A twisting, turning, very late noir with doses of black humor and satire, Hajime Satô’s Sanpo suru reikyusha (US: The Glamorous Ghost) uses a cunning, convoluted blackmail scheme to depict the greed that permeated postwar Japan. After Hiroshi Asami (Kô Nishimura) strangles his unfaithful wife Sugie (Masumi Harukawa) in a fit of rage, he decides to profit from it by blackmailing all of her wealthy lovers. Renting a hearse, Hiroshi transports Sugie’s body in a casket to a nearby wedding where he displays her to a millionaire industrialist and shows him a fake suicide note in which Sugie blames the man for her decision; Hiroshi leaves with a wad of cash, and things only get weirder from here. With nothing what it seems to be, Satô cleverly reveals surprises and builds suspense, the truth of who is manipulating whom constantly bouncing back and forth, Hiroshi’s omnipresent hearse like a pathetic grim reaper. With a few diversions to bleak humor (the final scene certainly eschews plausibility), the film entertains not only through its plot but through its visual inventiveness: extreme high angles as if from a ghost’s perspective (despite the English title, the film has no supernatural elements), circular pans to convey the chaos of fighting, Dutch angles to depict disorientation, superimposition of one object on another. Kikuchi’s theremin-heavy score doesn’t always work, but the film’s paranoia and insanity make it a distinctive member of the film noir fringe.