Oh Wonderful Utamaro

Oh Wonderful Utamaro (Shikijo Toruko Nikki) (1974).

Director Kazuhiko Yamaguchi was best known for martial arts (Karate Bull Fighter) and Pinky Violence (Delinquent Girl Boss) films but he also directed a couple of erotic films in the mid 70s. This one is a mildly amusing sex comedy mainly remembered for starring American actress Sharon Kelly aka Colleen Brennan.

Kelly plays an American nymphomaniac who literally falls off the sky (with a parachute). She’s supposed to be picked up by a local yakuza gang, but “Porno Broker” Tatsuo Umemiya and his pal Gajiro Sato gets to her first. Umemiya then makes her work in his Turkish bath, which she doesn’t mind at all. In fact, she does eight men on her first night and comes asking for more. Poor Umemiya has trouble “getting it up” (or to be more precise, it usually gets up on the wrong moment, e.g. when bad guys are trying to kill him) and can’t help.

Kelly is obviously the main attraction here, whether you mean it literally or as a cinematic curiosity. It was not entirely rare to see foreign stars in Japanese sexploitation films in the 70’s though. Toei also imported Sandra Julien (Modern Porno Tale, 1971; Tokugawa Sex Ban, 1972) from France, Christina Lindberg (Sex and Fury, 1973; Journey to Japan, 1973) from Sweden, and even Harry Reems (Harry and the Geisha Girl, 1978) from USA. Nikkatsu even commissioned some Roman Porno films to be shot in Sweden by Japanese filmmakers utilizing fully Swedish casts.

Oh Wonderful Utamaro was Kelly’s only Japanese film. She was already a familiar face for Japanese audiences thanks to Teenage Bride (1970), A Scream in the Streets (1973) and The Dirty Mind of Young Sally (1973), which had been released in Japan in 1973-1974. She had also been covered in TV variety show called 11 PM quite a few times.

The film itself is a pretty ridiculous affair with hippies, yakuzas, lots of (boring) sex, silly comedy, Kelly, and a bit of extremely mediocre action at the end. It’s somewhat less fun than it sounds like. The best supporting character is an English speaking hippie dad taking care of a baby and having sex (at the same time) with Pinky Violence co-star Harumi Tajima who was probably more famous for her large breasts than her acting skills. Speaking of English, Kelly reads her lines in her native tongue with few sentences of (understandable) Japanese here and there. The rest of the cast speaks Japanese with a few sentences of (understandable) English here and there. Nice.

The film is a fun curiosity, but don’t kill yourself if you never get to see it.

I saw the film at a Kazuhiko Yamaguchi retrospective in Tokyo in 2015. The screening was preceded by a video greeting from Kelly. She recalled the ridiculous costumes, the language barrier thanks to which she had no idea who she was supposed to be shooting at when they put a machine gun in her hands, and the fact that she found director Yamaguchi more attractive than her co-star Umemiya. Umemiya famously disagreed and claimed in an old interview that he and Kelly got along so well they were having real sex in the film. The claim most likely has no base in reality.