Wedding Ring (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1950)

Toshiro Mifune and Kinuyo Tanaka in Wedding Ring

Noriko Kuki: Kinuyo Tanaka
Takeshi Ema: Toshiro Mifune
Michio Kuki: Jukichi Uno
Tetsuya Kuki: Kenji Susukida

Director: Keisuke Kinoshita
Screenplay: Keisuke Kinoshita
Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda
Art direction: Mikio Mori
Music: Chuji Kinoshita

Keisuke Kinoshita's Wedding Ring could easily have been made by MGM in the 1930s with Clark Gable, Norma Shearer, and Franchot Tone, and audiences would have lapped it up while critics dismissed it as old-hat. What Kinoshita's movie has going for it is the great actress Kinuyo Tanaka and the young and hunky Toshiro Mifune. In truth, Tanaka, whose own production company was responsible for Wedding Ring, is a little old for her role -- she was 10 years older than Mifune -- and not particularly suited for the film's frequent celebrations of her beauty. Kinoshita seems more fascinated with Mifune's virile presence, giving him multiple opportunities to appear shirtless, and even providing a scene in which Tanaka's Noriko cuddles the sweat-soaked jacket Mifune's Takeshi Ema has just removed. The plot is familiar stuff: Noriko's husband, Michio, whom she married just before he went to war, has come home with tuberculosis, and Ema is the doctor who visits him to supervise his recovery. Noriko spends much of her time running the family business, a Tokyo jewelry store, and she and Ema frequently encounter each other on their commutes to the seaside resort where Michio is recovering. One thing leads to another, of course. But Ema is made of sterner moral stuff than Noriko, and when Michio, becoming aware of his wife's attraction to the doctor, makes an attempt to kill himself by going swimming, something Ema has demonstrated his proficiency at, the doctor remembers the Hippocratic Oath and determines to break it off. Duty conquers love, and so on. The film is nobody's finest hour, but it's fun to watch Mifune when he was not being directed by Akira Kurosawa -- their Rashomon was released the same year, making Mifune an international star. As for Tanaka, she gave what is perhaps her greatest performance two years later for Kenji Mizoguchi in The Life of Oharu.

Morning for the Osone Family (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1946)

Haruko Sugimura, Mitsuko Miura, and Eitaro Ozawa in Morning for the Osone Family

Fusako Osone: Haruko Sugimura
Ichiro Osone: Toshinosuke Nagao
Taiji Osone: Shin Tokudaiji
Yuko Osone: Mitsuko Miura
Takashi Osone: Shiro Osaka
Issei Osone: Eitaro Ozawa
Sachiko Osone: Natsuko Kahara
Akira Minari: Junji Masuda
Heibei Tanji: Kinji Fujiwa
Ippei Yamaki: Eijiro Tono

Director: Keisuke Kinoshita
Screenplay: Eijiro Hisaita
Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda
Art direction: Mikio Mori
Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara
Music: Takaaki Asai

One of the myths of war is that the enemy moves in lockstep, from the commander-in-chief down to the lowliest citizen. So those of us who are (just barely) old enough to remember something about living through World War II, the myth of Japan as a monolithic force lingers, even though 70 years of peace with the Japanese and a wholesale assimilation by the West of their culture, from sushi to anime, has effaced old hostilities. Morning for the Osone Family gives us a valuable sense of the way things were -- or at least may have been. Made in the year after the surrender of Japan, after ideological censorship had ceased (though the American occupation imposed its own censorship, which is why you'll find no mention of the atomic bomb in Japanese movies made just after the war), Morning for the Osone Family gives us a portrait of what a dissenting family went through during the war. How accurate the portrait may be is up to question -- just as we could question the accuracy of the "home front" movies made in the United States during and after the war. But Kinoshita and screenwriter Eijiro Hisaita give us a plausible account of what might have happened to a widow, Fusako, and her three sons, her daughter, and her brother-in-law in the waning years of the war. One son is imprisoned for writing against the war; the daughter is forced to break off her engagement to a young man because of the political implications of what her brother did; another son, a pacifist who wants to be an artist, is drafted and dies of pneumonia in a hospital; the youngest son, embracing the militarist propaganda, enlists and is killed. And then there is the domineering presence of the brother-in-law, a colonel who despises the way Fusako has raised her children to doubt the glory of the Japanese military. When his house is destroyed by bombing, he moves in with the Osone family and takes over the household. Devastated by the surrender, he begins to stockpile food in their house, even as starvation spreads across the land. The film takes place on a single set, which only emphasizes the sense of a world closing in on the family.