Post by King Charles’s Butterfly on Sept 25, 2015 16:22:36 GMT -5
*Note: I’m also avoiding or obscuring big spoilers here, but this isn’t a detail-free review; I’m also jumping around a bit and reviewing in a more thematic than chronological manner. I’ve also updated the review with my own screencaps and some mild revisions.
Le nom & la chose
In a story familiar to many television shows of the 1960s and 70s, Lupin III was not much of a success in its initial timeslot but gained a loyal following in syndication. This sparked a second series and, along with it, a first animated movie (there was also a live-action Lupin film earlier in the seventies, but it was quickly—and, I’ve read, justifiably—forgotten). This movie was simply Lupin III. However, both to contrast it with the Lupin III television series, the later Lupin films, and the character himself, it’s gained a number of extra monikers. The least-liked is Lupin vs. the Clones (early and partial spoiler there), which is the dominant title in Japan (much to Japanese Lupin fans’ chagrin). The first English dub was named The Mystery of Mamo, a later dub distinguished itself by calling itself The Secret of Mamo, and the DVD version I acquired for this review has reverted to The Mystery of Mamo. The DVD has a good transfer, every English dub as an option, good subtitles for those of us who prefer to hear the original voices, and textual annotations, an essay, and a (translated) reproduction of the program from the film’s premier, which were all invaluable in writing this review.
But back to the original title: Lupin III. Even if it’s only called that because there weren’t any other (animated) Lupin III features at the time, the title still has a sort of definitiveness to it. The promotional program promotes it as a direct outgrowth of the original Lupin III (likewise, no extra titles) series and highlights the continuity of staff: Yoshiwara Sōji, the director, was the storyboardist of the series' first episode.
Yet stylistically there’s not much connecting The Mystery of Mamo to the original Lupin TV series. Look at Lupin—he’s bow-legged, broad-shouldered, altogether pretty grotesque. “We can’t all be Alain Delon,” he whines at one point. Stylistically it actually hearkens more to the original Lupin pilot film than it does to the series, bringing it closer to the comics than the show. The promotional program makes clear the director’s and actors’ intent with the film: this is Lupin as he was always meant to be, free of on-screen censorship and with enough time and energy to make something that lived up to their expectations of a Lupin film based on the original comics. It’s Lupin III without modifiers and without modification, and in that it stands alone in filmed Lupin media.
Look & Structure
How to make Lupin big? The obvious way is to raise the stakes. Heists are a small part of The Mystery of Mamo—there’s the nested mystery of Mamo (who, through Fujiko, has hired Lupin to perform the only real heist of the film, accomplished early), and Mamo’s a person—or rather being—so powerful that he threatens the whole world. Thus we get a globe-trotting adventure, wealth beyond anything Lupin’s seen before, the promise of immortality, Jigen being brought in by the US military as a possible intelligence asset, and the threat of nuclear armageddon. It’s quite a step up from stealing the odd jewel.
But how to structure a larger story? The short-story format of comics (my knowledge of them remains second-hand, but my understanding is that they did not rise to graphic novel-scaled narratives) adapts well to television, but a sustained film plot is another matter. The mystery of Mamo’s actual identity and the extent and nature of his power remains a question until near the end; the story does not build in the typical three-act narrative mold. I wouldn’t quite call it episodic, either—paneled seems the right word, with fairly discrete set pieces and story moments linking together but forming a continuous story. The Mystery of Mamo has a sustained energy like a comic book. It’s also a bit improbably at times, but the film’s energetic enough to make the audience excuse such logical leaps as a desert in the Pays de la Loire. Appropriately given Lupin’s origin as a cheeky comic book rejoinder to Bond, it also resembles a Bond film, with mini-arcs revolving around action sequences and a faux-climax before the final one like in Casino Royale or From Russia with Love.
Comic book pacing gets paired with comic book design. The character designs revert to semi-geometric comic caricatures (rectangular Lupin with his angular-legged run, a series of arcs for Jigen, Goemon, and Fujiko), and spatially The Mystery of Mamo is a uniquely flat film. The introduction mimics a typewriter hitting paper, putting the audience literally on the page. The next takes a bit of time to reveal itself—we just get vertical white lines against a black background, compositionally doing Ellsworth Kelly proud. It eventually turns out these are steps (rise dark, run illuminated). It’s a uniquely inky effect, and indeed The Mystery of Mamo feels drawn. Shade is typically represented by hatching, and close to the climax Mamo’s set on fire—the unrealistic and immaterial look of Mamo makes him all the more frightening in comparison to the better-sketched Fujiko and detailed rendering of the background.
