One Wonderful Sunday (Akira Kurosawa, 1947)

Isao Numasaki and Chieko Nakakita in One Wonderful Sunday

Yuzo: Isao Numasaki
Masako: Chieko Nakakita
Yamamoto: Atsushi Watanabe
Dessert Shop Owner: Zeko Nakamura
Yamiya: Ichiro Sugai
Dance Hall Manager: Masao Shimizu
Waif: Shiro Mizutani
Sono: Midori Ariyama
Apartment Superintendent: Toshi Mori

Director: Akira Kurosawa
Screenplay: Akira Kurosawa, Keinosuke Uekusa
Cinematography: Asakazu Nakai
Production design: Kazuo Kubo
Music: Tadashi Hattori

Akira Kurosawa's One Wonderful Sunday brings to mind two near-contemporary films: Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life (1946) and Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves (1948). In its own odd way, Kurosawa's film blends a bit of the fantasy of the Capra film with the neorealism of the De Sica, though it doesn't quite succeed in the attempt. All three are products of the postwar world. The Americans, having won the war, naturally put the stress on optimism; the Italians and the Japanese, having lost, and having been sunk in the economic crisis caused by losing, naturally put the stress on endurance, on clinging to shreds of hope. Kurosawa's protagonists are a young couple, Yuzo and Masako, who can't afford to get married, but pool their resources, a meager 35 yen, to try to enjoy a Sunday together. Yuzo's depression shadows the outing, but Masako is determined to cheer him up. She's a little bit bossy, however -- when they first get together at the train station, he has just picked up a half-smoked cigarette from the pavement, hoping to smoke it later, but she strikes it out of his hand. Then she drags him into a model home in a new housing development, even though it's well beyond their means and is, he notes, shoddily built. Their housing plight -- he lives with a friend, she with her sister's family -- is emphasized when they visit a place that has a room to rent, only to discover that it's only minimally livable and that they can't afford even that. But Yuzo manages to climb out of his depression when he finds a bunch of kids playing baseball in the street and joins their game. And so it goes through the day as they oscillate between depression and hope. A visit to what remains of the city's zoo confronts them with some sad-looking animals. A large, fat pig slumbers in a cage that used to belong to a lion, causing Yuzo to remark, "The world is run by pigs." And then it starts to rain. Yuzo suggests that they go to his place -- his roommate will be out until late, he says -- but Masako resists, angering him. Then she notices a poster for a concert featuring Schubert's Unfinished Symphony. They can afford the 10-yen tickets, so they run through the rain to the concert hall. But scalpers have bought up all the 10-yen tickets and are selling them for 15 yen, and when Yuzo protests, they beat him up. When they go to Yuzo's room after all, where Masako treats his wounds, he tries to persuade her to sleep with him and she leaves. More depressed than ever -- even the roof is leaking -- Yuzo broods until Masako returns, contrite, but her sobs make any further sexual moves impossible, so they decide to spend the last of their money in a coffee shop. Even there, they are stymied: The coffee shop bills them for café au lait, instead of the regular coffee they thought they ordered, so Yuzo leaves his overcoat, saying he'll return the next day to make good on the bill. Now penniless, they begin to live in their dreams. They pretend that the ruins of a house are the coffee shop they want to open some day and, discovering an old band shell, try to pretend that Yuzo is conducting the performance of Schubert's Unfinished that they missed. At this point, Kurosawa departs from neorealism and has Masako address the movie audience directly: If they'll applaud for all the sad, impoverished lovers in the world, then she and Yuzo will be able to hear the music he's pretending to conduct. It works, and they hear the music. They part as the film ends, promising each other to meet again next Sunday. In fact, Kurosawa's borrowing from Peter Pan and asking for the audience's applause didn't work in Japan, where audiences were simply puzzled, though when the film was shown in France years later, French audiences responded enthusiastically. The sentimentality of One Wonderful Sunday is hardly characteristic of Kurosawa, but it's tempered by some masterly use of locations -- blended with more stylized studio sets -- and good performances by the leads: Isao Numasaki, in fact, does manage to evoke both James Stewart in Capra's film and Lamberto Maggiorani in De Sica's, even though he couldn't have seen the latter and probably didn't see the former. There are moments when Kurosawa prolongs the depression of Yuzo and Masako a bit too much, and the film seems a little overextended for the slightness of its narrative, but it's clearly a formative work for a master director, as well as a heartfelt depiction of the plight of his country.

