the second movie that he directed, Imamura was apparently trying to go for some variant on "The Seven-Year Itch" (1955) by Billy Wilder and starring Marilyn Monroe.

The interesting thing is that Mood Kayo crooner Frank Nagai（フランク永井）seems to have a mystical role to play in the movie as not only the narrator but also a subway staffer and a lounge singer. Not surprisingly, he sings the titular theme song which is how I found out about the movie in the first place. Written by veterans Takao Saeki（佐伯孝夫）and Tadashi Yoshida（吉田正）, it's a brassy jazz piece with a bit of rockabilly guitar mostly about one fellow's frequent visitations to the club in the Ginza neighbourhood in search of drink and dames. I was a bit struck by that line of "ABC...XYZ" which I thought would have been ideal in a "Sesame Street" tune or something by an aidoru much later in the century.