The first Lupin III series, both Masaaki Ōsumi and Miyazaki & Takahata sought to bring Lupin into a real-seeming world, even as it retained some of the improbable tech, physics, and disguises. The Mystery of Mamo does not share that aim. The finely rendered automobiles here become somewhat more blobbish (the police DS’s suffer particularly badly, coming across more as wheeled bananas than masterpieces of twentieth century design); the car chase is okay but not the highlight similar chases were in the series (and later in The Castle of Cagliostro). Scale’s not a concern—a “semi” is sized larger than a Caterpillar 797 and it negotiates a curvy cliffside expressway with ease (and crushes those unfortunate DS’s underfoot). Sometimes this inattention to detail pays off in whimsical ways, too, such as when Lupin’s retractable glider has an incongruous umbrella’s handle at the end.
Attention is lavished, though, on the opulent technological backgrounds of Mamo’s lairs and biotechnical equipment. We get a preview of this in the Bondian opening scene, which frames the development of a fertilized egg with geometric channels. Mamo’s interiors alternate between immaculately smooth and immaculately detailed.
What’s most unique about Mamo, though, is its use of reproduction and collage (it was previously used in “Keep an Eye on the Beauty Contest,” also to reproduce fine art). Mamo is a collector (or maker?) of great art around the world, and this is put directly on screen. Lupin scampering up-and-down Escherian staircases is fun but a predictable way to go. More impressive is his chase through de Chirico’s Mystery & Melancholy of a Street, followed by a scamp through Dali and a deep cut through a Delvaux (I think—it is a deep cut). It’s little more than a reference joke after the excellent de Chirico gag, but the rest of the artwork has real weight. There’s real the Laocoön and Botticelli’s Primavera destroyed, and we get some heavy (if effective) symbolism with Michelangelo’s Creation of Man behind Mamo’s throne and The Expulsion from Paradise behind Lupin and Fujiko (and it’s worth noting Fujiko’s first appearance in the film is nude in a garden).
Mamo quickly straps Lupin onto a thick crucifix, restraining him to probe his unconscious, bringing up another advantage to the film’s flat aesthetic: the use of collage. We get a collage of Lupin’s psyche, and it’s mostly breasts cut out of lads’ mags. Gentilhomme-cambrioleur indeed.
Masculin Féminin
The peek into Lupin’s subconscious is a literal Freud’s definition of a joke: conscious expression of subconscious urges. It’s also a good characterization of Lupin’s role in the film. We’re most familiar with Lupin as a more-or-less dashing rogue, less familiar with him just as a rogue. Lupin’s plenty clever in The Mystery of Mamo, but not really heroic until the end. Lupin started out as a response to Bond, and here he almost plays as spoof. He may be billed as the world’s greatest thief, but watching The Mystery of Mamo it’s hard not to conclude that’s at least half-due to his skill in running away. Lupin’s seldom in control of situations—his main skill is figuring out how to dodge and narrowly escape. He’s no he-man, and no lover either. He’s the protagonist, but also the butt of most of the jokes.
The morally diciest scene bit of humor in the film plays with this. Lupin, frustrated at Fujiko’s advances breaks down her door and tries to leap into Fujiko’s bed. He immediately collapses, though, Fujiko having drugged him earlier. The joke of Lupin even being an incompetent rapist is dated and offensive, but at least it’s short and over quickly (and really feels out of place—it’s even lit/colored a bit differently—and is a less endearing reminder of The Mystery of Mamo’s age).
Despite the scene, this is oddly the only Lupin film where Fujiko is the female lead——she hires Lupin for the film’s opening heist and was hired by Mamo—for much of the film she’s his main interlocutor, and proves a real equal to Lupin until close to the end. A Fujiko of equal or near-equal skill to Lupin is always a good sign, and although her motivation can be somewhat inconsistent (and the film briefly relies on hypnosis to paralyze her judgment at the end) I’m always glad when we get to see bad Fujiko—she’s duplicitous, emotional, and vain, but as usually as clever as Lupin and often more in control of herself and her situation than Lupin, holding his life in her hands at multiple points in the film. She’s no paragon but bad Fujiko’s a lot more fun.
