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."

Walk Cheerfully (Yasujiro Ozu, 1930)

Minoru Takada and Hisao Yoshitani in Walk Cheerfully

Kenji Koyama: Minoru Takada
Yasue Sugimoto: Hiroko Kawasaki
Senko: Hisao Yoshitani
Chieko: Satoko Date
Ono: Takeshi Sakamoto
Gunpei: Teruo Mori
Yasue's Sister: Nobuko Matsuzono
Mother: Utako Suzuki

Director: Yasujiro Ozu
Screenplay: Tadao Ikeda
Based on a story by Hiroshi Shimizu
Cinematography: Hideo Shigehara
Set decoration: Hiroshi Mizutani

The English titles of Yasujiro Ozu's films are typically oblique, ranging from the atmospheric but uninformative -- Late Spring (1949),  Early Summer (1951) -- to the proverbial or epigrammatic (but only in Japanese) -- The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice (1952), A Hen in the Wind (1958) -- to the simply mistranslated -- Record of a Tenement Gentleman (1947). The title of Walk Cheerfully would seem to be similarly somewhat aside of the mark for what started as a gangster movie, but at least the phrase appears in an intertitle in the film as the parting advice given by Yasue to Kenji as he's being taken away by the police -- she seems to mean it somewhat in the spirit of "take care." The film itself is a curious blend of gangster film and romance. In fact, the work it reminded me of sometimes was Frank Loesser's musical Guys and Dolls, which has a similar theme of a shady guy being redeemed by a good girl. The analogy leaped to mind when some of Ozu's gangsters did synchronized routines and gag soft-shoe dances in the pool hall where they meet. For these are not hard-core American gangsters or even murderous yakuza; they're small-time pickpockets and thieves. We meet our hero, Kenji, while he's still a thug known as "Ken the Knife" for the tattoo on his left forearm. The movie begins with a chase: Kenji's sidekick, Senko, being pursued by a mob who think he has stolen a man's wallet. When the mob catches up with Senko, Kenji appears out of the crowd and suggests that they search him for the wallet. Nothing turns up, so Senko goes free, but later we see them meet up and discover that they're in cahoots: Kenji has picked the wallet from Senko as the mob was roughing him up. Eventually, however, both Kenji and Senko try to go straight when Kenji meets and falls in love with Yasue. When they first see her, they think Yasue is a rich woman: She arrives at a jewelry store in a large car and goes in to buy a diamond ring. But it turns out that she's running an errand for her boss, the head of the Ono Trading Co., who puts the moves on her when she brings it to him. Eventually, after Kenji and Yasue meet up again and he learns the truth, that she's just an office worker, he will have an opportunity to beat up Ono for sexually harassing Yasue. This is very minor Ozu, but he handles it well, demonstrating not only his skill at telling a story but also the way American movies influenced him: On the wall at Ono Trading Co. there's a poster for Joan Crawford's Our Dancing Daughters (Harry Beaumont, 1928). Movies, big cars, and pop music -- Senko has written the English lyrics to the 1928 song "The Gay Caballero" on the wall of the room he shares with Kenji and is trying to learn them -- figure large with these very modern Japanese gangsters.

Record of a Tenement Gentleman (Yasujiro Ozu, 1947)

Hohi Aoki and Choko Iida in Record of a Tenement Gentleman

Otane: Choko Iida
The Boy: Hohi Aoki
Tashiro: Chishu Ryu
Tamekichi: Reikichi Kawamura
Kawayoshi: Takeshi Sakamoto
Kikuko: Mitsuko Yoshikawa
The Father: Eitaro Ozawa

Director: Yasujiro Ozu
Screenplay: Tadao Ikeda, Yasujro Ozu
Cinematography: Yuharu Atsuta
Art direction: Tatsuo Hamada
Music: Ichiro Saito

