A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Sunday, November 26, 2017

Walk Cheerfully (Yasujiro Ozu, 1930)

Minoru Takada and Hisao Yoshitani in Walk Cheerfully
Kenji Koyama: Minoru Takada
Yasue Sugimoto: Hiroko Kawasaki
Senko: Hisao Yoshitani
Chieko: Satoko Date
Ono: Takeshi Sakamoto
Gunpei: Teruo Mori
Yasue's Sister: Nobuko Matsuzono
Mother: Utako Suzuki

Director: Yasujiro Ozu
Screenplay: Tadao Ikeda
Based on a story by Hiroshi Shimizu
Cinematography: Hideo Shigehara
Set decoration: Hiroshi Mizutani

The English titles of Yasujiro Ozu's films are typically oblique, ranging from the atmospheric but uninformative -- Late Spring (1949),  Early Summer (1951) -- to the proverbial or epigrammatic (but only in Japanese) -- The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice (1952), A Hen in the Wind (1958) -- to the simply mistranslated -- Record of a Tenement Gentleman (1947). The title of Walk Cheerfully would seem to be similarly somewhat aside of the mark for what started as a gangster movie, but at least the phrase appears in an intertitle in the film as the parting advice given by Yasue to Kenji as he's being taken away by the police -- she seems to mean it somewhat in the spirit of "take care." The film itself is a curious blend of gangster film and romance. In fact, the work it reminded me of sometimes was Frank Loesser's musical Guys and Dolls, which has a similar theme of a shady guy being redeemed by a good girl. The analogy leaped to mind when some of Ozu's gangsters did synchronized routines and gag soft-shoe dances in the pool hall where they meet. For these are not hard-core American gangsters or even murderous yakuza; they're small-time pickpockets and thieves. We meet our hero, Kenji, while he's still a thug known as "Ken the Knife" for the tattoo on his left forearm. The movie begins with a chase: Kenji's sidekick, Senko, being pursued by a mob who think he has stolen a man's wallet. When the mob catches up with Senko, Kenji appears out of the crowd and suggests that they search him for the wallet. Nothing turns up, so Senko goes free, but later we see them meet up and discover that they're in cahoots: Kenji has picked the wallet from Senko as the mob was roughing him up. Eventually, however, both Kenji and Senko try to go straight when Kenji meets and falls in love with Yasue. When they first see her, they think Yasue is a rich woman: She arrives at a jewelry store in a large car and goes in to buy a diamond ring. But it turns out that she's running an errand for her boss, the head of the Ono Trading Co., who puts the moves on her when she brings it to him. Eventually, after Kenji and Yasue meet up again and he learns the truth, that she's just an office worker, he will have an opportunity to beat up Ono for sexually harassing Yasue. This is very minor Ozu, but he handles it well, demonstrating not only his skill at telling a story but also the way American movies influenced him: On the wall at Ono Trading Co. there's a poster for Joan Crawford's Our Dancing Daughters (Harry Beaumont, 1928). Movies, big cars, and pop music -- Senko has written the English lyrics to the 1928 song "The Gay Caballero" on the wall of the room he shares with Kenji and is trying to learn them -- figure large with these very modern Japanese gangsters.

No comments: