What Did the Lady Forget? (Yasujiro Ozu, 1937)

Michiko Kuwano and Shuji Sano in What Did the Lady Forget?

Cast: Sumiko Kurishima, Tatsuo Saito, Michiko Kuwano, Shuji Sano, Takeshi Sakamoto, Choko Iida, Ken Uehara, Mitsuko Yosshikawa, Masao Hayama, Tomio Aoki, Mitsuko Higashiyama. Screenplay: Akira Fushimi, Yasujiro Ozu. Cinematography: Yuharu Atsuta, Hideo Shigehara. Film editing: Kenkichi Hara. Music: Senji Ito.

The denouement of this early Ozu talkie is rather unfortunate: a man slaps his wife and makes her behave. It's a throwback to the marital dynamics of the era of domestic comedy when gags were milked from the relationship of a henpecked husband and a shrewish wife. Otherwise, What Did the Lady Forget? is an amusing glimpse at the conflict of tradition and modernity in pre-war Japan. A mild-mannered university professor (Tatsuo Saito) is married to a woman (Sumiko Kurishima) conscious of propriety and her station in society. When his modernized, free-thinking niece (Michiko Kuwano) comes to visit, the two women immediately are at odds, and the professor is caught in their conflict. It's a sly, sophisticated movie, influenced, as many have noted, by the films of Ernst Lubitsch, but with Ozu's own distinctive style prevailing, so much so that it's easy to forgive the retrograde element of the plot resolution. So what did the lady forget? It's not an easy question to answer, but some think it's the wife's failure to compromise with her husband's less restrictive view of his niece's behavior. 

Carmen Comes Home (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1951)

Toshiko Kobayashi and Hideko Takamine in Carmen Comes Home

Cast: Hideko Takamine, Shuji Sano, Chishu Ryo, Toshiko Kobayashi, Kuniko Igawa, Takeshi Sakamoto, Bontaro Miake, Keiji Sada, Yuko Mochizuki. Screenplay: Keisuke Kinoshita. Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda. Production design: Motoji Kojima. Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara. Music: Chuji Kinoshita, Toshiro Mayuzumi.

Two giddy Tokyo showgirls descend upon a Japanese village, the birthplace of one of them, Kin Aoyama, whose stage name is Lily Carmen. She's played by the emerging Japanese superstar Hideko Takamine, and her friend, Maya Akemi, by Toshiko Kobayashi. Naturally, their big-city style turns the village upside down, especially when they decide to put on a show and the town learns that they're not just "dancers" but strippers. This first Japanese feature in color was a huge hit, spawning a sequel, Carmen's Innocent Love (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1952), firmly establishing Takamine's stardom, and accelerating writer-director Kinoshita's extraordinarily prolific career.

There Was a Father (Yasujiro Ozu, 1942)

Chishu Ryu and Haruhiko Tsuda in There Was a Father 

Shuhei Horikawa: Chishu Ryu
Ryohei Horikawa: Shuji Sano
Ryohei as a boy: Haruhiko Tsuda
Yasutaro Kurokawa: Shin Saburi
Makoto Hirata: Takeshi Sakamoto
Fumiko Hirata: Mitsuko Mito
Seiichi Hirata: Masayoshi Otsuka
Minoru Uchida: Shin'ichi Himori

Director: Yasujiro Ozu
Screenplay: Tadao Ikeda, Yasujiro Ozu, Takao Yanai
Cinematography: Yuharu Atsuta
Art direction: Tatsuo Hamada
Film editing: Yoshiyasu Hamamura
Music: Kyoichi Saiki

