General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Black Test Car (黒の試走車)

Black Test Car (黒の試走車, Kuro no shisōsha, also released as Kuro no tesutokā (テストカー)) is a 1962 Japanese black-and-white industrial-espionage thriller directed by Yasuzo Masumura and produced by Daiei's Tokyo studio, adapted from Sueyuki Kajiyama's bestselling novel of the same name. It follows a covert war between two rival Japanese automobile companies, Tiger Motors and Yamato Motors, as each schemes, spies, and sabotages to win the market for a new sports car.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Japanese title	黒の試走車 (テストカー), Kuro no shisōsha
Release	July 1, 1962, distributed by Daiei; produced at Daiei Tokyo¹
Director / screenwriters	Yasuzo Masumura; screenplay by Kazuo Funahashi and Yoshihiro Ishimatsu³
Source	Bestselling 1962 novel by Sueyuki Kajiyama, published by Kobunsha¹^•⁴
Format	Black and white, CinemaScope (1:2.35), 35 mm⁵
Runtime	94 minutes per eiga.com; 95 minutes per KADOKAWA, Filmarks, and allcinema¹^•⁶
Series position	First installment of the "Kuro" (Black) suspense thriller series²
Principal cast	Jiro Tamiya, Junko Kano, Eiji Funakoshi, Hideo Takamatsu, Ichiro Sugai³

Spoilers

Plot

The story opens with a disguised prototype speeding along a highway; on a curve it overturns and bursts into flames. The next day the automotive trade press reports the crash with photographs under the headline asking whether Tiger Motors' new-car production plan has collapsed. The secret road test of Tiger's sports car, the Pioneer, had been leaked in advance to rival Yamato Motors, photographs included.¹

Tiger's planning department, which functions as the company's industrial-espionage unit, responds in kind. Planning section head Onoda has his subordinate Asahina Yutaka (Jiro Tamiya) fabricate dummy data presenting the Pioneer as if it were an ordinary mass-market car, to confuse Yamato. When Asahina learns that Yamato's planning chief Mawatari (Ichiro Sugai) is a regular at the bar Pandora, he sends his girlfriend Shoko (Junko Kano) to work there as a hostess and probe Mawatari's movements. The intelligence gathered shows that Yamato is secretly building its own sports car and has even stolen the design Tiger commissioned from an Italian designer, so the contest over design and model type turns into a price war.¹

The espionage escalates through blackmail, wiretapping, covert photography, and sexual coercion. Sent to Mawatari's hotel, Shoko steals important documents about the new car but is raped in the process; the costly price of the material helps Tiger defeat Yamato. Just as Tiger celebrates, the first production Pioneer collides with an express train at a crossing on the Tokaido Line, and its driver, a man named Yoshino, testifies that the car had stalled, pushing Tiger into crisis. Asahina eventually identifies the leak inside Tiger as Hiraki (Eiji Funakoshi), head of the planning department's second section, who had been bought by Mawatari. Mawatari is charged with obstructing the train and resigns from Yamato. With the affair settled, Pioneer sales climb, and Asahina, offered the post of first-section chief, instead submits his resignation and runs through the streets to the wounded Shoko, crying that he wants to live for himself even if he cannot live in the modern world.¹^•⁷

Production background

The film adapts Kajiyama Sueyuki's novel Black Test Car, published by Kobunsha in 1962, at a moment when Japan's postwar intelligence activity was publicly discredited and corporate competition was intensifying with the coming of mass motorization. The novelist, a journalist-turned-popular writer who died young, built the story around automobile companies, including the fictional Tiger, Nagoya, and Fuji Motors, waging a corporate intelligence war that includes outright illegal spying.⁴

Daiei assigned the adaptation to Kazuo Funahashi, known for Gan no Terа, and Yoshihiro Ishimatsu, with Masumura, fresh from Ran (1962), directing and Yoshihisa Nakagawa, cinematographer of Black Lizard (1962), behind the camera. Sei Ikeno composed the score, Hiroshi Yamaguchi designed the sets, and Gen Taro Nakajima planned the production.¹^•³

Style and themes

The film is shot in high-contrast monochrome in the CinemaScope ratio, and reviewers have repeatedly connected its look to film noir: heavy shadowed lighting, a persistent oppressive atmosphere, and compositions that fill the wide frame with figures. Its score by Sei Ikeno has been described as sounding as if a monster movie might break out at any moment.⁸

Thematically, the film treats the corporate war as a continuation of war by other means. Mawatari is written as a former military intelligence officer of the prewar Kanto Army special services, and the film's symbolism is explicit: men who once threw away their lives for the nation now throw away their humanity for the company.⁷^•⁹ A 2023 study of Masumura's work places the film among his salaryman pictures, such as Giants and Toys (1958), in which black space figures the alienation of people caught in Japan's high-growth economy.¹⁰ Contemporary reviewers note the film's cynicism toward corporate conduct and its treatment of the woman sent to spy as expendable, an aspect some modern viewers find hard to watch.¹¹^•¹²

The Black series and later release

Black Test Car launched a run of similarly themed "Black" thrillers at Daiei, including Masumura's own The Black Report (黒の報告書, 1963), and the title's success is credited with starting a marketing fashion for putting "Black" in thriller titles.²^•¹³ KADOKAWA issued the film on DVD on January 29, 2016, with the trailer and a photo gallery as extras, and Arrow Video released The Black Test Car and The Black Report together on Blu-ray with English subtitles in 2020.⁶^•¹³ The film has also been screened at retrospective events, including a 2024 PIA Film Festival program in Hiroshima.¹⁴

Reception

On Filmarks the film holds a 3.8 average from 546 user reviews, with 67 percent of ratings in the 3.1 to 4.0 band; on eiga.com it averages 3.4 from 11 reviews, and allcinema users give it 6.2 of 10 from 35 votes.¹⁵^•¹^•³ English-language reviews of the Arrow release describe it as a noirish, briskly edited espionage tale and a must for viewers interested in 1960s world cinema and the automobile industry.¹³^•¹⁶

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Crime, thriller, and mystery films (individual works) › 1960s films

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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