It’s unfortunate that she consistently gets sidelined as just part of the gang in favor of leading ladies who are either less a match for Lupin or more wholesome (either typically gets put under the rubric of “cuter”). It’s not hard to read into between the lines of the original promo to see how excited everyone involved was to be able to be unabashedly sexual (Fujiko spends much of the film either nude or demonstrating Theiss’s Titillation Theory), and the entire plot is powered by lust—Lupin’s lust for Fujiko might be the main reason he tries to solve the titular mystery of Mamo, and Mamo’s infatuation with Fujiko is one of his primary motivations. The tension between their competing affections—Lupin’s frankly physical and hormonal, whereas Mamo’s more aesthetic. And ultimately it’s Fujiko’s role to choose. She’s really a co-protagonist of The Mystery of Mamo, not the point-of-view character but in many ways more central to the story, with Lupin just along with the ride. Even with the dicey humor The Mystery of Mamo does better than most of its contemporaries.
Lupin’s vulgarity even plays a role in the finale—he doesn’t entertain the same high notions Mamo does, and can’t be fooled by them. Lupin’s a skeptic, which allows him to puncture Mamo’s highbrow demeanor and reveal the final mystery. And while there’s a lot of fun made at Lupin’s expense, it’s that earthy, grounded demeanor that wins the day. Crudity, whatever its disadvantages, is at least straightforward.
Time & Politics
In some respects, The Mystery of Mamo is very much a film of the late seventies—it’s hard not to watch the opening sequence and not think of the first test-tube baby. Despite the overall skeptical stance, tin keeping with the period’s interest in pseudoscience we get hints of the occult, both from the west (we see Lupin stealing the philosopher’s stone) and East (Qin Shihuang’s immortality elixirs get ample mention). The score is resolutely of the 1970s, and very good, too—while I wouldn’t trade the unique hippie Western music of the original series for anything, Ōno Yūji’s score fits the film’s atmosphere perfectly, being half-Bond score, half-Moroder.
In many ways, though, The Mystery of Mamo remains a holdover from earlier in the seventies or even the late sixties, and not in a bad way, either. The politics are straightforwardly anti-nuclear, anti-militant and anti-American, even featuring a sardonic Kissinger stand-in. Although Miyazaki is often credited with giving Lupin his personal conscience, his political stance has always been fairly left wing, or at least anti-authoritarian. Also reminiscent of the sixties are the more space-y elements—we’re still very much in the pre-Star Wars Laser Age (as Keith Phipps termed it), and The Mystery of Mamo pays homage to 2001 in its final scenes. Even in a finale filled with explosions, the coup de grâce is silent in the vacuum.
The explosive ending hearkens back to the ending of the Yoshiwara-storyboarded first episode of Lupin III, “Is Lupin Burning?!” One of the harder-edged installments of the original (see Lupin’s menacing grin), it ends in a giant, if somewhat pointless series of explosions. The explosions at the end of The Mystery of Mamo have more purpose, but the overkill of firepower has the same aim—to show Lupin’s dangerous, unpredictable, and irreverent. It’s almost a countercultural statement. Combined with the mixing of high culture and low humor, the frank (and sometimes dated) sexuality, and overall energy of the film make it seem a bit like something out of 1968. Lupin’s almost a Situationist Homo ludens, a man at play without being restricted by the systems around him.
Recommended?
At least among English-speaking audiences, the reputation of The Mystery of Mamo is mostly poor. It’s understandable as to why—the main entropôts to Lupin for Anglophone viewers were The Castle of Cagliostro, which features a very different iteration of Lupin, and the second Lupin III television show, which consists mostly of straightforward heist-adventures. When I mentioned I was reviewing the first Lupin series in AVC comments someone responded enthusiastically, but added the caveat that he preferred the second, more even series.
Outside of a couple of episodes (“Wings of Death—Albatross” and the series finale, “Farewell My Beloved Lupin,” to be reviewed post-Cagliostro) I have no interest in reviewing or even watching the second series, and the evenness is a big part of the reason why. The original Lupin show was the product of three auteurs (Masaaki Ōsumi and then the pair of Miyazaki Hayao and Takahata Isao) in the original sense of the word—directors working on a corporate product who nonetheless put their own stamp on their product, and seeing the evolution of the character within and across their tenures was a big part of what made the show interesting to me, even when their attempts to bring Lupin to the small screen weren’t total successes.
