Charles Bronson In Mandom

As mentioned before, things have been a little chaotic for the staff at Showa OK! over the past couple of months, so please excuse our lack of updates to the site. We hope you've been following our posts on Twitter and Facebook and enjoying the content we've been sharing there. However, as we prepare for our move east, we'd like to provide you with a little something in the meantime to whet your surely insatiable appetite for all things Shōwa.

A few months ago we covered director Nobuhiko Ōbayashi's spectacularly odd film House (ハウス, Hausu), which, at the time, was touring theaters across the country. It has since been announced that the film will be released in October by The Criterion Collection on both Blu-Ray and DVD. In our post we had mentioned that Ōbayashi had honed his skills producing television commercials in the 70s, perhaps the most memorable of which was a campaign for men's care line Mandom featuring fearless action star Charles Bronson.

First aired in 1970, the ads showed Bronson performing a host of "manly" tasks, set to the music of Jerry Wallace's single of the same year, "The Lovers Of The World", which was released only in Japan — apparently as a commercial tie-in — under the title "Otoko No Sekai" (男の世界).

Below is a collection of those curious commercials, originally found via the website C.H.U.D. and graciously posted to YouTube by user rinrinsky. So sit back, kick off your boots, douse yourself in cologne and enjoy the rustic world of Mandom.

House (1977)

Described by one reviewer as "an episode of Scooby Doo as directed by Dario Argento", House (ハウス, Hausu) is the first feature film from prolific director and screenwriter Nobuhiko Ōbayashi (大林宣彦). During the 60s, Ōbayashi spent his years following university producing short experimental films, while the next decade saw him directing commercials for television. He was able to use his expertise in these two seemingly divergent fields to produce a wholly engrossing, terrifyingly comic debut in this phantasmagorical coming-of-age nightmare.

According to Ōbayashi, production giant Toho Films was "tired of losing money on completely comprehensible films" and encouraged the director to "produce his own completely incomprehensible script". The result: a plethora of poltergeist phenomena and murderous mayhem; a film "too absurd to be genuinely terrifying, yet too nightmarish to be merely comic".



Fortunately, we here in San Francisco have the opportunity to experience the gut-busting, mind-blowing macabre of House on the big screen during an upcoming showing at the Castro Theater. North American distributor Janus Films is presenting the film in theaters across the country in preparation for its eventual DVD release, possibly slated for later this year. Additional show times and dates can be found by visiting the film's site.

House plays at the Castro Theater on Saturday, April 17th at 7:30 and 9:45p. For more information, click here.