There are Web pages devoted to the "funny titles" that other countries give American films. The Japanese title for Leaving Las Vegas (Mike Figgis, 1995) allegedly translates as I'm Drunk and You're a Prostitute, and Being John Malkovich (Spike Jonze, 1999) becomes The Hole of Malkovich. But presumably other countries have similar sites devoted to silly Anglicizations of their film titles, too. Certainly the Japanese have every reason to wonder how the translators came up with an off-the-mark title like Record of a Tenement Gentleman for Yasujiro Ozu's film. The setting is not what we call a tenement: a multistory apartment building in a slum. It takes place instead in a row of small houses in an impoverished suburb of Tokyo, where people eke out a living as artisans or peddlers. And the protagonist of the film is not a gentleman but a middle-aged widow named Otane, who agrees to take in for a night a small boy who has followed one of her neighbors home. The boy was separated from his father, a carpenter, when the two of them went into the city in search of work after the apartment building in which they lived burned down. He made his way back to where they used to live, which is where he began to tag along with Tashiro, a fortune-teller by trade. Tashiro shares a home with Tamekichi, a tinker, who refuses to take the boy in, so they persuade Otane to shelter the boy for a night. Things do not go well: The boy wets the bed, and Otane, already grumbling at having been pressured to take him in, becomes even more grouchy at the "stupid" child. She takes the boy to the place where he once lived, but the neighbors there say that the father hasn't yet returned. Otane even tries to abandon the boy, running away from him when they start back, but he's too quick for her. Of course, anyone who's ever seen a movie knows where this is going: After he wets the bed again, the boy runs away, afraid of Otane's anger, but she realizes how much she has come to enjoy his presence and her heart softens when he returns home. She begins to indulge the boy with new clothes and even has their photograph taken together. And then, of course, just as Otane has decided that motherhood suits her, the father arrives, having tracked the boy down. That Ozu manages never to descend into mawkishness with this familiar premise is remarkable, but also a great tribute to his actors, especially Choko Iida as Otane, who makes the transformation from grumpiness to affection entirely credible. The film is also a tribute to the stubborn endurance of the Japanese working classes in the difficult environment of the immediate post-war period. 

Boyhood (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1951)

Akiko Tamura and Akira Ishihama in Boyhood

Ichiro: Akira Ishihama
Mother: Akiko Tamura
Father: Chishu Ryu
Teacher Shimomura: Renaro Mikuni
Toyo: Toshiko Kobayashi
Mrs. Yamazaki: Mutsuko Sakura
Furukawa: Takeshi Sakamoto
Headmaster: Ryuji Kita

Director: Keisuke Kinoshita
Screenplay: Keisuke Kinoshita, Sumie Tanaka
Based on a novel by Isoko Hatano
Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda
Art direction: Tatsuo Hamada
Music: Chuji Kinoshita

It's easy to see why Keisuke Kinoshita was one of Japan's most popular directors: He had that audience-pleasing ability to create identifiable characters and familiar situations, along with a sincere desire to make a statement about ordinary people caught up in the sweep of history. Like his Twenty-Four Eyes (1954), Boyhood is about people in wartime but not where the conflict rages most fierce -- the conflicts in Boyhood are interpersonal and internal, not international. Ichiro is a 15-year-old boy, too young to fight in the war. When his family -- mother, father, two younger brothers -- relocates to the country during the war, Ichiro chooses to stay behind in Tokyo so he can continue his studies. But the first air raid finds him on a train to see his family, and when he returns to school he finds that he has fallen behind the other students and is stigmatized for his flight. So he joins his family in the country and starts at a new school, where he is an outcast, in part because the rural people treat the refugees from the city with scorn. He also feels at odds with his father, an intellectual who tacitly disapproves of the war, and is disturbed by the fact that his mother does most of the work to keep the family fed and housed, while his father continues with his studies. Ichiro is regarded as a weakling by his fellow students, and the teachers, most of whom preach the militaristic virtues of strength and self-sacrifice, do little to help. When the lake freezes over in winter, for example, Ichiro finds that he is incapable of learning to skate, and though he makes a determined effort, he's mocked for his failure. Not as wrenchingly sentimental as Twenty-Four Eyes, Boyhood still elicits strong feeling because Kinoshita sticks with Ichiro's point of view -- his desire to fit in, his closeness to his mother, and his confusion about his father's distance from the reality of what is happening around them. At the conclusion of the film there's a measure of triumph in the defeat of militarism at the war's end, but there's also a feeling of a lack of resolution to Ichiro's story.

