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Domo Arigato — 3-D Blu-ray

by Glenn Erickson Jan 28, 2025

The 3-D Archive continues its quest to revive our heritage of stereoscopic features with Arch Oboler’s obscure romantic travelogue. That the movie falls short of most of its aims won’t make a difference to connoisseurs of the process. Two Americans in Japan fall in love while seeing the sights, but the real interest is in the back story of the production and its creator, through Oboler biographer Matt Rovner. Plus two 3-D short subjects.


Domo Arigato 3-D
3-D Blu-ray
Bayview Entertainment
1973 / Color / 2:39 widescreen / 91 min. / Street Date January 13, 2025 / Available from Bayview Entertainment / 34.99
Starring: Jason Ledger, Bonnie Sher.
Cinematography: Donald Peterman
Production Manager: John ‘Bud’ Cardos
Film Editor: Robert Angle
Music: Sherry Mills
Executive Producer Louis K. Sher
Produced, Written and Directed by
Arch Oboler

Arch Oboler’s ‘lost’ 3-D movie belongs to a romantic subgenre that almost always succeeds: a young and perhaps innocent couple find each other far away from home. The key is to find appealing actors that can bring such an impromptu romance to life, even without a script. Vincente Minnelli’s  The Clock gave us Robert Walker and Judy Garland, and Richard Linklater’s  Before Trilogy scored with Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke. With attractive actors, access to interesting backgrounds and some visual flexibility, this kind of show often shines. Big stars like Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck  shouldn’t be essential.

Radio legend Arch Oboler made about ten feature films as director, and of the ones we can see, only a couple can be called good. Several seem like radio show ideas that don’t play well as movies.  Strange Holiday is a sloppy reworking of an industrial ‘scare film.’  Bewitched is a laughably inept psychological thriller, and  The Twonky an unfunny comedy that even Hans Conreid can’t redeem.  The Bubble premieres a very good 3-D system, but its story barely holds our attention.

 

Oboler’s two good movies are quite exceptional. His 1951  FIVE is an excellent neorealist-inflected doomsday story, the first post-nuclear apocalypse feature. He predicted a major trend with that show, but his  Bwana Devil was even more prophetic. The self-produced blockbuster singlehandedly ignited the 1950s 3-D craze. The riches it earned gave Oboler the ability to continue dabbling in movie ideas and 3-D tech development for the next 20 years.

1973’s Domo Arigato was supposed to duplicate the success of Bwana Devil, bring back 3-D as a dominant format, and make Oboler rich licensing the use of Space-Vision 3-D, a proprietary stereoscopic system. His 3-D production The Bubble had done poorly enough that Oboler couldn’t find mainstream financing; he eventually found a backer in a producer-distributor who had done well with a shoestring adult movie, The Stewardesses 3-D. But Domo Arigato couldn’t be filmed too cheaply: as described by Robert Furmanek, it was photographed in the summer of 1972 in Japan by three-time Oscar-nominated cinematographer Donald Peterman and depth-supervised by the inventor of Space-Vision 3-D, Robert V. Bernier.

In 1973 a small scale drama with no stars could have commercial potential, if the characters were sincere and relatable. Add 3-D, and Oboler’s plan was not a bad one.  *

 

Taking a break in Tokyo after his tour in Vietnam, Doug (Jason Ledger) picks up and pursues solitary tourist Tara (Bonnie Sher). He discovers that the somber Tara is a diabetic. She begins to appreciate his company as they travel to Tokyo, Osaka and other places, visiting monuments and shrines. Tara must then rebuff Doug’s direct attempts at sex. When he returns from a drunken night of clubbing with a sex worker, she changes her mind and they make love (?). More touring of shrines and entertainment follows, including some circus-like stage acts. A tragic incident at a tourist volcanic site affects them both. It inspires Doug to go back to medical school. Tara finally reveals why she is so despondent. They may have a future together after all.

How obscure is Domo Arigato? The American Film Institute’s comprehensive film index gives Arch Oboler’s last entry as The Bubble, from 1966. That would indicate that Domo didn’t receive an actual release of any size.

 

As produced, the show billboards Japan, the superior 3-D system and little else. The obstruction is the 63 year-old Oboler’s conceptualization of what a young, footloose American couple in Tokyo might be like. This is no Lost in Translation. Jason Ledger’s Doug in no way resembles a Vietnam veteran, starting with his fancy Shaun Cassidy hairstyle. Ledger’s acting sinks the movie from the start, but even if he were good, it wouldn’t make much difference. Oboler’s thoughtless script has Doug stalk Tara and relentlessly prod her for private information. He twice makes aggressive sexual advances, and not out of inexperience. Oboler is imposing an older generation’s vision of acceptable male behavior … if a guy isn’t always knocking at the door, he could be gay, right?

We pretty much write off the drama when Doug’s second major move, practically a rape attempt, results in him blaming her and running off for (presumed) sex elsewhere. When he returns, Tara welcomes him with (literally) open arms. In the absence of any rational explanation, it is assumed that Tara was frigid and needed to come out of her emotional cocoon. This is one instance where the disc’s commentator Matt Rovner is likely spot-on with his interpretation of the director’s mindset. Oboler himself lived with two women, asserting his prerogative as the he-bull center of attention.