The Mystery of Mamo is an evolutionary holdover, closer to the comics even as the screen Lupin continues to evolve. The difference from other Lupins, even on the basic aesthetic level, is a big part of the draw, even if that means you’ll be laughing more at Lupin (as is the film’s intent) than with him. It’s an attempt to bring to life a character—the original, comic-book Lupin—that has mostly been lost to Anglophone audiences, and I think Yoshiwara showed considerable skill in making the film’s less-than-savory cast of characters likable and entertaining (it’s the favorite film of the characters’ creator, Monkey Punch). You can also feel the enthusiasm on the screen—the actors’ delight in being able to express a wider range of emotions, the animators’ love of art history, the writers’ desire to go big.
The Mystery of Mamo is overstuffed with material and potential meanings—in a sense it just barely scrapes by on everyone’s energy. It’s a bit like a Lupin heist—perhaps more complicated than it needs to be, but very smart and only getting away with it by the skin of their teeth. What better way to bring Lupin the big screen?
Stray Observations
• Much as the title is contentions, so is the spelling of “Mamo,” which is made worse by the fact that the character was inspired by (though completely distinct from) a character from the comics and original show of the same name. I personally like the quasi-French Meraux—it comes closest to my ears how the name sounds in Japanese—but stuck with Mamo for simplicity here.
• We’re also introduced to the issue of the different Lupin jackets here. The show was produced during the era of the second, “Red Jacket” show (and the opening theme is a variant on its theme song), but this is supposed to be a follow-up to the original series’ “Green Jacket” Lupin. However, the Lupin here bears little resemblance to the character the Green Jacket Lupin turned into by the end of Miyazaki & Takahata’s tenure, and reaches back to the original pilot film where Lupin likewise wore a Red Jacket. I find it’s easiest to avoid the jacket classification altogether.
• Lupin’s Fiat, a Miyazaki invention, isn’t here, though Lupin’s original ride (the Mercedes SSK) is. Lupin’s Fiat in the series was originally Fujiko’s, and here Lupin does steal Fujiko’s ride, a Mini, giving us our small-car chase in a different iconic small European car.
• During the chase Lupin and Jigen idly wonder about Zenigata’s blood type. Okay.
Next Week
The Castle of Cagliostro
Le nom & la chose
In a story familiar to many television shows of the 1960s and 70s, Lupin III was not much of a success in its initial timeslot but gained a loyal following in syndication. This sparked a second series and, along with it, a first animated movie (there was also a live-action Lupin film earlier in the seventies, but it was quickly—and, I’ve read, justifiably—forgotten). This movie was simply Lupin III. However, both to contrast it with the Lupin III television series, the later Lupin films, and the character himself, it’s gained a number of extra monikers. The least-liked is Lupin vs. the Clones (early and partial spoiler there), which is the dominant title in Japan (much to Japanese Lupin fans’ chagrin). The first English dub was named The Mystery of Mamo, a later dub distinguished itself by calling itself The Secret of Mamo, and the DVD version I acquired for this review has reverted to The Mystery of Mamo. The DVD has a good transfer, every English dub as an option, good subtitles for those of us who prefer to hear the original voices, and textual annotations, an essay, and a (translated) reproduction of the program from the film’s premier, which were all invaluable in writing this review.
But back to the original title: Lupin III. Even if it’s only called that because there weren’t any other (animated) Lupin III features at the time, the title still has a sort of definitiveness to it. The promotional program promotes it as a direct outgrowth of the original Lupin III (likewise, no extra titles) series and highlights the continuity of staff: Yoshiwara Sōji, the director, was the storyboardist of the series' first episode.
Yet stylistically there’s not much connecting The Mystery of Mamo to the original Lupin TV series. Look at Lupin—he’s bow-legged, broad-shouldered, altogether pretty grotesque. “We can’t all be Alain Delon,” he whines at one point. Stylistically it actually hearkens more to the original Lupin pilot film than it does to the series, bringing it closer to the comics than the show. The promotional program makes clear the director’s and actors’ intent with the film: this is Lupin as he was always meant to be, free of on-screen censorship and with enough time and energy to make something that lived up to their expectations of a Lupin film based on the original comics. It’s Lupin III without modifiers and without modification, and in that it stands alone in filmed Lupin media.
