The Munekata Sisters (Yasujiro Ozu, 1950)

Kinuyo Tanaka and Hideko Takamine in The Munekata Sisters

Cast: Kinuyo Tanaka, Hideko Takamine, Ken Uehara, So Yamamura, Sanae Takasugi, Chishu Ryu, Yuji Hori, Tatsuo Saito. Screenplay: Kogo Noda, Yasujiro Ozu, based on a story by Jiro Osaragi. Cinematography: Joji Ohara. Production design: Seiya Kajima. Film editing: Toshiro Goto. Music: Ichiro Saito. 

Some very non-Ozu things happen in Yasujiro Ozu's The Munekata Sisters. For example, the camera actually moves in one scene. Granted, it's only a brief pan across the setting at the end of the scene, but it was enough to startle anyone used to Ozu's locked-in low-angle points of view. But more unusually, there is actual physical violence in the film: A man slaps his wife repeatedly, and a few scenes later drops dead on the floor. The most contemplative of filmmakers, Ozu rarely deals directly with violence, preferring to show us the emotional consequences of disturbing events. The man, Ryosuke Mimura (So Yamamura), is unemployed. During his desultory search for a job, he is supported by his wife, Setsuko (Kinyuo Tanaka), who runs a small bar with the help of her much younger sister, Mariko (Hideko Takamine). The two sisters are very different: Setsuko, brought up before the war, is quiet and reserved and dresses in traditional Japanese style. Mariko reflects postwar attitudes in dress and manner: She's outspoken, with a spunky carefree manner, and sharply critical of her brother-in-law, whom she sees as an idler and a drunk. Then an old flame of Setsuko's, Hiroshi Tashiro (Ken Uehara), returns to town. Setsuko might have married him, but he decided to go to France before the war, so she married Mimura instead. Hiroshi is handsome and successful, and Mariko immediately sets her sights on reuniting him with her sister. Ozu develops all four characters with great finesse. Mimura is something of a dead-end case, and his outburst of jealous rage at Mimura's seeing Hiroshi again is frightening, but he has a softer side that he shows with the clowder of cats that he apparently fosters. There is something of the too-detached sophisticate about Mimura that shows in his scenes with Mariko, who falls in love with him while she's trying to reunite him with her sister. As a whole, The Munekata Sisters is more melodramatic than Ozu's films usually are, including the ending, which involves one of those renunciations that movies typically rely on as a plot resolution. But it's beautifully acted, especially by Tanaka and Takamine. 

Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family (Yasujiro Ozu, 1941)

Shin Saburi and Mieko Takamine in Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family

Cast: Mieko Takamine, Shin Saburi, Hideo Fujino, Ayako Katsuragi, Mitsuko Yoshikawa, Chishu Ryu, Masao Hayama, Tatsuo Saito, Kuniko Miyake, Michiko Kuwano. Screenplay: Tadao Ikeda, Yasujiro Ozu. Cinematography: Yuharu Atsuta. Art direction: Tatsuo Hamada. Film editing: Yoshiyasu Hamamura. Music: Senji Ito. 

Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family is an insular work like the novels of Jane Austen, which were written during the upheavals in Europe during the Napoleonic wars. Austen created her own world of domestic conflict while ignoring the larger world's conflicts, alluding to them only with incidental characters like the soldiers who delight the younger Bennet girls in Pride and Prejudice or the naval officers who appear in Persuasion. Similarly, Ozu creates a little island of family in the midst of Tokyo, and does so in the fateful year of 1941, when Japan's imperial ambitions would finally bring the United States and its allies into global war. The film focuses on family tensions following the death of the patriarch, Shintaro (Hideo Fujino), which reveals his bankruptcy and forces his widow (Ayako Katsuragi) and unmarried daughter Setsuko (Mieko Takamine) to depend on the other family members. The difficulties of living with Setsuko's siblings and in-laws form the plot of the film, until finally the two women go to live in a rundown family property by the sea. Meanwhile, the unmarried brother, Shojiro (Shin Saburi), is off running a business in the city of Tianjin, in China. When he returns for the anniversary of his father's death, Shojiro, who has always been somewhat at odds with his siblings, excoriates them for their neglect of their mother and sister, and invites the two women to come with him to China. There's a brief comic episode in which Shijoro arranges a marriage for Setsuko and she does likewise for him -- though the film ends with Shojiro shyly avoiding an encounter with the bride-to-be. What makes the insularity of Ozu's film so poignant is that Tianjin had been acquired by Japan in the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, and Japan ordered troops from Great Britain to leave in 1940 and followed with an expulsion of American Marines stationed there in November 1941, just weeks before the attack on Pearl Harbor. It was clearly not a peaceful place to do business, let alone to bring one's wife and mother to. Censorship would have forbidden Ozu from acknowledging any of this, but history has a way of imposing irony where none would have been intended.  

