Nobody can escape capitalism unblemished. That seems to be the moral lesson of Yasuzô Masumura’s Kuro no tesuto kâ (US: Black Test Car) which blurs the lines between corporate executives and yakuza gangsters in the swamp of Japan, Inc. rottenness. Masumura’s haunting film depicts the increasingly malevolent competition between top executives at Yamato Company and Tiger Motorcar as they race to build the first Japanese sports car for a booming postwar market; the hostilities involve spying (journalists are paid “spying fees”), bribery (a nurse is paid to record conversations), blackmail (an engineer’s corruption is threatened with exposure), fraud (fake product specs are planted), kidnapping, and murder. If the film has a protagonist with a conscience, that’s Yutaka Asahina (Jirô Tamiya) who early on demands that his hostess girlfriend spy on the competing executives at her club and even go to bed with the ruthless president of Yamato to find out his pricing strategy or he won’t marry her (“If my plan works, then I’ll be head of the department and we can get married”). Hideo Takamatsu plays Toru Onoda, a Tiger executive charged with investigating his own colleagues to determine who within their ranks is serving as a Yamato spy. Japanese film and literature of the 1950’s had established the “salaryman” as a sort of avatar for social and economic stability, yet here the salary appears to be not nearly enough as these characters are also profiting through extracurricular, illicit means. The film is visually dark, generous with deep focus, and replete with dramatic and unusual camera angles (from the floor, at table height, framed between walls and furniture). Ikeno’s music is more of a mood than a score: eerie chords, dissonance, industrial house effects, a crying trombone.