With its low-angle long takes and shots of buildings and landscapes bridging scenes, There Was a Father is unmistakably a film by Yasujiro Ozu. What doesn't seem characteristic of Ozu is the didactic, moralizing tone, the persistent stress on duty, on hard work, on self-sacrifice. You don't need to check the release date for the film to realize that this was Ozu's contribution to the war effort in the form of home front propaganda, very much in the manner of Akira Kurosawa's The Most Beautiful (1944) and Keisuke Kinoshita's The Living Magaroku (1943), designed to encourage greater wartime productivity. What sets Ozu's film apart from those two slightly later films is the relative absence of actual reference to the war, except for the grownup Ryohei's passing his draft physical and the remarkable moment when Shuhei encourages his son to bow at the shrine to his dead mother and give her the news. Ozu gives us a Japan in which life goes on, not one in which consciousness of the enemy dominates every waking moment. It's a film without much of a plot, in which the dramatic tension stems from the always postponed hope of father and son that they will one day live together. The main thing that keeps There Was a Father from becoming mawkish is the beautifully controlled performance by Chishu Ryu, Ozu's favorite actor, who had the great ability to play characters of almost any age. In Early Summer (1951), for example, he plays Setsuko Hara's brother, while in Tokyo Story (1953) he plays her elderly father-in-law. In There Was a Father we first see him as the dark-haired, stubble-bearded widower, raising the young Ryohei; by the end of the film Ryohei is grown and Shuhei is gray-haired and ill, but he's vividly convincing in both appearances. He also makes the determinedly self-sacrificing Shuhei convincing, when he gives up his teaching job because he feels responsible for the accidental death of one of his students, and even his moralizing speeches bear the weight of conviction. There Was a Father is the work of a great director forced to compromise by a totalitarian regime and managing to remain as true to his art as circumstances will allow.

Here's to the Young Lady (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1949)

Setsuko Hara and Shuji Sano in Here's to the Young Lady

Keizo Ishizu: Shuji Sano
Yasuko Ikeda: Setsuko Hara
Sato: Takeshi Sakamoto
Goro: Keiji Sada
Yasuko's Mother: Chieko Higashiyama
Yasuko's Sister: Masami Morikawa
Yasuko's Brother-in-law: Junji Masuda
Yasuko's Father: Yasushi Nagata
Yasuko's Grandmother: Fusako Fujima
Yasuko's Grandfather: Sugisaku Aoyama
Bar Owner: Sachiko Murase

Director: Keisuke Kinoshita
Screenplay: Keisuke Kinoshita
Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda
Art direction: Motoji Kojima
Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara, Shizuko Osawa
Music: Chuji Kinoshita

Stop me if you've seen this one: A middle-aged working-class single man meets a pretty young woman from the upper classes and.... Okay, right. It's a romantic cliché, one that's so irresistible that Samuel Goldwyn once ordered a screenplay to be written on the basis of a title alone, The Cowboy and the Lady (H.C. Potter, 1938), and it's the inspiration for the teaming of Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn. But what sets Keisuke Kinoshita's Here's to the Young Lady apart is its country and time of origin: postwar Japan. In part the film is a manifestation of the occupying forces' desire to bring about a more egalitarian Japan, one in which a system of caste and class would be broken down, but it's also a reflection of economic reality in a recovering country whose male population had been decimated by the war. So Keizo Ishizu, a 34-year-old man who owns a thriving auto repair business and has dreams of getting into manufacturing, is introduced by his friend Sato to Yasuko Ikeda, from a cultured and educated family, as a potential wife. Ishizu is smitten instantly by the lovely but very shy young woman, but he also has doubts that she would ever be interested in him -- and he is sort of a schlub, whose chief recreation is drinking at his favorite bar. But then Ishizu visits Yasuko at her home and meets her family, learning that they are on the brink of financial disaster. Kinoshita starts with mostly long shots of the living room of the Ikeda home, but then switches to some shots from Ishizu's point of view that reveal the threadbare upholstery and well-worn furnishings. It turns out that Yasuko's father is in prison because after the war he was tricked into joining a company that was on the shady side. When its fraudulent practices were exposed, he honorably took the blame, even though it's suggested that he was ignorant of them. Moreover, a loan is about to come due, one that was taken out to help the family -- which includes Yasuko's mother, grandparents, sister and brother-in-law -- to survive. Ishizu has every reason to flee from this entanglement, but he's so taken with Yasuko that he agrees to court her for a while to see if their marriage would work out. She suggests that they go to the ballet, where he winds up in tears -- partly because he realizes that he can never be a match for her in culture. He takes her to a boxing match, where she winces at the violence but nevertheless winds up cheering for one of the fighters. And so on as obstacles to their marriage rise. We know how it will end, but Kinoshita makes that ending almost plausible, especially with the help of a talented cast that features the always magnificent Setsuko Hara. One blot on the film is the overbearing and sometimes inappropriate use of Chuji Kinoshita's repetitive score, augmented by the overuse of Chopin's Fantaisie-Impromptu in C# minor, the one spoiled for many of us by its use as the melody for the popular song "I'm Always Chasing Rainbows."

