Tetsuro Tamba played spymasters, gang bosses and senior samurai for five decades, took every part he was offered and read his lines off cards taped around the set. The odd thing is how alive he looks doing it, never more so than as Tiger Tanaka.
Fi1m perspective
Among the few things that earn the evening in You Only Live Twice (1967) is a man being hospitable. Tetsuro Tamba's Tiger Tanaka, head of the Japanese secret service, has a private underground train and a bath staffed by attendants, and he plays the friendship with Sean Connery's Bond as an amused host putting up with a difficult guest, in no doubt about who owns the house. Connery, heavier than before and plainly bored, says his lines as if reading them off a card held out of frame. Tamba, as it happens, really was reading his off cards taped around the set, and he is the liveliest person on screen. We enjoyed him a good deal more than the picture around him, because he is amused by his guest and the guest is waiting for a car.
He came up in 1951 through a Shintoho new-face contest, went freelance in 1959 and from then on, by his own account, never refused a part. The result is close to three hundred film and television productions across five decades: samurai pictures, yakuza films, disaster epics, horror, art cinema and the occasional international job. The best of it came early and came from Masaki Kobayashi. In Harakiri (1962), which we think close to great, he plays Hikokuro Omodaka; our review keeps its eyes on Tatsuya Nakadai and does not single Tamba out, which is fair, since the film is Nakadai's. He returned to Kobayashi for a segment of Kwaidan (1965) and took a lead in Three Outlaw Samurai (1964), the film to see for the commanding physicality that suited him to period and action roles. Later came Shohei Imamura and Kinji Fukasaku and, at the end, Takashi Miike, for whom he played the grandfather in The Happiness of the Katakuris (2002), the same year he took a supporting part in The Twilight Samurai (2002).
For fifty years he was cast as the same thing: a man you would believe was in charge. Secret service chief, gang boss, detective, samurai of rank. He did not have to do much to establish it, and the cards meant he never looked like a man straining to remember. The cost is equally plain. Because he chose nothing, a good deal of what he made is not worth your evening, and on the evidence of the films we have seen he was not an actor who changed from part to part. He never watched a finished film he was in. Tanaka has a line, "Rule number one—never do anything for yourself when someone else can do it for you", and Tamba is said to have adopted it as his own. It describes his working method rather well.
Start with Harakiri, for the film, and then You Only Live Twice, for him. Beyond those two you are on your own in a filmography of nearly three hundred titles, and so, by his own cheerful admission, was he.
Biography
Tetsurō Tamba (also credited as Tetsuro Tamba) was a Japanese actor whose career spanned five decades. He appeared in nearly 300 film and television productions in both leading and supporting roles. Born Shōzaburō Tanba on 17 July 1922 in Tokyo, he died on 24 September 2006 in Tokyo.
Before acting, Tamba worked as an interpreter for the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers and graduated from Chuo University in 1948. He joined Shintoho and made his screen debut in the early 1950s. He is known for roles including Hikokuro Omodaka in Harakiri (1962), Tiger Tanaka in You Only Live Twice (1967), and the Cat King (voice) in The Cat Returns (2002). He also appeared in Kwaidan (1965), The Twilight Samurai (2002) and films by directors including Masaki Kobayashi and Takashi Miike. Tamba won the Japan Academy Prize for Best Supporting Actor in 1981. His son Yoshitaka Tamba is also an actor.