Look & Structure
How to make Lupin big? The obvious way is to raise the stakes. Heists are a small part of The Mystery of Mamo—there’s the nested mystery of Mamo (who, through Fujiko, has hired Lupin to perform the only real heist of the film, accomplished early), and Mamo’s a person—or rather being—so powerful that he threatens the whole world. Thus we get a globe-trotting adventure, wealth beyond anything Lupin’s seen before, the promise of immortality, Jigen being brought in by the US military as a possible intelligence asset, and the threat of nuclear armageddon. It’s quite a step up from stealing the odd jewel.
But how to structure a larger story? The short-story format of comics (my knowledge of them remains second-hand, but my understanding is that they did not rise to graphic novel-scaled narratives) adapts well to television, but a sustained film plot is another matter. The mystery of Mamo’s actual identity and the extent and nature of his power remains a question until near the end; the story does not build in the typical three-act narrative mold. I wouldn’t quite call it episodic, either—paneled seems the right word, with fairly discrete set pieces and story moments linking together but forming a continuous story. The Mystery of Mamo has a sustained energy like a comic book. It’s also a bit improbably at times, but the film’s energetic enough to make the audience excuse such logical leaps as a desert in the Pays de la Loire. Appropriately given Lupin’s origin as a cheeky comic book rejoinder to Bond, it also resembles a Bond film, with mini-arcs revolving around action sequences and a faux-climax before the final one like in Casino Royale or From Russia with Love.
Comic book pacing gets paired with comic book design. The character designs revert to semi-geometric comic caricatures (rectangular Lupin with his angular-legged run, a series of arcs for Jigen, Goemon, and Fujiko), and spatially The Mystery of Mamo is a uniquely flat film. The introduction mimics a typewriter hitting paper, putting the audience literally on the page. The next takes a bit of time to reveal itself—we just get vertical white lines against a black background, compositionally doing Ellsworth Kelly proud. It eventually turns out these are steps (rise dark, run illuminated). It’s a uniquely inky effect, and indeed The Mystery of Mamo feels drawn. Shade is typically represented by hatching, and close to the climax Mamo’s set on fire—the unrealistic and immaterial look of Mamo makes him all the more frightening in comparison to the better-sketched Fujiko and detailed rendering of the background.
The first Lupin III series, both Masaaki Ōsumi and Miyazaki & Takahata sought to bring Lupin into a real-seeming world, even as it retained some of the improbable tech, physics, and disguises. The Mystery of Mamo does not share that aim. The finely rendered automobiles here become somewhat more blobbish (the police DS’s suffer particularly badly, coming across more as wheeled bananas than masterpieces of twentieth century design); the car chase is okay but not the highlight similar chases were in the series (and later in The Castle of Cagliostro). Scale’s not a concern—a “semi” is sized larger than a Caterpillar 797 and it negotiates a curvy cliffside expressway with ease (and crushes those unfortunate DS’s underfoot). Sometimes this inattention to detail pays off in whimsical ways, too, such as when Lupin’s retractable glider has an incongruous umbrella’s handle at the end.
Attention is lavished, though, on the opulent technological backgrounds of Mamo’s lairs and biotechnical equipment. We get a preview of this in the Bondian opening scene, which frames the development of a fertilized egg with geometric channels. Mamo’s interiors alternate between immaculately smooth and immaculately detailed.
What’s most unique about Mamo, though, is its use of reproduction and collage (it was previously used in “Keep an Eye on the Beauty Contest,” also to reproduce fine art). Mamo is a collector (or maker?) of great art around the world, and this is put directly on screen. Lupin scampering up-and-down Escherian staircases is fun but a predictable way to go. More impressive is his chase through de Chirico’s Mystery & Melancholy of a Street, followed by a scamp through Dali and a deep cut through a Delvaux (I think—it is a deep cut). It’s little more than a reference joke after the excellent de Chirico gag, but the rest of the artwork has real weight. There’s real the Laocoön and Botticelli’s Primavera destroyed, and we get some heavy (if effective) symbolism with Michelangelo’s Creation of Man behind Mamo’s throne and The Expulsion from Paradise behind Lupin and Fujiko (and it’s worth noting Fujiko’s first appearance in the film is nude in a garden).
