Opiniones de davidmvining

John Frankenheimer returns to feature filmmaking after retreating to television at the behest of Burt Lancaster and United Artists. This feels like Frankenheimer, a New York based television director, being a director for hire for Lancaster, liking both Lancaster and the material, and throwing himself into the project at a level that he couldn't on The Young Stranger. For the handsomeness of Frankenheimer's first film, The Young Savages is a shotgun blast of interesting angles and compositions, announcing Frankenheimer as new blood in the world of cinema. However, the script by Edward Anhalt and J. P. Miller is just too clever for its own good, taking on way too much to explore and ultimately digging far too shallowly to be effective.

Two young Italian-American in Harlem, Danny diPace (Stanley Kristien) and Anthony Aposto (Neil Burstyn), follow their Irish-American leader, Arthur Reardon (John Davis Chandler), attack a blind Puerto Rican boy, Roberto Escalante (Jose Perez), with knives and murder him in front of his sister Louisa (Pilar Seurat). Assigned the criminal case is assistant district attorney Hank Bell (Burt Lancaster) who convinces his boss, the DA Dan Cole (Edward Andrews), to pursue pre-meditated murder charges on all three boys. It feels like an easy call because the white (were Italians and Irish considered white at this point? They weren't for a long time) attack on the blind, Hispanic boy feels so open and shut, but Hank's pursuit of justice, partially inspired by a drunken rant by his wife, Karin (Dina Merrill), makes everything murky.

Now, this is the kind of thing I should like a lot, but I think one element holding the film back is its running time. It's only 105-minutes long, and digging into nearly a dozen characters from the three killers, one of their mother's, Danny's mother Mary (Shelley Winters) who was an old girlfriend of Hank's, Louisa, Cole, two background figures of the dueling cultural centers in Harlem, and even the dead Roberto himself, all in the name of painting a portrait of poverty that leads to crime. Except, the film isn't interested in an easy explanation like that. In fact, it doesn't want an easy explanation. And that's what I should like about it. I kind of admire the fact that it sidesteps a lot of easy explanations except...I don't think it actually does sidestep them. It's kind of cagey about what the ultimate point is, and I think that's because the cast of characters is so big while the actual runtime is so short.

It doesn't help that the ending of the film is a courtroom drama. Of course it's going to be a courtroom drama. What else could it be with an assistant DA as the main character. My problem is that courtroom dramas are just generally not that compelling. There will be exceptions here and there, but I don't think The Young Savages is one. Where the film falters is in the general application of courtroom drama dynamics (including, lord, last second evidence admission which...I'm not a lawyer and I know that this never, ever happens) and in the obfuscation of everything in the utilization of a joint trial to begin with.

The most interesting part of the film is the portrait of the three young men, the titular savages, who killed a blind Puerto Rican kid for no reason and the investigation around the mess of reality that was the Bronx as the film portrays. Like, for instance, Roberto wasn't a complete innocent. There's evidence that he was a willing mule for illegal weapons for the gang. And, on top of things, Aposto has an IQ well under 100 and just gets into fights because they make him feel good. DiPace is a good boy who probably didn't actually stab Roberto at all. This leaves Reardon, the brains of the outfit and the mean streak, who orchestrated the whole thing. Except, Bell's entire effort becomes massively confused because it's a joint trial. He wants to get Aposto and diPace off because of their circumstances, and that ends up leaving Reardon kind of lost in the action with Bell ending the movie explaining that everyone's at fault.

I...disagree with this, but I don't reject the film for it. Heck, 12 Angry Men is a step removed from this conclusion and I don't reject the film for it. I resist the film because of that confusion of the final act, the use of courtroom mechanics which never feel right and the intentional obfuscation of guilt which denies any sort of ending to the story. It's an intentional choice driven by political considerations, a leftist impulse to deny the agency of the individual in place of the fault of society, and that is a killer for dramatics. "Ah, we're all to blame," says the audience, unfulfilled.

And yet, I admire Frankenheimer's skill. He's putting the camera anywhere he can imagine, getting interesting compositions wherever he can find them, intense performances from everyone, and painting an interestingly complex portrait of a complex situation. There's a lot to admire in the first two-thirds of the film. The last third, though, simply fumbles things uncompellingly with a combination of bad courtroom antics and intentional obfuscation.

It's an unfortunate end to a promising beginning.

John Frankenheimer was an established television director, doing mostly live dramatic broadcasts, when William Dozier became head of productions at RKO, inviting the young, talented director to make a new, feature film version of a teleplay Dozier's son, Robert, had written based on his own life. The experience turned Frankenheimer off of feature filmmaking for a few years, reportedly because he didn't like working with an unfamiliar crew which, he thought, limited his ability to accomplish what he wanted. However...this movie is really good. I mean, it's kind of great. Frankenheimer takes a very good script that touches on the popular teens in trouble genre, keeps everything restrained in tone, and accomplishes a shockingly effective emotional catharsis by the end.