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. 

The Only Son (Yasujiro Ozu, 1936)

Choko Iida and Shinichi Himori in The Only Son

Cast: Choko Iida, Shinichi Himori, Masao Hayama, Yoshiko Tsoubuchi, Mitsuko Yoshkawa, Chishu Ryu, Tomio Aoki. Screenplay: Yasujiro Ozu, Tadao Ikeda, Masao Arata. Cinematography: Shojiro Sugimoto. Production design: Tatsuo Hamada. Film editing: Eiichi Hasagawa, Hideo Mohara. Music: Senji Ito. 

If someone were to ask me what movie by Yasujiro Ozu they should watch first, I'd probably suggest the one that makes the critics' lists of the greatest films ever made, Tokyo Story (1953), or perhaps his very last one, An Autumn Afternoon (1962). I probably wouldn't select his first talkie, The Only Son, but only because the print I saw was blotchy and its soundtrack occasionally noisy. It's also one of his most melancholy films, drenched in the kind of disappointment that Ozu himself must have felt in the Depression year of 1936 as militarism took stronger hold on Japan. It tells the simple story of a single mother, O-Tsune (Choko Iida), who supports her son, Ryosuke (Shinichi Himori), by working in a silk mill as he grows up, gets an education, and moves to Tokyo determined to be a "great man." But when she pays a visit to him there, she discovers that he has married and has an infant son of his own, and that the little family is struggling to make ends meet. The best job he's able to find is teaching night school. His failure to thrive mirrors that of the teacher, Okubo (Chishu Ryu), who mentored him, urging him to further his education, and went to Tokyo himself to advance his career. Now, even the teacher is struggling, supporting his wife and four children by running a small tonkatsu restaurant. Ryosuke, who is living from paycheck to paycheck, borrows money from friends so he can show his mother a good time in Tokyo. They do some sightseeing and he takes her to the movies. The film is Unfinished Symphony (Willi Forst and Anthony Asquith, 1934) a British-Austrian biopic of Franz Schubert that Ozu uses for an ironic allusion: It's about a disappointed genius and it has dialogue in German, echoing the fact that Japan signed a pact with Hitler's Reich in 1936. Ryosuke tries to impress his mother by pointing out that it's "a talkie," but she nods off during the film -- perhaps Ozu's sly dismissal of the medium that he has finally been persuaded to adopt. Though it's touched with humor, The Only Son persists in its melancholy portrait of failed hopes, ending with Ryosuke's vow that he will go back to school and get a better job. O-Tsune returns to her work in the mill, and tells her friends that her son has become a great man, but her face when she's alone reveals the truth.    

A Mother Should Be Loved (Yasujiro Ozu, 1934)

Mitsuko Yoshikawa in A Mother Should Be Loved

Cast: Mitsuko Yoshikawa, Den Ohinata, Koji Mitsui, Seiichi Kato, Shusei Nomura, Shinyo Nara, Chishu Ryu, Yumeko Aizome, Shinobu Aoki, Choko Iida. Screenplay: Kogo Noda, Tadao Ikeda, Masao Arata, Yasujiro Ozu. Cinematography: Isamu Aoki. 

