No Blood Relation (Mikio Naruse, 1932)

Yoshiko Okada in No Blood Relation

Tamae Kiyooka: Yoshiko Okada
Masako Atsumi: Yukiko Tsukuba
Shigeko: Toshiko Kojima
Shunsaku Atsumi: Shin'yo Nara
Kishiyo Atsumi: Fumiko Katsuragi
Masaya Kusakabe: Joji Oka
Keiji Makino: Ichiro Yuki
Gen the Pelican: Shozaburo Abe
Neighbor Boy: Tomio Aoki

Director: Mikio Naruse
Screenplay: Kogo Noda
Based on a novel by Shunyo Yanagawa
Cinematography: Eijiro Fujita, Suketaro Inokai, Masao Saito

Before it settles down to become an intense domestic drama, No Blood Relation begins with a sequence of comic action: Gen, a goofy-looking purse-snatcher, is being chased through the streets until he collides with a man who holds him until the crowd catches up. Forced to strip, Gen reveals that he doesn't have the purse on him, and the cops send him away with his pants falling down around his ankles. But the man who caught him is actually an accomplice, Keiji, who hid the purse on himself when they collided. Keiji is the brother of a big Hollywood movie star, Tamae, who is returning that day to Japan for the first time in years, and Keiji and Gen see their chance for the big time as flunkies for Tamae. Her reason for returning home is to reclaim her daughter, Shigeko, whom she abandoned shortly after her birth. Her husband, Shunsaku, remarried, and his new wife, Masako, has proved to be a devoted mother to the little girl. Unfortunately, Shunsaku's business is about to go under, owing to his bad management and some shady deals that get him sent to prison. His mother, Kishiyo, is bitter about not only his business failure but also because this means they'll have to move out of their big house into a poor neighborhood. So when Tamae comes in search of her child, Kishiyo takes her side against Masako, leading to an intense battle between the birth mother and the one who is ... well, that's the point of the title. Masako fortunately has a defender, Masaya Kusakabe, whose relationship to the family is enigmatic: He's just returned from Manchuria, and since he's played by the handsome Joji Oka -- a sharp contrast to the plain and dour Shunsaku -- we begin to suspect that there's more to his relationship with Masako than meets the eye, though that part of the plot never pans out. No Blood Relation is a very effective tearjerker, with Naruse's characteristically hyperactive camera panning and dollying and zooming in to provide emphasis at key moments, and it shows Naruse's mastery of silent filmmaking, carrying the story without an overabundance of intertitles.

Filmstruck Criterion Channel

Every-Night Dreams (Mikio Naruse, 1933)

Tatsuo Saito and Sumiko Kurishima in Every-Night Dreams

Why do the plots of so many Japanese films from the 1930s hinge on the illness of a child? It was the case in three of Yasujiro Ozu's films I watched recently: That Night's Wife (1930), Tokyo Chorus (1931), and An Inn in Tokyo (1935), and it happens again in Mikio Naruse's Every-Night Dreams. In two of the Ozu films, a man commits robbery to get money to pay the child's hospital bills and is sent to jail. The man in Naruse's film also commits a robbery but, wounded and desperate, he commits suicide -- an instance of how much darker in tone Every-Night Dreams is from the Ozu films. It's also different in that the central figure is a woman, rather than the men who seize the focus in the Ozu films. The dominant figure in Every-Night Dreams is Omitsu, played beautifully by Sumiko Kurishima, whom we meet as a single parent, working as a bar hostess to support her small son, Fumio (Teruko Kojima). Soon, however, the boy's father, Mizuhara (Tatsuo Saito), shows up, down and out. She's reluctant to take him back after his earlier abandonment of them, but he's so needy and the boy is so glad to see his father that she gives in. Mizuhara is a weakling in both body and character, however. He searches for work that will allow Omitsu to give up her rather disreputable job -- there's a scene early in the film in which she gets reproachful glares from the passengers on a streetcar -- but he is turned down for factory work because the employer thinks he's not strong enough for it. And then Fumio is struck by an automobile: He survives, but the doctor says he will need extensive therapy to regain the use of a shattered arm. So Mizuhara pulls off a robbery to get the funds, but is wounded by the police in his escape. He brings the money to Omitsu, but she is appalled by what he has done and urges him to turn himself in to the police. He leaves, and the next morning Omitsu learns that he has drowned himself. In a touching final scene, she urges Fumio to grow up strong. Though Naruse is credited in IMDb with 92 titles as director, from short films in 1930 to his last feature in 1967, his reputation in the West has been overshadowed by that of his contemporaries Ozu, Kenji Mizoguchi, and Akira Kurosawa. But Every-Night Dreams displays a fiercely original talent, with a distinct bias toward portraying strong women like Omitsu. In contrast to Ozu, who preferred to work with carefully framed scenes with little camera movement, Naruse favors an active camera -- zooms, pans, dolly shots -- and fast-paced editing: The scene in which Fumio's accident is announced is a series of quick cuts from a toy car rolling off the edge of a table through shots of the boy's playmates running in with the news. He likes narrative foreshadowing: In one scene, a despondent Mizuhara looks out over the harbor as the camera pans from boats and buildings down to the water itself, while in another, Mizuhara urgently signals to Fumio to stay on the other side of a road until a car speeds past and the boy can cross safely. Yet he also allows his actors room to develop their characters: Kurishima builds up our sense of Omitsu's inner strength through her expressions and gestures. The film's story is by Naruse and the screenplay by Tadao Ikeda; the cinematographer is Suketaro Inokai.