Passing Fancy (Yasujiro Ozu, 1933)

Den Obinata and Takeshi Sakamoto in Passing Fancy

In Passing Fancy we can see Yasujiro Ozu edging, however reluctantly, toward sound. For a silent movie it has an extraordinary number of intertitles, reflecting a stronger reliance on dialogue to carry the story and the relationships of the characters. Ozu even departs from convention on occasion to show a title card before the character has spoken the line. The film also shows more of the development of Ozu's personal style as a director than some of his contemporary silent films do: There's a greater reliance on low-angle camerawork, his so-called "tatami shots," and a more frequent use of shots of streets and buildings that don't necessarily carry information about the plot and characters but serve as something like "chapter breaks" in the narrative. But film technique aside, Passing Fancy would be remembered as one of Ozu's most charming early films. Takeshi Sakamoto plays Kihachi -- a character name the actor would retain in other films by Ozu, including A Story of Floating Weeds (1934) and An Inn in Tokyo (1935). The several characters are discrete from one another, although the Kihachi in Passing Fancy bears some resemblance to the one in An Inn in Tokyo in that they are both single parents of a son played by the marvelous child actor Tomio Aoki. (If you're not confused yet, let me also add that in Passing Fancy Aoki is billed as "Tokkan Kozo," the title of a 1929 Ozu short film based on O. Henry's "The Ransom of Red Chief" in which Aoki appeared. Oh, and that in Passing Fancy, the character is named Tomio.) Anyway, Kihachi and Tomio share rundown lodgings with Jiro (Den Obinata), who works with Kihachi in a brewery. Tomio is a good student, and he's a bit embarrassed by his illiterate and occasionally drunken father. One night, Kihachi and Jiro encounter a young woman, Harue (Nobuko Fushimi), who has just been fired from her job and is looking for a place to stay. Jiro is suspicious that Harue is "no better than she ought to be," as the saying goes, but Kihachi is smitten with her and arranges for her to live with and work for Otome (Choko Iida), a woman who owns a neighborhood bar-restaurant. Kihachi begins to spruce himself up to woo Harue, but she's more attracted to the younger and handsomer Jiro. Eventually, Otome persuades Kihachi that he's too old for Harue and that he should try to get Jiro to return her affections. Then Tomio falls ill and, following the familiar sick-child motif of many Japanese films in the 1930s, Kihachi is pressed to find a way to pay the doctor bills. Ozu's generous humor and genuine affection for his characters suffuses the film, and the splendid rapport of Sakamoto and Aoki as actors provides a special insight into the often volatile father-son relationship. There's a wonderful scene, for example, in which Kihachi slaps Tomio once too often and the boy turns around and begins to pummel his father, who submits, resulting in a deeper understanding between them. The screenplay is by Tadao Ikeda, from a story by Ozu under his pseudonym James Maki. The cinematographers are Hideo Shigehara and Shojiro Sugimoto.

An Inn in Tokyo (Yasujiro Ozu, 1935)

Takeshi Sakamoto and Tomio Aoki in An Inn in Tokyo

Kihachi: Takeshi Sakamoto
Otaka: Yoshiko Okada
Otsune: Choko Iida
Zenko: Tomio Aoki
Kuniko: Kazuko Ojima
Policeman: Chishu Ryu
Masako: Takayuki Suematsu

Director: Yasujiro Ozu
Screenplay: Masao Arata, Tadao Ikeda, Yasujiro Ozu
Cinematography: Hideo Shigehara