Ordinarily, I would regard watching a silent movie about mother love as a chore, not a pleasure. Especially if the movie is missing its first and last reels and doesn't have a music soundtrack to sweeten it. But A Mother Should Be Loved is an exception, mostly because it's directed by Yasujiro Ozu, who can be trusted not to slip into mawkishness and also to provide visuals that compensate for what's lacking in audibles. The story is emotionally complex: After the death of their father -- a role, played by Yukichi Iwata, that was lost with the movie's first reel -- Sadao (Seiichi Kato) and Kosaku (Shusei Nomura) are raised by Chieko (Mitsuko Yoshikawa). But when Sadao comes of age (now played by Den Ohinata) and applies to the university, he sees his birth certificate and realizes that Chieko is not really his mother -- he's the son of his father's first wife. He's upset at the deception but is quickly assured by Chieko that she loves him equally with Kosaku (now played by Koji Mitsui) and has tried to raise him as her own son. Eventually, however, Sadao suspects Chieko of overcompensating: treating him more generously than Kosaku. They argue, and when Kosaku learns that Sadao has upset their mother, he strikes him. Unwilling to fight back, Sadao leaves home and takes up residence in a brothel. When Chieko comes to plead with him to return home, Sadao refuses at first, but a maid in the brothel overhears their conversation and tells him her own story, which moves him so much that he relents. The reconciliation scene has been lost with the last reel, but is narratively inessential -- if the loss of any of Ozu's work can be deemed inessential. The delicacy of the performances and the lovely framing of each scene in the film overcome sentimentality. Ozu also slips in one of his allusions to other movies by decorating the brothel with a poster of Joan Crawford as Sadie Thompson in Rain (Lewis Milestone, 1932).  

Woman of Tokyo (Yasujiro Ozu, 1933)

Yoshiko Okada and Ureo Egawa in Woman of Tokyo

Cast: Yoshiko Okada, Ureo Egawa, Kinuyo Tanaka, Shinyo Nara, Chishu Ryo. Screenplay: Tadao Ikeda, Kogo Noda, Yasujiro Ozu. Cinematography: Hideo Shigehara. Art direction: Takashi Kanasu. Film editing: Kazuo Ishikawa. 

Woman of Tokyo, which runs only 45 minutes and was shot in nine days, shows Yasujiro Ozu moving toward the economy of narrative that marks his mature style. In it, Ozu also pays homage to one of the master directors who influenced him: Ernst Lubitsch. In the middle of the film, Harue (Kinuyo Tanaka) goes to the movies with her boyfriend Ryoichi (Ureo Egawa), and we see a bit of the movie they're watching: the 1932 anthology film If I Had a Million. It's the segment directed by Lubitsch featuring Charles Laughton as an office worker who, upon being given a million dollars, celebrates the windfall by razzing his boss. The Lubitsch segment has nothing to do with the plot of Woman of Tokyo, other than that the central character, Chikako (Yoshiko Okada), works in an office, which doesn't pay her enough to support herself and her brother, Ryoichi, a university student. Chikako resorts to prostitution as a result, and the plot turns on the revealing of her secret occupation. If I Had a Million was a talkie, but Lubitsch's segment is virtually silent, and I think Ozu alluded to it in Woman of Tokyo, which is one of his late silent films, as a kind of homage to visual narrative, at which Ozu would continue to excel. 

The Lady and the Beard (Yasujiro Ozu, 1931)

Tokihiko Okada in The Lady and the Beard

Cast: Tokihiko Okada. Hiroko Kawasaki, Satoko Date, Choko Iida, Ichiro Tsukida, Toshiko Iizuka, Mitsuko Yoshikawa, Tatsuo Saito, Takeshi Sakamoto, Sotaro Okada, Yasuo Nanjo, Ayako Katsuragi. Screenplay: Komatsu Kitamur, Yasujiro Ozu. Cinematography: Minoru Kuribayashi, Hideo Shigehara. Film editing: Minoru Kuribayaski, Hideo Shigehara. 