Floating Clouds (Mikio Naruse, 1955)

Hideko Takamine in Floating Clouds

Yukiko Koda: Hideko Takamine
Kengo Tomioka: Masayuki Mori
Sei Mukai: Mariko Okada
Sugio Iba: Isao Yamagata
Kuniko Tomioka: Chieko Nakakita
Seikichi Mukai: Daisuke Kato

Director: Mikio Naruse
Screenplay: Yoko Mizuki
Based on a novel by Fumiko Hayashi
Cinematography: Masao Tamai
Production design: Satoru Chuko
Film editing: Eiji Ooi
Music: Ichiro Saito

Mikio Naruse's Floating Clouds brings to mind some of Ernest Hemingway's stories about war-damaged lovers trying to make the best of a doomed relationship. Yukiko is a young woman returning to Tokyo after working in Japanese-occupied French Indochina as a secretary. There she had an affair with the bitter, cynical Kengo, an employee of the Japanese forest service who is married to the sickly Kuniko. Trying to make it on her own in postwar Japan, Yukiko finds that her secretarial skills are in little demand because she doesn't know English, a necessity under the American occupation. Desperate, she picks up an American soldier and becomes his mistress. Meanwhile, she also seeks out Kengo, and finds him trying to make a go of it in the lumber business, still married to Kuniko but unwilling to divorce her and marry Yukiko. So over the course of the film, these two deeply wounded people meet and part repeatedly, not only lacerating themselves but also hurting others with words and deeds. At the end, they have seemingly found a way to live together, partly by retreating from the world onto a remote Japanese island, but even that rapprochement is ill-fated. Naruse's film is an absorbing downer, gaining much of its energy from our suspense about what the protagonists will do to each other next, as well as a showcase for Hideko Takamine's marvelous performance. There are those who think it a masterpiece. 

Wife (Mikio Naruse, 1953)

Yatsuko Tan'ami and Ken Uehara in Wife

Mihoko Nakagawa: Mieko Takamine
Toichi Nakagawa: Ken Uehara
Fusako Sawara: Yatsuko Tan'ami
Tadashi Tanimura: Rentaro Mikuni
Yoshimi Niemura: Michiyo Aratama
Setsuko Sakarai: Sanae Takasugi
Eiko Matsuyama: Chieko Nakakita
Hirohiso Matsuyama: Hajime Izu
Taeko Niemura: Yoshiko Tsubouchi

Director: Mikio Naruse
Screenplay: Toshiro Ide
Based on a novel by Fumiko Hayashi
Cinematography: Masao Tamai
Production design: Satoru Chuko
Music: Ichiro Saito

I was well into Mikio Naruse's Wife when I had a sudden feeling of déjà vu: I felt like I had seen this film before. It struck me when Nakagawa goes to a cafe with Sawara, a typist who works in his office, and she identifies the music playing in the background as a violin concerto by Édouard Lalo. I thought I had seen the cafe setting before: It's distinctively divided into two levels, with some ornamental ironwork separating the upper from the lower level where Nakagawa and Sawara are sitting. Later in the film, when Tanimura, the painter and art student who rents a room from the Nakagawas, appears, and still later when Nakagawa's wife, Mihoko, rents another room to a young woman who's the mistress of an older man, I knew I'd seen Wife before. At my age, any memory lapse like this can be disturbing, but I also thought it told me something about the kind of film Wife is. For the main story of the film, about the stagnant marriage of Toichi and Mihoko Nakagawa, is so low-key that it's hard to latch onto anything specific about it. We've seen troubled marriages and illicit affairs before, but the Nakagawas hold their emotions in such tight check that they never explode into memorable scenes. The parts of Wife that the memory holds onto are the unique ones -- a classical melody, a distinctive set (as contrasted with the Nakagawas' typically boxlike home), or colorful characters. Even the title, Wife, has a generic quality to it -- like some of Yasujiro Ozu's titles, it doesn't give the mind much to hold onto. This is not meant to be a knock on Naruse's film, however. The pain experienced by Mihoko when she learns of her husband's affair, and that felt by Toichi and Sawara when they're forced to part, is very real and quite delicately observed. And there's something particularly devastating about the lack of resolution at the film's end, when, having achieved a kind of stalemate, the Nakagawas return to routine. He goes off to work and she stays home, both condemned to trying to work things out. In a way, I'm glad I had forgotten that I'd seen Wife before: It gave me a chance to rediscover a work whose subtlety and finesse outweigh its lack of flashy memory hooks.