Does any filmmaker have a clearer, less sentimental view of the moral conundrum of childhood than Yasujiro Ozu? We tend to think that because children are innocent they are naturally good, when in fact their egotism leads them into trouble. In Ozu's I Was Born, But... (1932) and Good Morning (1959), the naive self-centeredness of children causes problems both for them and for their middle-class parents. Much the same thing happens in An Inn in Tokyo, one of Ozu's late silent films, but the consequences are more serious. Kihachi is a single father down on his luck, trudging the road through an industrial district in search of work, accompanied by his two small sons, Zenko and Masako. Kihachi is a loving father -- there's a wonderful scene in which he pretends to be drinking sake that Zenko is serving him, after which the boys pretend to eat the food they can't afford -- but perhaps a little too indulgent. The boys capture stray dogs which they turn in to the police because there's a small reward, part of a rabies-control effort. But when Zenko collects the reward, he spends it on a cap he has wanted, instead of the food and shelter they need. Later, when Kihachi goes to a job interview, he tells them to wait for him by the side of the road with the small bundle that contains all of their possessions. But after a while they decide to follow him, and squabble over which one is to carry the bundle. Zenko takes off, leaving his younger brother behind, but Masako abandons the bundle, and when they go back to retrieve it, it's gone. And when they are left with only enough money for either food or lodging for the night, Kihachi unwisely leaves the decision up to the boys, who naturally choose the immediate gratification of food -- leaving them out in the cold when it starts to rain. The film is often compared to the neo-realist films of Vittorio De Sica that were made more than a decade later, and it has the same graceful sensitivity to the plight of the underclass that De Sica's Bicycle Thieves (1948) demonstrates. Life improves for a while for Kihachi and the boys when he meets an old friend who helps him get a job. But in the end he is undone by his own kindness: He has met a young woman with a small daughter on the road, and when the little girl falls ill with dysentery, Kihachi resorts to theft in order to help her pay the hospital bills. In a heartbreaking ending, he turns himself in to the police. The performances are quietly marvelous, and while the existing restored print still shows the ravages of time, it's still possible to appreciate the cinematography of Hideo Shigehara, who collaborated frequently with Ozu in the pre-War period.

A Story of Floating Weeds (Yasujiro Ozu, 1934)

Tomio Aoki in A Story of Floating Weeds

Kihachi: Takeshi Sakamoto
Otsune: Choko Iida
Shinkichi: Koji Mitsui
Otaka: Rieko Yagumo
Otoki: Yoshiko Tsubouchi
Tomi-boh: Tomio Aoki
Tomibo's Father: Reiko Tani

Director: Yasujiro Ozu
Screenplay: Tadao Ikeda, Yasujiro Ozu
Cinematography: Hideo Shigehara
Art direction: Tatsuo Hamada

This is the first, silent version of a film that Ozu remade with sound and in color in 1959, when it was released as Floating Weeds. Yes, 1934 is late to be making silent films, but Ozu was following the lead of the Japanese film industry, which didn't switch to sound until 1931 -- and Ozu waited till 1936 to make a talkie. It's the story (written by Tadao Ikeda and Ozu himself under his pseudonym James Maki) of Kihachi Ichikawa, the head of a troupe of traveling players who find themselves in a village where Kihachi has a former mistress, Otsune, with whom he had a son, Shinkichi. The now almost-grown son has always known Kihachi as "Uncle," because Kihachi has kept his parentage secret, not wanting him to follow in his footsteps as an actor. But when Otaka, an actress in the troupe and Kihachi's most recent mistress, discovers the secret, she decides to take revenge by asking a younger actress, Otoki, to seduce Shinkichi. The revenge backfires when Otoki falls in love with the young man. As usual, Ozu's sympathetic view of human relationships carries the film, giving depth to the somewhat slight story. And the glimpses of the world of the traveling players is both fascinating and funny. The lovely cinematography is by Hideo Shigehara, who filmed and sometimes edited many of Ozu's pre-war movies.