The Lady and the Beard is one of Yasujiro Ozu's silent comedies that, like I Graduated, But... (1929), I Flunked, But ... (1930), and Where Now Are the Dreams of Youth? (1932), center on college students and their postgraduate life. The protagonist, Kiichi (Tokhiko Okada), affects a full beard and old-fashioned dress, which his fellow students tolerate laughingly, but which opens him to mockery when he goes home with a friend who invites him to his sister's birthday party. The young women at the party shun him. Worse, when he graduates, he discovers that the beard is an obstacle to getting a job. So he shaves it off, and suddenly finds that he's not only employable but also a magnet to marriageable young women. He rescues Hiroko (Hiroko Kawasaki) from being mugged by Furyo (Satoko Date) and her thuggish companions, and winds up attracting the attention of both women. Later, he encounters Furyo again at the hotel where he works: He thwarts her in a con job involving a piece of jewelry, but that doesn't deter her interest in him. It's a likable little comedy with an endearing performance by Okada. I occasionally had trouble following some of the narrative, whether because of cultural differences or missing footage -- the print shows signs of damage. As often with Ozu's early films, he shows his inspiration in the form of movie posters on the characters' walls: Kiichi's room has a poster of a Laurel and Hardy movie. Ozu credits himself, under his pseudonym James Maki, as the film's gag writer. 

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.

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.

Late Autumn (Yasujiro Ozu, 1960)

Yoko Tsukasa, Setsuko Hara, Ryuji Kita, Shin Saburi, and Nobuo Nakamura in Late Autumn

Akiko Miwa: Setsuko Hara
Ayako Miwa: Yoko Tsukasa
Yuriko Sasaki: Mariko Okada
Soichi Mamiya: Shin Saburi
Shuzo Taguchi: Nobuo Nakamura
Seiichiro Hirayama: Ryuji Kita
Shotaru Goto: Keiji Sada
Shukichi Miwa: Chishu Ryu

Director: Yasujiro Ozu
Screenplay: Kogo Noda, Yasujiro Ozu
Based on a novel by Ton Satomi
Cinematography: Yuharu Atsuta
Production design: Tomiji Shimizu
Film editing: Yoshiyasu Hamamura
Music: Takanobu Saito

It's possible to think of 1960 as a kind of watershed year in Japanese film, with the appearance of two such radically different films as Nagisa Oshima's The Sun's Burial and Yasujiro Ozu's Late Autumn. The contrast between the lurid chaos of Oshima's underworld and the strict geometry (of both style and morals) of Ozu's middle classes couldn't be sharper. I imagine some alien intelligence on a distant planet intercepting transmissions of both films and wondering that they could possibly come from the same world, let alone the same country (and even the same film studio, Shochiku). Ozu was of course an established master, whereas Oshima was beginning a career -- with a bang, it should be said, making three feature films that year. The razzle-dazzle of The Sun's Burial was long behind Ozu, if it was ever really in his cinematic vocabulary. But both films speak to the restless undercurrents in Japanese postwar society, Oshima's by confronting the disorder and corruption, Ozu's by slyly examining the breakup of stifling traditions in the Japanese family. Both end with solitary women, the gangster-prostitute Hanako in The Sun's Burial and the empty-nest mother Akiko in Late Autumn, confronting loneliness. But if Hanako has a counterpart in Ozu's film, it's really the feisty Yuriko, the representative of the younger generation who sorts out all the tangled threads that the meddling older generation has gotten snared in. At this point I feel the comparisons getting strained, but it's always fun to let differing films sort themselves out.

Dragnet Girl (Yasujiro Ozu, 1933)

Kinuyo Tanaka in Dragnet Girl

Tokiko: Kinuyo Tanaka
Joji: Joji Oka
Kazuko: Sumiko Mizukubo
Hiroshi: Koji Mitsui
Misako: Yumeko Aizome
Senko: Yoshio Takayama
Misawa: Koji Kaga
Okazaki: Yasuo Nanjo

Director: Yasujiro Ozu
Screenplay: Tadao Ikeda
Based on a story by Yasujiro Ozu (as James Maki)
Cinematography: Hideo Shigehara
Art direction: Yonekazu Wakita

