Jubilation Street (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1944)

Mitsuko Mito, Chiyo Nobu, and Eijiro Tono in Jubilation Street 

Shingo Furukawa: Ken Uehara
Takako: Mitsuko Mito
Kiyo Furukawa: Chiyo Nobu
Shingo's Father: Eijiro Tono
Bathhouse Owner: Makoto Kobori
Bathhouse Owner's Wife: Choko Iida

Director: Keisuke Kinoshita
Screenplay: Kaoru Morimoto
Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda

There's a kind of quiet desperation in the patriotism on display in Keisuke Kinoshita's Jubilation Street. Kinoshita could not have ignored the censors' demands for the flag-waving ending and the vows to revenge the death of one of the central characters, but maybe it's only postwar hindsight that makes me feel that his heart wasn't in it. Or maybe he was more interested in his characters than in manipulating them to serve the war effort. The titular street is condemned to be torn up by the military for unspecified wartime purposes, but the longtime residents are at first not thrilled by being dislocated to serve their country. The film depicts their struggle to hold on as long as they can, some out of stubbornness, like the bathhouse owner who doesn't want to leave a place where he has run his business for so long -- though he has to admit, when someone reminds him, that he won't have any customers after all the other neighbors leave. And some, like Kiyo Furukawa, want to remain for more deeply personal reasons: She's afraid that if the husband who left her and their son, Shingo, so many years ago suddenly decides to return he won't be able to find them. Shingo is already doing his part in the war as a test pilot, but he has also fallen in love with the pretty Takako, whose family wants her to enter into an arranged marriage. They are afraid that separation will prove fatal to their love. The plot then takes a predictable turn: Shingo's father returns, though Kiyo has misgivings about resuming their marriage when she learns how many varied jobs he has held over the years, an indicator that the instability that caused him to leave is still a problem. But then an event -- one that most filmgoers will have predicted on their own -- alters everything. Good performances aren't enough to lift this early Kinoshita film above routine, but the director's characteristic humanity (and equally characteristic sentimentality) gives it a warmth that even the ham-fisted propaganda can't quite obliterate.

Black River (Masaki Kobayashi, 1957)

Tatsuya Nakadai and Ineko Arima in Black River

Shizuko: Ineko Arima
Nishida: Fumio Watanabe
Killer Joe: Tatsuya Nakadai
Landlady: Isuzu Yamada
Okada: Tomo'o Nagai
Okada's Wife: Keiko Awaji
Kurihara: Eijiro Tono
Kin: Seiji Miyaguchi
Sakazaki: Asao Sano

Director: Masaki Kobayashi
Screenplay: Zenzo Matsuyama
Based on a story by Takeo Tomishima
Cinematography: Yuharu Atsuta
Production design: Ninjin Kurabu
Film editing: Yoshiyasu Hamamura
Music: Chuji Kinoshita

Masaki Kobayashi's remarkable slice-of-life drama Black River takes place in a slum near an American army base. It's a festering dump, inhabited by a variety of people, from lowlifes attempting to make a living by exploiting the soldiers to dead-enders with no place else to go. Into this morass wanders a naïve university student, Nishida, in search of cheap lodgings, who tries to make a little money as a used-book seller. He falls for a pretty waitress, Shizuko, who longs to escape from the slum, but their attachment puts him in the line of fire of a swaggering young gangster called Killer Joe, who has his own designs on Shizuko. Presiding over everything is the landlady, who has plans for the property that don't include its tenants. She's played to a fare-thee-well by the great Isuzu Yamada, perhaps best known as the Lady Macbeth equivalent in Akira Kurosawa's Throne of Blood (1957). Here she's outfitted with a snaggly golden-toothed grill, a fitting correlative for the concealment of the moral rot within. But the real scene-stealer of the film is Tatsuya Nakadai as Killer Joe, in one of his first major film appearances, perfectly blending the charisma that would make him a star with the menace that would allow him to play memorable villains as well as heroes.

Farewell to Dream (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1956)

Noriko Kikuoki, Shinji Tanaka, and Yoshiko Kuga in Farewell to Dream

Yoichi Akimoto: Shinji Tanaka
Oshin, Yoichi's Mother: Yuko Mochizuki
Toyoko, Yoichi's Older Sister: Yoshiko Kuga
Genkichi, Yoichi's Father: Eijiro Tono
Kazue, Yoichi's Younger Sister: Noriko Kikuoki
Sudo: Takahiro Tamura
Seiji Harada: Ryohei Ono

Director: Keisuke Kinoshita
Screenplay: Yoshiko Kusuda
Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda
Art direction: Kazue Hirataka
Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara
Music: Chuji Kinoshita

