The Only Son (Yasujiro Ozu, 1936)

Choko Iida and Shinichi Himori in The Only Son

Cast: Choko Iida, Shinichi Himori, Masao Hayama, Yoshiko Tsoubuchi, Mitsuko Yoshkawa, Chishu Ryu, Tomio Aoki. Screenplay: Yasujiro Ozu, Tadao Ikeda, Masao Arata. Cinematography: Shojiro Sugimoto. Production design: Tatsuo Hamada. Film editing: Eiichi Hasagawa, Hideo Mohara. Music: Senji Ito. 

If someone were to ask me what movie by Yasujiro Ozu they should watch first, I'd probably suggest the one that makes the critics' lists of the greatest films ever made, Tokyo Story (1953), or perhaps his very last one, An Autumn Afternoon (1962). I probably wouldn't select his first talkie, The Only Son, but only because the print I saw was blotchy and its soundtrack occasionally noisy. It's also one of his most melancholy films, drenched in the kind of disappointment that Ozu himself must have felt in the Depression year of 1936 as militarism took stronger hold on Japan. It tells the simple story of a single mother, O-Tsune (Choko Iida), who supports her son, Ryosuke (Shinichi Himori), by working in a silk mill as he grows up, gets an education, and moves to Tokyo determined to be a "great man." But when she pays a visit to him there, she discovers that he has married and has an infant son of his own, and that the little family is struggling to make ends meet. The best job he's able to find is teaching night school. His failure to thrive mirrors that of the teacher, Okubo (Chishu Ryu), who mentored him, urging him to further his education, and went to Tokyo himself to advance his career. Now, even the teacher is struggling, supporting his wife and four children by running a small tonkatsu restaurant. Ryosuke, who is living from paycheck to paycheck, borrows money from friends so he can show his mother a good time in Tokyo. They do some sightseeing and he takes her to the movies. The film is Unfinished Symphony (Willi Forst and Anthony Asquith, 1934) a British-Austrian biopic of Franz Schubert that Ozu uses for an ironic allusion: It's about a disappointed genius and it has dialogue in German, echoing the fact that Japan signed a pact with Hitler's Reich in 1936. Ryosuke tries to impress his mother by pointing out that it's "a talkie," but she nods off during the film -- perhaps Ozu's sly dismissal of the medium that he has finally been persuaded to adopt. Though it's touched with humor, The Only Son persists in its melancholy portrait of failed hopes, ending with Ryosuke's vow that he will go back to school and get a better job. O-Tsune returns to her work in the mill, and tells her friends that her son has become a great man, but her face when she's alone reveals the truth.