Yasujiro Ozu clung to silent film for a long time, but who needs sound when you and your cinematographer, Hideo Shigehara, can use the camera as eloquently as they do in Dragnet Girl? Early in the film, the camera explores an office setting, panning over rows of young women at typewriters, clocks slowly ticking away the workday, and rows of men's hats hanging in a hallway. In the last take, one of the hats drops from its hook, as if impatient for quitting time. One of the typists, Tokiko, is summoned from her machine to the office of the president, where she finds his son, Okazaki, who has been putting the moves on her by giving her jewelry, this time a ruby ring. She shrugs off his advances but accepts the ring -- she's living with a gangster, an ex-boxer named Joji, and it's his world that she prefers. This is one of Ozu's forays into the underworld made familiar to us by Hollywood, and it's permeated with echoes of Warner Bros. movies of the 1930s. American culture creeps in everywhere: Even the rules of conduct in a pool hall are written in English on the wall, and in the boxing gym that Joji frequents a sign proclaims the virtues of "The Manly Art of Self-Defense." When an eager young kid named Hiroshi shows up in the gym wanting to become a champion fighter, Joji takes an interest in him, and through him meets his sister, Kazuko, who works in a record store that prominently features the RCA Victor mascot, Nipper. Tokiko gets jealous of Joji's interest in Kazuko, but when she decides to emulate her rival by taking up knitting and other domestic pursuits, she and Joji quarrel. She storms out, but later returns to persuade Joji that it might be a good thing to go straight. Things get complicated, however, when Hiroshi, Joji's protégé, steals money from the cash register at his sister's store. Joji persuades Tokiko that they should pull off one last heist, robbing from the office where Tokiko works to get cash so Hiroshi can pay back what he stole. Ah, but crime does not pay. All of this melodramatic business is elevated not only by Ozu's sure-footed direction and attention to visual detail but also by the performances, especially that of  Kinuyo Tanaka, who once again shows why she should be honored as one of the great film actresses. She has Bette Davis's toughness combined with Lillian Gish's gift for pathos.

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.

The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice (Yasujiro Ozu, 1952)

Koji Tsuruta and Shin Saburi in The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice

Mokichi Satake: Shin Saburi
Taeko Satake: Michiyo Kogure
Noboru Okada: Koji Tsuruta
Setsuko Yamauchi: Keiko Tsushima
Aya Amamiya: Chikage Awashima
Sadao Hirayama: Chishu Ryu
Chizu Yamauchi: Kuniko Miyake
Naosuke Yamauchi: Eijiro Yanagi
Toichiro Amamiya: Hisao Toake

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

Yasujiro Ozu's The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice begins like a 1950s American TV sitcom in which Lucy and Ethel try to pull a fast one over Ricky. In this case, Lucy is Taeko Satake, who wants to get away for a day with Ethel, or Aya Amamiya, at a resort spa without letting Ricky, or Mokichi Satake, know what she's up to. So Taeko decides to tell Mokichi that her niece has fallen ill at a class reunion and she needs to go tend to her. But just as she's about to depart, the niece, Setsuko, drops by the Satake home, so Taeko has to swiftly come up with a Plan B. What we are in for, obviously, is a comedy of marital errors. The Satakes have no children and their marriage has grown stale, which provides an object lesson for Setsuko, whose parents are pressuring her into an arranged marriage and have set up a meeting with the potential groom. Seeing that not only do Taeko and Mokichi have no passion in their lives but Aya is also insouciant about the extramarital affairs of her husband, Toichiro, Setsuko is determined not to fall into their trap. Where Ozu excels is in the presentation of the texture of his characters' lives -- Taeko with her gossipy friends, Mokichi with his daily office grind followed by visits to bars and pachinko parlors, sometimes with his young friend Noboru, whom Mokichi is helping get a start in life after Noboru graduates from college. (There's a wonderful little moment when a slightly inebriated Noboru sings "Gaudeamus Igitur.") At one pachinko parlor, Mokichi discovers that the owner is an old army buddy, Sadao, played by Ozu regular Chishu Ryu, whose chief role in the film is to provide a note of nostalgia for the more adventurous days during the war. Escaping from the meeting with her prospective groom, Setsuko joins Mokichi at the parlor, where she also meets Noboru, and we see a potential relationship spark between the two young people. But when Taeko learns that Mokichi has met with Setsuko when she should have been at the matchmaking session, she's furious and refuses to speak to her husband. Eventually, the crisis is resolved in a lovely scene in which Taeko and Mokichi begin to resolve their marital problems while raiding the larder after the maid has gone to bed, though the film ends with Setsuko and Noboru having what looks like their first fight. Ozu's bittersweet little comedy is sometimes dismissed as a minor work by a master director, but the mastery is very much in evidence.