Mother (Mikio Naruse, 1952)

Kyoko Kagawa in Mother

Masako Fukuhara: Kinuyo Tanaka
Toshiko Fukuhara: Kyoko Kagawa
Shinjiro: Eiji Okada
Ryousuke Fukuhara: Masao Mishima
Susumo Fukuhara: Akihiko Katayama
Hisako Fukuhara: Keiko Enami
Uncle Kimura: Daisuke Kato
Tetsuo: Takashi Ito
Aunt Noriko: Chieko Nakakita

Director: Mikio Naruse
Screenplay: Yoko Mizuki
Cinematography: Hiroshi Suzuki
Music: Ichiro Saito

Mutatis mutandis, Mikio Naruse's Mother could almost have been a 1950s Hollywood family drama starring Irene Dunne or Myrna Loy in the title role: a woman struggling to help her family survive difficult times. Of course, the necessary change would be that of setting: Mother is very much a portrait of lower middle class Japan in the immediate postwar years. Masako Fukuhara is not just trying to feed her family but also struggling with the effects of the war, including disease -- the death of her only son from tuberculosis -- and crippling loss -- she and her husband, Ryosuke, take in her sister Noriko's little boy, Tetsuo, after Noriko returns from Manchuria, where her husband was killed. Masako's struggle gets worse after Ryosuke works himself to death reestablishing the family's laundry business. Fortunately, there is Uncle Kimura, who had been a prisoner of war in Russia, to help out in the laundry, but Masako still has to raise her teenage daughter, Toshiko, as well as her younger daughter, Hisako, called Chako. What links Mother to the Hollywood films is some sentimental melodrama, a characteristic not usually ascribed to Naruse's work, and some rather conventional comic relief, such as the scene in which Toshiko's boyfriend, Shinjiro, sees her dressed as a bride and thinks she's marrying someone else, when in fact she's modeling for Noriko, who is trying to make it as a hair stylist. Fortunately, Naruse knows how to work against sentimentality and convention with some distancing tricks. In mid-film we are suddenly presented with a title card that says "The End" in Japanese -- a moment that actually made me reach for the remote control to see if the screening service had somehow skipped to the end. It turns out to be the end title for a movie that Toshiko and her friends have gone to see -- a weepie that has left them in the tears guaranteed by its advertising. It also helps that Mother has the extraordinary Kinuyo Tanaka and Kyoko Kagawa playing mother and daughter -- a relationship they would repeat in Kenji Mizoguchi's Sansho the Bailiff (1954). It's also fun to see Eiji Okada as Shinjiro, one of his early performances, before he achieved international fame in Hiroshima Mon Amour (Alain Resnais, 1959) and Woman in the Dunes (Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1964).

Watched on Filmstruck Criterion Channel

Sound of the Mountain (Mikio Naruse, 1954)

So Yamamura and Setsuko Hara in Sound of the Mountain

Shingo Ogata: So Yamamura
Kikuko: Setsuko Hara
Shuichi: Ken Uehara
Yasako: Teruka Nagaoka
Fusako: Chieko Nakakita
Kinuko: Rieko Sumi
Hideko Tanizaki: Yoko Sugi

Director: Mikio Naruse
Screenplay: Yoko Mizuki
Based on a novel by Yasunari Kawabata
Cinematography: Masao Tamai
Music: Ichiro Saito