A Hen in the Wind (Yasujiro Ozu, 1948)

Shuji Sano and Kinuyo Tanaka in A Hen in the Wind

Tokiko Amamiya: Kinuyo Tanaka
Shuichi Amamiya: Shuji Sano
Akiko Ida: Chieko Murata
Kazuichiro Satake: Chishu Ryu
Shoichi: Hohi Aoki
Fusako Onada: Chiyoko Fumiya
Orie Noma: Reiko Minakami
Hideo: Koji Mitsui
Hizoko Sakai: Takeshi Sakamoto

Director: Yasujiro Ozu
Screenplay: Yasujiro Ozu, Ryosuke Saito
Cinematography: Yuharu Atsuta
Art direction: Tatsuo Hamada
Film editing: Yoshiyasu Hamamura
Music: Senji Ito

I was startled by the opening scenes that set up the plot for Yasujiro Ozu's A Hen in the Wind* in which a woman waiting for her husband to return from the war tries to make ends meet for herself and her small son by selling some of her possessions. The woman who buys her things suggests that she would make more money by selling her body. Shocked, she rejects this suggestion. But when her child falls ill, she sees prostituting herself as the only way to pay the hospital bills. The striking thing about this opening sequence is that it's almost identical to the plot setup in Kenji Mizoguchi's Women of the Night, which was made the same year as A Hen in the Wind and stars the same actress, the great Kinuyo Tanaka. But then the plots of the two films diverge: In Mizoguchi's film, both the husband and the child die, and the woman finds herself descending deeper into prostitution. Ozu, however, brings the husband home and the child survives his illness. But there is misery to come for Ozu's heroine, Tokiko: She feels compelled to tell her husband, Shuichi, the truth about what she did to pay the hospital. He does not take it well: He stews with resentment and eventually makes his way to the brothel where Tokiko had her assignation. There he encounters Fusako, a young prostitute, and instead of having sex with her, questions her about why she chose this way of life. Though he decides to help Fusako give up prostituting herself, and even goes out of his way to find her a job in the company where he works, the encounter does nothing to ease Shuichi's mind about Tokiko's actions. When he returns home he gives way to his simmering anger and, giving her a shove, causes her to fall down the steep stairway from their upstairs rooms. It's a moment of unaccustomed violence for Ozu, who throughout the film takes his usual steady, measured course in portraying these troubled lives. But it serves as a catharsis, bringing husband and wife back together -- although not in a way that will satisfy some viewers, especially in an age conscious of domestic violence: Tokiko pleads for forgiveness and even suggests that Shuichi beat her. In the final scene that shows the couple, they embrace and Tokiko clasps her hands tightly behind his back. (The film actually ends on a shot more characteristic of Ozu, in which we see life go on in the outside world in the shadow of the giant storage tanks that dominate the industrial slum where they live.) Ozu later called A Hen in the Wind a failure -- just as, coincidentally, Mizoguchi expressed his disappointment with Women of the Night -- but it remains a fascinating display of Ozu's directorial skills, especially his way of building tension quietly and making his points without didacticism. For example, he uses his characteristic subjective camera to good effect in a scene between Tokiko and her friend Akiko, who is shocked by Tokiko's prostituting herself. Tokiko asks what she would have done if she found herself penniless with a sick child. Although the question is addressed to Akiko, the camera takes her place, so that Tokiko looks directly at us, making the audience the target of the question. I don't know if the similarities between Ozu's and Mizoguchi's films are entirely coincidental -- it's almost as if they shared a common premise and dared each other to make a film out of it -- but the two films provide a unique opportunity to compare the style and technique of two great directors.

*I haven't seen an explanation for the title, which is a literal translation of the Japanese title. It seems to be a simile out of a proverb: "As [something] as a hen in the wind," but nobody I've seen on line has provided the source.