Mamo quickly straps Lupin onto a thick crucifix, restraining him to probe his unconscious, bringing up another advantage to the film’s flat aesthetic: the use of collage. We get a collage of Lupin’s psyche, and it’s mostly breasts cut out of lads’ mags. Gentilhomme-cambrioleur indeed.
Masculin Féminin
The peek into Lupin’s subconscious is a literal Freud’s definition of a joke: conscious expression of subconscious urges. It’s also a good characterization of Lupin’s role in the film. We’re most familiar with Lupin as a more-or-less dashing rogue, less familiar with him just as a rogue. Lupin’s plenty clever in The Mystery of Mamo, but not really heroic until the end. Lupin started out as a response to Bond, and here he almost plays as spoof. He may be billed as the world’s greatest thief, but watching The Mystery of Mamo it’s hard not to conclude that’s at least half-due to his skill in running away. Lupin’s seldom in control of situations—his main skill is figuring out how to dodge and narrowly escape. He’s no he-man, and no lover either. He’s the protagonist, but also the butt of most of the jokes.
The morally diciest scene bit of humor in the film plays with this. Lupin, frustrated at Fujiko’s advances breaks down her door and tries to leap into Fujiko’s bed. He immediately collapses, though, Fujiko having drugged him earlier. The joke of Lupin even being an incompetent rapist is dated and offensive, but at least it’s short and over quickly (and really feels out of place—it’s even lit/colored a bit differently—and is a less endearing reminder of The Mystery of Mamo’s age).
Despite the scene, this is oddly the only Lupin film where Fujiko is the female lead——she hires Lupin for the film’s opening heist and was hired by Mamo—for much of the film she’s his main interlocutor, and proves a real equal to Lupin until close to the end. A Fujiko of equal or near-equal skill to Lupin is always a good sign, and although her motivation can be somewhat inconsistent (and the film briefly relies on hypnosis to paralyze her judgment at the end) I’m always glad when we get to see bad Fujiko—she’s duplicitous, emotional, and vain, but as usually as clever as Lupin and often more in control of herself and her situation than Lupin, holding his life in her hands at multiple points in the film. She’s no paragon but bad Fujiko’s a lot more fun.
It’s unfortunate that she consistently gets sidelined as just part of the gang in favor of leading ladies who are either less a match for Lupin or more wholesome (either typically gets put under the rubric of “cuter”). It’s not hard to read into between the lines of the original promo to see how excited everyone involved was to be able to be unabashedly sexual (Fujiko spends much of the film either nude or demonstrating Theiss’s Titillation Theory), and the entire plot is powered by lust—Lupin’s lust for Fujiko might be the main reason he tries to solve the titular mystery of Mamo, and Mamo’s infatuation with Fujiko is one of his primary motivations. The tension between their competing affections—Lupin’s frankly physical and hormonal, whereas Mamo’s more aesthetic. And ultimately it’s Fujiko’s role to choose. She’s really a co-protagonist of The Mystery of Mamo, not the point-of-view character but in many ways more central to the story, with Lupin just along with the ride. Even with the dicey humor The Mystery of Mamo does better than most of its contemporaries.
Lupin’s vulgarity even plays a role in the finale—he doesn’t entertain the same high notions Mamo does, and can’t be fooled by them. Lupin’s a skeptic, which allows him to puncture Mamo’s highbrow demeanor and reveal the final mystery. And while there’s a lot of fun made at Lupin’s expense, it’s that earthy, grounded demeanor that wins the day. Crudity, whatever its disadvantages, is at least straightforward.
Time & Politics
In some respects, The Mystery of Mamo is very much a film of the late seventies—it’s hard not to watch the opening sequence and not think of the first test-tube baby. Despite the overall skeptical stance, tin keeping with the period’s interest in pseudoscience we get hints of the occult, both from the west (we see Lupin stealing the philosopher’s stone) and East (Qin Shihuang’s immortality elixirs get ample mention). The score is resolutely of the 1970s, and very good, too—while I wouldn’t trade the unique hippie Western music of the original series for anything, Ōno Yūji’s score fits the film’s atmosphere perfectly, being half-Bond score, half-Moroder.
