The Portrait (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1948)

Chieko Higashiyama, Kuniko Miyake, and Ichiro Sugai in The Portrait

Midori: Kuniko Igawa
Kaneko: Eitaro Ozawa
Tamai: Kamatari Fujiwara
Nomura, the Artist: Ichiro Sugai
The Artist's Wife: Chieko Higashiyama
Kumiko, the Daughter-in-Law: Kuniko Miyake
Yoko, the Artist's Daughter: Yoko Katsuragi
Midori's Friend: Mitsuko Miura
Nakajima, Yoko's Boyfriend: Keiji Sada
Ichiro, the Artist's Son: Toru Abe

Director: Keisuke Kinoshita
Screenplay: Akira Kurosawa
Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda
Production design: Motoji Kojima
Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara
Music: Chuji Kinoshita

Keisuke Kinoshita's The Portrait deserves to be a little better known, if only because its screenplay is by Akira Kurosawa. Not that it's a masterpiece, or even a particularly felicitous example of Kurosawa's screenwriting, but it's one of the better films of the enormously prolific and sometimes misguided Kinoshita. IMDb, oddly, gives only the names of the cast members, not indicating what roles they play, which can be something of a challenge to those of us who aren't completely familiar with Japanese actors. Fortunately, I was able to track down a cast list and a useful summary on French Wikipedia. At the core of the film is an old trope: the portrait that reveals the truth. In this case, it reminds Midori, the mistress of real-estate hustler Kaneko, of her innocent past, causing her to break off their relationship. Kaneko has entered into partnership with Tamai to buy a rather rundown and ill-planned house, make some renovations, and flip it for double the price. The problem is the tenants, an artist named Nomura and his family. Kaneko is reluctant to evict them outright -- this guy is in real estate? -- so he concocts a plan: He will move Midori, who has somewhat of a temper, into the upstairs room of the house, and she'll prove such a torment to Nomura and his family that they'll be glad to leave. But things start to go awry almost immediately: The family think that Midori is Kuneko's daughter instead of his mistress. Naturally, she's somewhat flattered by this misconception. She softens even more when Nomura wants to paint her portrait, and falls completely when the family downstairs prove to be kind and affectionate people. Watching Yoko, the daughter, dance with her boyfriend under a full moon, and then be joined by Nomura and his wife, Midori starts to turn against Kaneko. But then even Kaneko is softened by the tenants and abandons his scheme. This is typical movie sentimentality, a fault Kinoshita (and sometimes Kurosawa) was often guilty of, but there is a bittersweet touch to the ending when Midori, having seen her portrait on display at a museum, walks away into an unknown future.

Tokyo Twilight (Yasujiro Ozu, 1957)

Isuzu Yamada in Tokyo Twilight

Takako Numata: Setsuko Hara
Akiko Sugiyama: Ineko Arima
Shukichi Sugiyama: Chishu Ryu
Kikuko Soma: Isuzu Yamada
Shigeko Takeuchi: Haruko Sugimura
Sakae Soma: Nobuo Nakamura
Gihei Shimomura: Kamatari Fujiwara
Yasuo Namata: Kinzo Shin
Kenji Kimura: Masami Taura

Director: Yasujiro Ozu
Screenplay: Kogo Noda, Yasujiro Ozu
Cinematography: Yuharu Atsuta
Art direction: Tatsuo Hamada
Music: Takanobu Saito