 

The relative insensitivity continues with a major scene at the top of a volcanic mountain. They see a Japanese husband, wife and child on holiday, and witness a tragedy. Unbelievably, Oboler leverages the sad scene as a cheap dramatic device to ‘grow’ Doug’s character. It’s appalling.

When commentator Rovner looks for film precedents for Domo, he immediately points to Arthur Hiller’s  Love Story. Tara doesn’t have a fatal disease, but the same pattern is present. She has a reason to put her life on pause and spend her time sightseeing. But Arch Oboler’s non-direction of his actors takes a toll — most every simple emotional scene falls flat. Bonnie Sher is much more of a natural than Jason Ledger, but her underwritten, inconsistent character would challenge an experienced actress. Through most of the first half of the movie Tara looks glumly uninvolved. When she starts having a good time and we see a brighter personality, we wonder why … Doug’s behavior continues to be unpleasant.

 

Bonnie Sher was a dancer and aspiring actress. Her hiring may have been necessary to get the movie made, as she was related to Oboler’s executive producer. Louis Sher reportedly wanted the picture to bear an ‘R’ rating. That translates into just a few seconds of Tokyo cabaret dancers, a topless shot of Doug’s prostitute, and a completely unnecessary topless flash of Ms. Sher. Not helping matters, the IMDB says that Louis Sher won an award for Adult Film Producer of the year, 1983. Could he have been hoping for a movie more like Stewardesses 3-D?

Too much of Domo Arigato is what we call unrelated coverage: isolated shots and cutaways. Oboler pads the show with stage acts filmed from odd angles. A couple of these are nicely edited but most just cut back to our lovers pretending to be entertained. Only occasionally, as with a bull-wrestling tournament, can we detect that an audience was actually present. In the bathhouse scene Tara says “do like the Romans do” and disrobes. But her angle is on a neutral doorway. There’s no proof that it was filmed at the actual hot tub location. The reverse angle of the Japanese family bathing reminds us of Grace Kelly in the older movie  The Bridges at Toko-Ri.

 

Oboler jams in other things without telling us why we should find them interesting. A Japanese chicken with a long tail might need some explanation. Doug and Tara visit the same romantic ‘married rocks’ vista that Marlon Brando and Miiko Taka visited in Joshua Logan’s  Sayonara. Oboler doesn’t even get into the tourist site’s significance.

Most movies about ‘exotic foreign lands’ confect happy exchanges with the locals, but Domo shows almost no interaction between our couple and anybody Japanese. We’re surpised to find that Tara knows some of the language. Doug talks to a desk clerk and pats a boy on the head. But at a shrine he yanks a (sacred?) bow from a wall and shoots an arrow with it. The bow snaps in half. Doug has destroyed a cultural object, but it’s no big deal … the dramatic / cultural insensitivity is off the chart.

 

We have to presume that the narrative competence of Five and Bwana Devil came via cameramen that called the shots and actors that didn’t need direction. This movie looks as if Oboler dashed off a script and expected miracles on the set. Even a pure travelogue needs pre-planning, but this show doesn’t seem to have access to, or control over, most of its locations. Oboler is able to clear a decorative bridge and the steps of a popular shrine long enough for his lovers to walk up or down alone, but a lot of the movie appears to take place in off-to-the-side corners. Tokyo looks unpopulated … we barely feel that we are there. We get only a couple of angles on the giant Tokyo Tower. Oboler had to have cooperation to film in the tower’s moving elevator … but that shot has no actors in it. When they stroll around the Osaka Fair Grounds we see no busy public areas.  (We do see, in an amusement park, a figure of the character Kamen Rider. We also see a monster of some sort in the same park; perhaps it’s one of KR’s many foes.)

Tipping the film’s cultural insensitivity quotient further are Oboler’s ‘3-D’ attempts to inject more Japanese flavor into his movie. He apparently bought a bushel of tourist tchotchkes out of the airport vendor racks, and had them filmed back in California as special 3-D optical transitions — little figurines, pendants, jewels, etc.. When a scene change occurs, a figurine fades up, and glides forward into the ‘3-D Space.’  The gimmick gets old very fast, unless you’re crazy for your grandmother’s travel knick-knacks.

 

While watching a 3-D film we’re constantly asking, what does stereoscopic depth add to this scene?  Am I watching this for the story, or to admire the 3-D illusion?  Wim Wenders’ 3-D feature  Anselm turns hundreds of locations into fascinating works of 3-D art, just by keeping his camera in ‘soft’ motion. Domo Arigato’s Space-Vision 3-D delivers excellent stereoscopic shots, but for most the camera is locked down. With few camera moves, we’re denied the easiest way to convey an involving 3-D space. Arch Oboler didn’t have the luxury to do much more but grab good angles where he could get them.