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. 

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.

An Autumn Afternoon (Yasujiro Ozu, 1963)

Chishu Ryu in An Autumn Afternoon

Shuhei Hirayama: Chishu Ryu
Michiko Hirayama: Shima Iwashita
Koichi: Keiji Sada
Akiko: Mariko Okada
Yutaka Miura: Teruo Yushida
Fusako Tagachi: Noriko Maki
Kazuo: Shin'ichiro Mikami
Shuzo Kawai: Nobuo Nakamura
Nobuko Kawai: Kuniko Miyake
Sakuma ("The Gourd"): Eijiro Tono
Tomoko Sakuma: Haruko Sugimura
Bar Owner: Kyoko Kishida
Yoshitaro Sakamoto: Daisuke Kato

Director: Yasujiro Ozu
Screenplay: Kogo Noda, Yasujiro Ozu
Cinematography: Yuharu Atsuta
Production design: Minoru Kanekatsu

If a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, then what is a wise consistency? Because Yasujiro Ozu was nothing if not consistent, especially in the films of his greatest period: From Late Spring (1949) through An Autumn Afternoon, his final film, we get the same milieu -- middle class Japanese family life -- with the same problems -- aging parents, marriageable daughters, unruly children -- and the same style -- low-angle shots, stationary camera, boxlike interiors, exterior shots of buildings and landscape used to punctuate the narrative. Ozu's style would be called "mannered" except that the word suggests an obtrusive inflection of style for style's sake, whereas Ozu's style is unobtrusive, dedicated to the service of storytelling. There are, I suppose, some who are turned off by such consistency, who don't "get" Ozu. All I can say is that it's their loss, because it's a wise consistency, dedicated to trying to understand the way people work, why, for example, they conceal and obfuscate and manipulate to get what they really want. And why, sometimes, they don't even know what they really want. An Autumn Afternoon could almost be mistaken for a remake of Late Spring because of its central problem: a young woman at risk of sacrificing herself for an aging, widowed father. It stars the same actor, Chishu Ryu, as the father, Shuhei, and it ends in a strikingly similar way: The daughter, Michiko, gets married, but we never see the bridegroom, just as we never see the man Noriko marries in Late Spring. But where Late Spring centered itself on a kind of moral dilemma, the white lie the father tells to resolve the problem, An Autumn Afternoon illuminates the relationship of father and daughter through the experiences of secondary characters. If Michiko marries, will her marriage be like that of her brother and sister-in-law, strained by constant arguments about money? If Shuhei doesn't encourage her to marry, will she end up like the daughter of his old teacher, embittered because she gave up the prospect of marriage to serve him? There's yet another possibility for Shuhei: His close friend, a widower, remarried, but now his much younger wife has him on a tight leash, putting limits on him that Shuhei doesn't have, such as the ability to stop off in bars and to drink with his old war buddies. (Even Michiko tries to rein in her father where this is concerned, pointedly commenting when Shuhei comes home a little late and tipsy.) The screenplay by Ozu and his usual collaborator, Kogo Noda, deftly integrates all of these stories and more, but the shining center of the film is the performance of Ryu, constantly letting us see the conflict that is churning beneath Shuhei's calm demeanor. And it's entirely fitting that the final shot of Ozu's last film -- Shuhei, saying softly to himself, "Alone, eh?" -- features Ryu, the actor who appeared in so many of his films that he seemed to be Ozu's alter ego.