In commenting on Mikio Naruse's Sound of the Mountain (1954), I noted that some critics saw his film as a kind of reaction against films by Yasujiro Ozu like Late Spring (1949) in which the plot climaxes with the marriage of a young woman. Naruse was exploring the fact that marriage is not always, or even seldom, the fulfillment of things that the bride and her family have wished for. But I also noted that Ozu himself is not above his own skepticism about marriage, and no film of his depicts that skepticism more keenly and tragically than Tokyo Twilight, in which a father whose own marriage has failed is trying to cope with the failed marriage of one daughter and the troubled love life of another. The father in this case is played, as it so often was in Ozu's films, by Chishu Ryu, Ozu's favorite actor. I can see why Ozu liked him so much: Is there any other actor who can say "Hmm" with such eloquence and variety of intonation than Ryu? He has many opportunities to pack that internalized sound with meaning in Tokyo Twilight, expressing everything from doubt to contentment to disapproval, or just reinforcing his character's stoic resignation to the misfortunes that life continues to bring him. Shukichi Sugiyama and his three children were abandoned by his wife during the war, when he was stationed in Seoul, and he has done what he can to raise the family. The son from the marriage has died in an accident several years earlier, and now his daughter, Takako, has left her husband, bringing their toddler daughter to live with Shukichi. The other daughter, Akiko, has a disastrous fling with the irresponsible Kenji, who leaves her pregnant and looking for the money to have an abortion. The various secrets that the family, packed into one of the boxlike homes Ozu has made into such eloquent settings (expressing both closeness and confinement), only become more pressing when the girls' mother, Kikuko, returns to their lives: She and her new husband (the man she left Shukichi for has died) run a mah jongg parlor that Akiko, searching for Kenji, finds herself in. Kikuko overhears the young woman's name and, realizing she's her daughter, strikes up a conversation, asking about the family without revealing the truth. But then Shukichi's sister accidentally encounters Kikuko while shopping and brings him the news that she's returned. When Takako overhears, she goes to Kikuko and asks her not to reveal her identity to Akiko. But secrets will out, and Akiko, racked with guilt not only for the abortion but also for having been arrested under suspicion of prostitution while waiting for Kenji in a bar, decides that she has inherited a bad streak from Kikuko, even questioning whether Shukichi is her actual father. Events are set in motion that culminate in Takako denouncing Kikuko, who decides to leave town. There is a poignant scene at the end in which Kikuko, hoping that she has made amends with Takako, looks out of the window of the train for her daughter to say goodbye. If you know Isuzu Yamada only as the sinister "Lady Macbeth" of Akira Kurosawa's Throne of Blood (1957), her performance as the woman who has spent a lifetime of quiet regret will be eye-opening. As usual, Ozu transcends the potential for sentimental excess and arrives at just the right blend of pathos and quiet endurance.

The Lower Depths (Akira Kurosawa, 1957)

Bokuzen Hidari in The Lower Depths

Toshiro Mifune was to Akira Kurosawa as John Wayne was to John Ford: a charismatic leading man. But like Ford, Kurosawa had a kind of stock company of actors who regularly appeared in his films. Among them was Bokuzen Hidari, who was something like Kurosawa's equivalent of Ford's Hank Worden: a somewhat goofy-looking character player, usually employed as comic relief. Hidari appeared in nine of Kurosawa's films, but he had his most prominent role in The Lower Depths, Kurosawa's adaptation of Maxim Gorky's play about a collection of society's outcasts living in a decaying flophouse. As Kahei, an elderly pilgrim who seeks shelter with the group of drunks, prostitutes, thieves, and gamblers, Hidari becomes something of the conscience of the group, a grandfatherly presence who counsels hope and dispenses wisdom that is usually not heeded. It is a standout performance in a film that showcases brilliant acting on the part of the entire ensemble. Mifune has a key role, in which he demonstrates his usual hyperactive virility, but never overshadows the work of the company, which also includes Isuzu Yamada as the grasping landlady, Osugi, who has the hots for Mifune's Sutekichi; Ganjiro Nakamura as Rokubei, her jealous husband; and Kyoko Kagawa as Okayo, Osugi's sister, who is also attracted to Sutekichi. The Lower Depths betrays its theatrical origins in its confinement to a single set (with outlying areas), but Kurosawa's camera, under the supervision of cinematographer Kazuo Yamazaki, never makes the film feel static. It ranges from pathos -- the death of a consumptive woman -- to violence in the altercations among the various tenants to black comedy. A high-spirited musical moment at the end, in which some of the tenants improvise a song and dance, is interrupted by the news that the drunken actor (Kamatari Fujiwara) has killed himself, which leads to a bitter, memorable curtain line. Kurosawa's reputation has declined in recent years, partly from a perception that he catered more to Western tastes than his contemporaries Yasujiro Ozu and Kenji Mizoguchi, but The Lower Depths reveals him as a master in his direction of actors.