The English title, Farewell to Dream, seems to be grammatically or idiomatically off: We would expect Farewell to a Dream or ... Dreams instead. (The Japanese title is Yûyake-gumo, which Google Translate renders as "Sunset Cloud.") But then there's something a little off about this entire short film -- only 78 minutes long. Its young narrator, Yoichi, tells us his story about how circumstances made him bid farewell to his dreams, except that he doesn't seem to have had any substantial dream other than not following in his father's footsteps as a fishmonger, a job he hates because it makes him smell of fish, causing other boys to taunt him. We can't really blame him, but the film never suggests that Yoichi had a clear plan of escape from that life. He spends a good deal of his time looking out over the rooftops of Tokyo through his binoculars, sighting a pretty young woman whom he dreams of meeting. Eventually, he and his friend Seiji make their way across the city to where they think the young woman lives, only to arrive in her neighborhood as she's getting into an automobile with the man she's engaged to marry. Yoichi's story is also mixed with that of his sisters: The elder one, Toyoko, is pretty and vain, and has a handsome boyfriend, Sudo. But when Sudo's family goes broke, she marries an older man -- and then carries on an affair with Sudo. When his father falls ill, Yoichi's parents allow a rich uncle to adopt his younger sister, Kazue, in exchange for some financial support, and we see Yoichi bid a sad farewell to the girl. I think we're meant to sympathize with Yoichi in the collapse of his family, but the irony is that after his father dies, Yoichi turns out to be a very good fishmonger, building a thriving business from his own talent as a cook by developing a sideline as a caterer and seller of prepared meals. Like it or not, Yoichi has become what many families would see as a blessing: the son who successfully keeps the family business alive. The effect is that Yoichi's lament for his lost future feels like self-pity rather than legitimate dismay at unfulfilled potential.

Our Marriage (Masahiro Shinoda, 1961)

Noriko Maki and Chieko Baisho in Our Marriage

Keiko: Noriko Maki
Saeko: Chieko Baisho
Komakura: Shin'ichiro Mikami
Matsumoto: Isao Kimura
Father: Eijiro Tono
Mother: Sadako Sawamura

Director: Masahiro Shinoda
Screenplay: Zenzo Matsuyama, Masahiro Shinoda
Cinematography: Masao Kosugi
Art direction: Chiyoo Umeda
Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara
Music: Naozumi Yamamoto

It goes without saying (though I've said it often enough) that cultural differences are a hindrance to our understanding or enjoyment of films made in other countries, but Masahiro Shinoda's Our Marriage brought the point home for me in an unusual way. It's a simple, elegantly made film, scarcely over an hour long, about two sisters and the pressures on women to get married. That's nothing we haven't seen in films by Naruse and Ozu and others, but Shinoda is particularly focused on social and economic change -- not just in the role of women in Japan but also on a society in which upward mobility is becoming possible and desirable. Keiko and Saeko are office workers in a factory, the daughters of a man struggling to make ends meet by harvesting seaweed. His job has become more difficult because of industrial pollution, and his wife sometimes has to borrow money from the daughters to pay bills. So the parents begin looking for a husband for 22-year-old Keiko. The father wants her to marry the son of the union chief at the factory, a widower nearing 30, but another man, Matsumoto, who works for a dry goods company, also shows interest in her. The parents disapprove of Matsumoto because he traded in the black market in the postwar years, but he has since cleaned up his act. The complication is that Keiko has met a handsome young factory worker, Komakura. Saeko, who has a secret crush on Komakura, wants Keiko to marry him, and Keiko is certainly not averse to the idea except that Komakura doesn't make much money. Things work themselves out after some family drama, of course. But the cultural difference that mars the film for me is not the tension between arranged marriages and marrying for love -- that's familiar enough even in the Western tradition. The problem is that the music arranger has chosen the tune of the old spiritual "Michael, Row Your Boat Ashore" as the film's main theme. Anyone who grew up singing it around a campfire, or knows the recorded versions by Pete Seeger and Harry Belafonte, is going to have a hard time reconciling the music with the story.

An Innocent Witch (Heinosuke Gosho, 1965)

Jitsuko Yoshimura in An Innocent Witch

Ayako Oshima: Jitsuko Yoshimura
Kikuno: Kin Sugai
Kansuke Yamamura: Taiji Tonoyama
Kanjiro Toda: Minoru Terada
Kanichi Yamamura: Keizo Kawasaki
Father: Yoshio Yoshida
Shaman: Eijiro Tono
Narrator: Takayuki Akutagawa

Director: Heinosuke Gosho
Screenplay: Hideo Horie
Based on a novel by Hajime Ogawa
Cinematography: Sozaburo Shinomura
Art direction: Totetsu Hirakawa
Film editing: Sadako Ikeda
Music: Sei Ikeno