Are we too rough on this movie?  3-D aficionados looking for a film to study will be fascinated by Arch Oboler’s imperfect picture. We are glad to have seen this rare movie, even if we shake our head at a lot of it — the show makes us wonder if the words Domo Arigato translate as terminally out-of-touch. It’s fun to see the pleasant personality of Bonnie Sher peeking out from some scenes. At one point the couple crash a dance troupe’s street parade. We see only a flash of Bonnie dancing, but she seems to be having a great time. We thought that ‘Jason Ledger’ might have been a made-up name, but the actor has a handful of additional credits. Arch Oboler might have done better if he told his actors to just be themselves and make up their own dialogue — and concentrate on getting good travelogue shots of Japan’s beauty.

 


 

Bayview Entertainment’s 3-D Blu-ray of Domo Arigato is a solid encoding of this rare picture. ‘Sourced from one-of-a-kind film elements’ most likely means a positive print deposited in the Library of Congress. The 3-D Archive’s resurrection has recovered acceptable color values, even if the disc doesn’t have the look of an encoding sourced from a prime printing element. Some shots look grainy and others soft, but the Space-Vision 3-D illusions are impressive throughout.

Our favorite sequences are the montage scenes of shrines, and isolated tourist scenes. The most touted feature of Space-Vision 3-D is its ability to ‘float’ things in front of the screen’s plane. The effect of a little crab crawling on a long piece of wood is very good, but other things, such as a samurai sword point, just become a blur. It projects but it’s not in focus. Some of the main titles and credits didn’t quite come together for me … it took some concentration to read them.

 

The show is viewable in standard 3-D Blu-ray and anaglyphic 3-D, with one pair of red-blue glasses provided. The show can be seen in flat 2-D, with that menu choice hidden in the 3-D Blu-ray sub-menu. I was worried there for a second.

The Archive and Bayview throw in a pair of early-’50s burlesque items, essentially strip show short subjects. Cleopatra Follies is said to have been written by Ed Wood, but what that could possibly mean, we don’t know. It was recovered from an anaglyphic print, and bears some ghost images. Skid Row Holdup, the second 3-D short, is in in prime condition and looks really sharp.

 

The disc producers wisely tapped Matt Rovner as their go-to Arch Oboler guy. Rovner’s extensive research into EO (everything Oboler) extended to finding and interviewing actress Bonnie Sher. Getting a handle on Domo Arigato requires some understanding of its creator, a self-styled entertainment genius. Twenty years earlier, Oboler made his one really good movie  FIVE by delegating the camerawork to some talented ex-USC students. The result was unique, powerful. Oboler must have been convinced that anything in Space-Vision 3-D would be a hit. He believed in Domo Arigato so much that he put his Malibu Frank Lloyd Wright house on the line to get a deal made. That doesn’t line up with the frugal Arch of earlier projects.

We don’t like to slam any filmmaker who goes out on a limb for their art. Rovner does what he can to praise Oboler but ends up in agreement with our assessment, at least in terms of the film itself: Arigato is the creation of an old man with outdated ideas about romance and sex, even for 1972; despite a superficial concern about Hiroshima, the film has little to say about Japan or even its own characters. Like his Sci-fi film  The Bubble, this sentimental travelogue is fairly forgettable.

Arch Oboler and 3-D fans will grab Bayview’s disc fast: we’ve wondered about this film from the moment we heard of it, and the commitment of the 3-D Archive and Matt Rovner is to be applauded. Rovner recognizes that Arch Oboler’s legend may be overrated. He reports that Oboler eventually described himself as a maker of melodramatic entertainment. He identified the ‘Real Deal’ American audiovisual poet who began in radio as the great Norman Corwin.

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson


Domo Arigato
3-D Blu-ray rates:
Movie: Fair
Video: Very Good; in terms of restoration Excellent
Sound: Good
Supplements:
Separate anaglyphic red-blue 3-D encoding, for non- Blu-ray 3-D viewers
2-D encoding to watch flat
Audio commentary by Arch Oboler authority Matthew Rovner, with 3-D expert Mike Ballew.
Two 3-D burlesque shorts:
•  Cleopatra Follies (aka Flame of Islam)
•  Skid Row Holdup
Domo Arigato daily outtakes (3 minutes).
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: One 3-D Blu-ray in Keep case
Reviewed:
January 23, 2025
(7265domo)

*  Another ‘old man’ director tried this ploy, in the same year: Robert Wise’s 1973 Two People with Peter Fonda and Lindsay Wagner has similarities to Oboler’s film. A draft evader and a model conduct a romance in Morocco and Paris.CINESAVANT

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Text © Copyright 2025 Glenn Erickson

About Glenn Erickson

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Glenn Erickson left a small town for UCLA film school, where his spooky student movie about a haunted window landed him a job on the CLOSE ENCOUNTERS effects crew. He’s a writer and a film editor experienced in features, TV commercials, Cannon movie trailers, special montages and disc docus. But he’s most proud of finding the lost ending for a famous film noir, that few people knew was missing. Glenn is grateful for Trailers From Hell’s generous offer of a guest reviewing haven for CineSavant.

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Greg Walton

Thanks for the review, Glenn. I popped this one in as soon as it arrived…but sorted it into the second-hand pile immediately afterward. Even as a collector I couldn’t justify it taking up space…in any dimension.

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