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. 

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.

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