Hal Ditmar (James MacArthur) is son to Hollywood producer Tom (James Daly). He's a teenage kid in high school, and his father isn't letting him have the easy life. Hal's car is old, broken, and needs to be constantly pushed just to start. Considering the house they live in with Hal's mother, Helen (Kim Hunter), it's obvious that Tom could buy Hal a brand new Cadillac if he deemed it worthwhile. But, Tom is trying to teach Hal life lessons before he goes out in the world. It's not quite that explicit, Tom walking through the logic of how Hal's car still works which means Hal doesn't actually need Tom's car that evening to go to the movies, but it's obviously the point.

The turning of the film happens at the movies with Hal's friend Jerry (Jeff Silver). Hal acts impudently to another patron at the theater, a situation that leads the theater manager (Whit Bissell) to kicking the boys out. Except, that's not all the theater manager wants to do. He wants to teach this hoodlum a lesson, so he orders the theater's usher to grab Hal as he's leaving peacefully which leads to Hal punching the manager in the face, which brings in Sergeant Shipley (James Gregory).

The actual dramatic center of the film is very simple: Hal wanting his father to believe his version of events. The manager insists that Hal's punch was unprovoked. Sergeant Shipley believes the manager completely and wants to throw the book at Hal but can't because he's a minor. Tom listens to the adults and can barely look his own son in the eye.

This feels like the stuff of melodrama, but Frankenheimer has the good sense of keeping everyone's acting in check. MacArthur could have gone full James Dean and screamed his way through scenes. Instead he's obviously frustrated and angry, but he doesn't yell. He actually gets quieter most of the time, like he's barely holding in his rage at the situation, only letting it bubble up once again when he goes to the manager, nearly begging him to tell his father the truth so that his father will believe him only for the manager to refuse.

And the resolution is surprisingly quiet. Having just come off the collected works of Yasujiro Ozu, I was shocked at how easy of a transition Frankenheimer's first feature film was from Ozu's family dramas. It would fit into Ozu's more melodramatic output rather than the family dramas, but the restrained approach to telling a small story works really, really well. And I have to mention the music. It's much more prominent in the beginning than in the end. Sometimes, it feels like a papering over of silently filmed footage (I think everything filmed outside, not on a set, was filmed silently), but it creates a kind of typical, mid-50s studio feel to things. And then, as the drama plays out on its small scale, the focus turning more towards indoor sets negating the need to create soundscapes not captured on stage, the music falls away, giving Frankenheimer that space to focus on what he had been doing through live television: getting performances from actors.

And that focus works really well with the modestly ambitious script with strongly written characters with clear goals tied to their emotional connections.

It doesn't surprise me that no one searches out Frankenheimer's first film, a small family drama he made in the middle of his television career before Birdman of Alcatraz with no movie stars and not at all genre related. But, I think that should be fixed. This is a great little film. Frankenheimer films it handsomely. The script by the younger Dozier is clear in intention. The acting is very quite good from a small, professional cast.

Really, this is underseen and underappreciated. It's kind of great.

I wish Yasujiro Ozu had lived another 30 years and worked every single one of them making movies well into his 80s. I doubt he would have done well with the collapse of the Japanese studio system in the 70s, but 1963 just feels far too early for a man of his talent to go. However, it's hard to imagine a better film for him to go out on. There are directors who end their careers on low notes, and then there are those who end careers on shockingly high ones. Ozu was at the absolute top of his creative power in 1962/3 when he made An Autumn Afternoon, another refinement of the story of a father giving away a daughter, and it shows. This is a tremendous achievement, a quiet melancholy for a changing world at the personal level.

Shuhei (Chishu Ryu) is the widowed father of three children. His eldest, Koichi (Keiji Sada), has moved out of the house and is married to Akiko (Mariko Okada). His youngest, Kazuo (Shin'ichiro Mikami), has just started his professional life and still lives at home. His middle child, Michiko (Shima Iwashita), is 24-years-old and probably should get married soon. So, Shuhei, once his eyes are opened to the situation, conspires with his friends Shuzo (Nobuo Nakamura) and Horie (Ryuji Kita) to find a husband.