Watched on Turner Classic Movies

I find that numerous critics have observed something I sensed while watching Mikio Naruse's Sound of the Mountain: that it feels like a kind of sequel to, or even reaction against, such films by Yasujiro Ozu as Late Spring (1949) and An Autumn Afternoon (1963) that center on the arrangement of the marriage of a young woman. In both of the Ozu films I mention, the marriage is so much the event toward which the plot moves that we never even see the potential bridegroom -- as if just being married were the point. I know that's doing a disservice to the great artistry of Ozu, whose interest is always on relationships and not outcomes, and that Ozu was working in the long tradition of romance and comedy, in which marriage is what the plot is there to move toward, but I have to feel that Naruse is making a direct riposte to that tradition. Why else cast Setsuko Hara, the "Noriko" of three of Ozu's films -- Late Spring, Early Summer (1951), Tokyo Story (1953) -- that center on unmarried or widowed women? In Sound of the Mountain, Hara is Kikuko, an unhappily married woman, whose husband, Shuichi, has taken a mistress and frequently comes home drunk -- or not at all. The couple lives with his parents, to whom she devotes herself almost to the point of servitude. And when their daughter, Fusako, arrives with her small children, having separated from her own husband, Kikuko's household duties increase. Fortunately, she has a sympathetic confidant in her father-in-law, Shingo, who is clearly more than a little in love with Kikuko, and tries to sort things out for her, even to the point of confronting his son's mistress to try to break up that relationship. But things are not so easily resolved in this state of extramarital affairs. Kikuko takes a quietly devastating revenge on her husband by having an abortion -- something that Shuichi's mistress, who is also carrying his child, refuses to do. This is a film of great sadness, a mood that Ichiro Saito's film score does much to emphasize without ever turning lugubrious.  

Drunken Angel (Akira Kurosawa, 1948)

Toshiro Mifune and Takashi Shimura in Drunken Angel

Sanada: Takashi Shimura
Matsunaga: Toshiro Mifune
Okada: Reizaburo Yamamoto
Nanae: Michiyo Kogure
Miyo: Chieko Nakakita
Gin: Noriko Sengoko
Singer: Shizuko Kasagi
Takahama: Eitaro Shindo
Oyabun: Masao Shimizu

Director: Akira Kurosawa
Screenplay: Keinosuke Uekasa, Akira Kurosawa
Cinematography: Takeo Ito
Production design: Takashi Matsuyama
Film editing: Akikazu Kono
Music: Fumio Hayasaka 

Drunken Angel has been called Akira Kurosawa's Stagecoach, because just as John Ford established a fruitful director-actor team with John Wayne in his 1939 Western, in this movie Kurosawa launched a brilliant collaboration with Toshiro Mifune that lasted for 16 films. But to my mind, just as important, Drunken Angel marked the first teaming of Mifune with the great character actor Takashi Shimura. Kurosawa immediately saw the potential of the team, in which Shimura's low-key steadfastness serves as a foil for Mifune's volatility. He reteamed them in 1949 for two films, The Quiet Duel and Stray Dog, but their most memorable work together would come in Seven Samurai (1954), in which Shimura's wise and wily Kambei Shimada plays off beautifully against Mifune's madly unpredictable Kikuchiyo. In Drunken Angel, Shimura has the title role: an alcoholic doctor laboring in the slums of a postwar Japanese city. His clinic fronts a festering lake of sewage and his clientele comes largely from the neighboring nightclubs and brothels. Mifune plays Matsunaga, a swaggering young gangster with tuberculosis, who comes to Dr. Sanada hoping for a cure that won't put a crimp in his lifestyle. The screenplay by Kurosawa and Keinosuke Uekusa makes both characters into complex figures: Sanada's bitterness about his poverty and lack of status feeds his alcoholism, but he persists in trying to help his patients, even when, like Matsunaga, they resist his efforts, sometimes violently. Still, there's a bond between the two men in a recognition that they are both caught in traps they didn't make. What makes Drunken Angel more than just a clever reworking of film noir tropes -- another instance of Kurosawa's fascination with American movies -- is that it's a veiled commentary on the wounded Japan, in which the militaristic violence has been turned inward. Yesterday's soldier has become today's yakuza, still carrying on about honor and saving face. Kurosawa's film delivers an incisive criticism of some of the root problems facing his country. Made during the American occupation, when censorship was at its strictest, especially in depicting violence, Kurosawa nevertheless stages some vivid and intense fight scenes, using Mifune's physicality to great effect. That much of it occurs against a background of Western-style pop music only heightens its boldness.