An Innocent Witch begins like a documentary, with a voiceover narration describing the pilgrimages to Mount Osore, where the faithful gather to ask blind seers to facilitate communication with their dead loved ones. One of the pilgrims is Kikuno, who wants to speak with her daughter, Ayako. As the seer goes into her trance, the film switches abruptly to a conventional narrative in which we learn that Ayako was sold -- willingly, it seems -- into prostitution by her mother because Ayako's father is too ill to continue supporting the family as a fisherman and gatherer of seaweed. (The father is never told about Ayako's work as a prostitute; he thinks only that she has gone to the city to earn more money.) In the brothel, Ayako loses her virginity to her first customer, a wealthy lumber wholesaler named Kansuke. Pleased with the young woman, Kansuke becomes Ayako's regular customer. Then one evening a shy young man named Kanjiro arrives with his fellow military cadets and Ayako relieves him of his virginity. They begin to fall in love, but just before he is called up for service, Kanjiro realizes that his own father, Kansuke, has been one of Ayako's customers. Kansuke, it turns out, has been aware that Kanjiro has also been seeing Ayako, and doesn't really mind sharing her with his son. But Ayako has promised Kanjiro that she won't see his father again, and when Kansuke insists on having sex with her anyway, he dies of an apparent heart attack. Soon word arrives that Kanjiro has also died at the front. The coincidence of the deaths of a father and son causes Ayako to be labeled a "femme fatale." But while visiting Kanjiro's grave, Ayako meets his older brother, Kanichi, and her involvement with this ill-fated family deepens into further tragedy. The film climaxes with Ayako seeking a kind of exorcism that will purify her of guilt, but that, too, has fatal consequences. The core story of An Innocent Witch is very well handled by screenwriter Hideo Horie and director Heinosuke Gosho, but the framing of it in the context of a documentary about the search for communication with the afterlife feels awkward, as if Horie and Gosho were trying to impose a larger statement about the consequences of superstition on the material. Ayako's story speaks for itself without extra help.

An Autumn Afternoon (Yasujiro Ozu, 1963)

Chishu Ryu in An Autumn Afternoon

Shuhei Hirayama: Chishu Ryu
Michiko Hirayama: Shima Iwashita
Koichi: Keiji Sada
Akiko: Mariko Okada
Yutaka Miura: Teruo Yushida
Fusako Tagachi: Noriko Maki
Kazuo: Shin'ichiro Mikami
Shuzo Kawai: Nobuo Nakamura
Nobuko Kawai: Kuniko Miyake
Sakuma ("The Gourd"): Eijiro Tono
Tomoko Sakuma: Haruko Sugimura
Bar Owner: Kyoko Kishida
Yoshitaro Sakamoto: Daisuke Kato

Director: Yasujiro Ozu
Screenplay: Kogo Noda, Yasujiro Ozu
Cinematography: Yuharu Atsuta
Production design: Minoru Kanekatsu

If a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, then what is a wise consistency? Because Yasujiro Ozu was nothing if not consistent, especially in the films of his greatest period: From Late Spring (1949) through An Autumn Afternoon, his final film, we get the same milieu -- middle class Japanese family life -- with the same problems -- aging parents, marriageable daughters, unruly children -- and the same style -- low-angle shots, stationary camera, boxlike interiors, exterior shots of buildings and landscape used to punctuate the narrative. Ozu's style would be called "mannered" except that the word suggests an obtrusive inflection of style for style's sake, whereas Ozu's style is unobtrusive, dedicated to the service of storytelling. There are, I suppose, some who are turned off by such consistency, who don't "get" Ozu. All I can say is that it's their loss, because it's a wise consistency, dedicated to trying to understand the way people work, why, for example, they conceal and obfuscate and manipulate to get what they really want. And why, sometimes, they don't even know what they really want. An Autumn Afternoon could almost be mistaken for a remake of Late Spring because of its central problem: a young woman at risk of sacrificing herself for an aging, widowed father. It stars the same actor, Chishu Ryu, as the father, Shuhei, and it ends in a strikingly similar way: The daughter, Michiko, gets married, but we never see the bridegroom, just as we never see the man Noriko marries in Late Spring. But where Late Spring centered itself on a kind of moral dilemma, the white lie the father tells to resolve the problem, An Autumn Afternoon illuminates the relationship of father and daughter through the experiences of secondary characters. If Michiko marries, will her marriage be like that of her brother and sister-in-law, strained by constant arguments about money? If Shuhei doesn't encourage her to marry, will she end up like the daughter of his old teacher, embittered because she gave up the prospect of marriage to serve him? There's yet another possibility for Shuhei: His close friend, a widower, remarried, but now his much younger wife has him on a tight leash, putting limits on him that Shuhei doesn't have, such as the ability to stop off in bars and to drink with his old war buddies. (Even Michiko tries to rein in her father where this is concerned, pointedly commenting when Shuhei comes home a little late and tipsy.) The screenplay by Ozu and his usual collaborator, Kogo Noda, deftly integrates all of these stories and more, but the shining center of the film is the performance of Ryu, constantly letting us see the conflict that is churning beneath Shuhei's calm demeanor. And it's entirely fitting that the final shot of Ozu's last film -- Shuhei, saying softly to himself, "Alone, eh?" -- features Ryu, the actor who appeared in so many of his films that he seemed to be Ozu's alter ego.