Late Spring (Yasujiro Ozu, 1949)

Hohi Aoki and Setsuko Hara in Late Spring

Shukichi Somiya: Chishu Ryu 
Noriko Somiya: Setsuko Hara 
Aya Kitagawa: Yumeji Tsukioka 
Masa Taguchi: Haruko Sugimura 
Katsuyoshi: Hohi Aoki 
Shoichi Hattori: Jun Usami 
Aiko Miwa:  Kuniko Miyake
Jo Onodera: Masao Mishima 
Kiku Onodera: Yoshiko Tsubouchi 
Misako: Yoko Katsuragi 
Shige: Toyo Takahashi
Seizo Hayashi: Jun Tanizaki

Director: Yasujiro Ozu 
Screenplay: Kogo Noda, Yasujiro Ozu
Based on a novel by Kazuo Hirotsu
Cinematography: Yuharu Atsuta 
Art direction: Tatsuo Hamada 
Film editing: Yoshiyasu Hamamura 
Music: Senji Ito 

The opening of Yasujiro Ozu's Late Spring is deceptively calm: the usual establishing shots of landscape and buildings and trains, the kind of images with which Ozu typically punctuates his narratives, and a group of women gathering for a tea ceremony. One of the women is Noriko, whose brilliant smile is also deceptive. This is the first film in Ozu's so-called "Noriko trilogy," to be followed by Early Summer (1951) and Tokyo Story (1953), in each of which Setsuko Hara plays a woman named Noriko. The three Norikos have nothing in common except that they are all unmarried. (In Tokyo Story she is a widow.)  The Noriko of Late Spring lives with her father, Shukichi, who is played by Ozu regular Chishu Ryu. (In Early Summer, Ryu plays Hara's brother, and in Tokyo Story her father-in-law.) The deceptions of what might be called the "get-acquainted" section of Ozu's film, which establishes for us the relationships among the characters, lie in the apparent happiness and contentment of father and daughter and the untroubled world in which they live. But Late Spring was filmed only four years after the end of the war that devastated Japan, which was still under occupation by American forces. The wounds and pain of the country and its people are invisible in the film, partly because of occupation censorship, but they provide a kind of tension in the viewer who knows what the characters must have suffered. There is only a brief mention of this in Late Spring: Noriko has been to the doctor and reports that her health has improved. Another character's reference to "forced work during the war" sheds some light on what may have caused her illness. Later, Noriko and her father visit Kyoto, and he remarks how much nicer it is than "dusty" Tokyo, obliquely referencing wartime destruction. The central deception, however, lies in Noriko's apparent contentment with her unmarried state: She feels it is her duty to spend her life caring for her widowed father, and brushes off any suggestions that at 27 she should really be thinking about getting married -- or worse, that her father might choose to remarry. She calls the second marriage of one of her father's friends "filthy." We who have seen this situation before, however, realize that the deception Noriko is perpetrating is on herself. Perhaps because she has lived through so much change and upheaval, Noriko is trying to persuade herself that her current happiness serving her father can be made permanent. And so she suffers a shock when her father displays interest in a beautiful widow, and another when he suggests that she might meet the young man her Aunt Masa thinks would be a suitable husband for Noriko. What Ozu and his frequent collaborator Kogo Noda establish here, working from a novel called Father and Daughter by Kazuo Hirotsu, is worthy of Henry James or Jane Austen -- I think particularly of Austen's Emma Woodhouse and her self-deluding attachment to her father. Eventually, Noriko is persuaded into marriage -- in a masterstroke of direction we never even see the groom -- by her father's lie: He claims that he has been planning to remarry, thereby eliminating any objection Noriko could have to seeking her own path to fulfillment. The film ends with a melancholy image of Shukichi alone, peeling an apple -- a kind of Jamesian twist on an Austenian situation. This magisterial example of Ozu's late style -- low camera angles, absence of pans and dissolves, emphasis on the somewhat claustrophobic interiors of the Japanese home -- is reinforced by Tatsuo Hamada's art direction and Yuharu Atsuta's cinematography, but most of all by the superb performances of Hara and Ryu.