In many ways, though, The Mystery of Mamo remains a holdover from earlier in the seventies or even the late sixties, and not in a bad way, either. The politics are straightforwardly anti-nuclear, anti-militant and anti-American, even featuring a sardonic Kissinger stand-in. Although Miyazaki is often credited with giving Lupin his personal conscience, his political stance has always been fairly left wing, or at least anti-authoritarian. Also reminiscent of the sixties are the more space-y elements—we’re still very much in the pre-Star Wars Laser Age (as Keith Phipps termed it), and The Mystery of Mamo pays homage to 2001 in its final scenes. Even in a finale filled with explosions, the coup de grâce is silent in the vacuum.
The explosive ending hearkens back to the ending of the Yoshiwara-storyboarded first episode of Lupin III, “Is Lupin Burning?!” One of the harder-edged installments of the original (see Lupin’s menacing grin), it ends in a giant, if somewhat pointless series of explosions. The explosions at the end of The Mystery of Mamo have more purpose, but the overkill of firepower has the same aim—to show Lupin’s dangerous, unpredictable, and irreverent. It’s almost a countercultural statement. Combined with the mixing of high culture and low humor, the frank (and sometimes dated) sexuality, and overall energy of the film make it seem a bit like something out of 1968. Lupin’s almost a Situationist Homo ludens, a man at play without being restricted by the systems around him.
Recommended?
At least among English-speaking audiences, the reputation of The Mystery of Mamo is mostly poor. It’s understandable as to why—the main entropôts to Lupin for Anglophone viewers were The Castle of Cagliostro, which features a very different iteration of Lupin, and the second Lupin III television show, which consists mostly of straightforward heist-adventures. When I mentioned I was reviewing the first Lupin series in AVC comments someone responded enthusiastically, but added the caveat that he preferred the second, more even series.
Outside of a couple of episodes (“Wings of Death—Albatross” and the series finale, “Farewell My Beloved Lupin,” to be reviewed post-Cagliostro) I have no interest in reviewing or even watching the second series, and the evenness is a big part of the reason why. The original Lupin show was the product of three auteurs (Masaaki Ōsumi and then the pair of Miyazaki Hayao and Takahata Isao) in the original sense of the word—directors working on a corporate product who nonetheless put their own stamp on their product, and seeing the evolution of the character within and across their tenures was a big part of what made the show interesting to me, even when their attempts to bring Lupin to the small screen weren’t total successes.
The Mystery of Mamo is an evolutionary holdover, closer to the comics even as the screen Lupin continues to evolve. The difference from other Lupins, even on the basic aesthetic level, is a big part of the draw, even if that means you’ll be laughing more at Lupin (as is the film’s intent) than with him. It’s an attempt to bring to life a character—the original, comic-book Lupin—that has mostly been lost to Anglophone audiences, and I think Yoshiwara showed considerable skill in making the film’s less-than-savory cast of characters likable and entertaining (it’s the favorite film of the characters’ creator, Monkey Punch). You can also feel the enthusiasm on the screen—the actors’ delight in being able to express a wider range of emotions, the animators’ love of art history, the writers’ desire to go big.
The Mystery of Mamo is overstuffed with material and potential meanings—in a sense it just barely scrapes by on everyone’s energy. It’s a bit like a Lupin heist—perhaps more complicated than it needs to be, but very smart and only getting away with it by the skin of their teeth. What better way to bring Lupin the big screen?
Stray Observations
• Much as the title is contentions, so is the spelling of “Mamo,” which is made worse by the fact that the character was inspired by (though completely distinct from) a character from the comics and original show of the same name. I personally like the quasi-French Meraux—it comes closest to my ears how the name sounds in Japanese—but stuck with Mamo for simplicity here.
• We’re also introduced to the issue of the different Lupin jackets here. The show was produced during the era of the second, “Red Jacket” show (and the opening theme is a variant on its theme song), but this is supposed to be a follow-up to the original series’ “Green Jacket” Lupin. However, the Lupin here bears little resemblance to the character the Green Jacket Lupin turned into by the end of Miyazaki & Takahata’s tenure, and reaches back to the original pilot film where Lupin likewise wore a Red Jacket. I find it’s easiest to avoid the jacket classification altogether.
• Lupin’s Fiat, a Miyazaki invention, isn’t here, though Lupin’s original ride (the Mercedes SSK) is. Lupin’s Fiat in the series was originally Fujiko’s, and here Lupin does steal Fujiko’s ride, a Mini, giving us our small-car chase in a different iconic small European car.
• During the chase Lupin and Jigen idly wonder about Zenigata’s blood type. Okay.
Next Week
The Castle of Cagliostro