That would normally be enough for an Ozu movie, but Ozu and his co-screenwriter Kogo Noda find more ways to fill the time. I think it's a great example of how Ozu kept making the same movies over and over again but kept finding ways to tell the same stories in new ways. It doesn't blow the story up and upend it, but the choices the pair bring into this newest telling provide some wonderful context that never felt necessary before but feels necessary now that it's been introduced. The newest wrinkles largely center around a reunion the three adult friends throw for their middle-school teacher, Seitaro, the Gourd, (Eijiro Tono). Seitoro, who now runs a poor noodle shop, never let his daughter, Tomoko (Haruko Sugimura) marry to the point where she's middle-aged with no prospects for marriage ever and can only help run the run-down noodle shop that even its regulars call a dump when her father comes home stinking drunk. She's deeply saddened and obviously so (she has a great moment where she breaks down in tears, but she's alone when she does it), and it is the context beyond convention that convinces Shuhei to get moving on Michiko's marriage prospects.

Another wrinkle is how Michiko has the example of Koichi's and Akiko's relatively new marriage as her chief comparison point. The married couple bicker over money. Koichi has to borrow money from Shuhei to buy a refrigerator, but he asks for more than he needs so that he can buy some used golf clubs from a friend. This causes a row between husband and wife that Michiko witnesses, a fight she finds amusing more than anything, but feeds the idea that marriage isn't something she needs right then. It's never said explicitly, but she's in that room during that scene for a reason (and the golf clubs stop getting mentioned after it for the same reason, the point has been made).

I also should note that Ozu's very deft handling of changing tones comes roaring back here after what I considered a slight (only slight) fumbling in The End of Summer. The movement from quiet, private tragedy to almost jaunty comedy is so smooth that there's no jarring sensation. However, the film definitely does move more towards the dramatic in its final act, and I was on edge through it all. It wasn't like a thriller, holding my breath, but it was this realization that a deep sadness of loss was coming, arrived, and washed over me along with the characters.

When one character, drunk, sad, and alone, sits down at a kitchen table to drink a glass of water, far from the camera in the furthest depth of a long shot down a traditional Japanese house, his back turned towards us, we know he's crying. We don't need a closeup of his face to understand the emotions of loss that he's experiencing. We feel it too. Ozu knew exactly what he was doing.

This is also the only film of Ozu's to deal with the idea that Japan lost WWII in any kind of detail (it's been mentioned briefly a couple of times), with Shuhei being a former naval captain and running into one of his crew, Sakamoto (Daisuke Kato), leading to some drinking and reminiscing where Shuhei says explicitly that it was good that Japan lost the war. It's interesting both as a comment from Ozu and Noda about the Japanese ethos almost 20 years after the end of the war but also Shuhei's sense of the inevitability and acceptance of loss. Here he's saying, about halfway through the film, that losing can ultimately be good. A harsh lesson to learn personally. Gosh darn it, this is really well written.

I loved this film. Absolutely loved it. If Late Autumn hadn't hit me so hard, I'd be calling this Ozu's best work in a body of work that includes Tokyo Story. And that's why I wanted Ozu to live and work another 30 years. He could make the same story of a parent giving away a daughter repeatedly forever, and I'd watch and enjoy them forever.

Thank you, sensei. Your work was remarkable.

Yasujiro Ozu made only three films for studios other than Shochiku, and The End of the Summer was the last of those, this one made with Toho, home studio to Kurosawa and Honda. It was something of a big deal within Toho because studio systems worked by keeping actors within the studio walls as much as possible. Setsuko Hara, though, was a Toho contract player, despite Ozu's affection for using her at Shochiku, meaning that for Late Autumn, Shochiku had to borrow her from Toho with the exchange being that Ozu would make a film for Toho afterwards. So, the Toho contract players got to work with the great Japanese master one time...and Ozu found space for so many of them. There's even a moment in the film where a minor character tries to summarize the family dynamics and can't because there's so much going on. That's not to say I don't think this movie works. It's a nice late-Ozu film that goes through the typical motions and works on its own. However, I have now seen it twice and just don't think it hits emotionally like most of his other films, especially after WWII.

The Manbei family is headed by patriarch Kohayagawa (Nakamura Ganjiro II), widowed and owner of a small brewery in Osaka. His son died leaving him with a widowed daughter-in-law, Akiko (Hara), and he has two daughters, the elder Fumiko (Michiyo Aratama), married to Hisao (Keiju Kobayashi), and the younger Noriko (Yoko Tsukasa), unmarried. Much like many other late Ozu films, there isn't a strong story here, but the two main threads are an effort to find a husband for Noriko and Kohayagawa reconnecting with his mistress, Sasaki (Chieko Naniwa). There's also a small effort to convince Akiko to remarry, but it happens largely outside of the family.

What Ozu had gotten really good at over the years was taking little family dramas, intertwining them, and getting them to feed off of each other in subtle, thematic ways, leading to a cathartic conclusion, usually drenched in melancholy. I think the closest parallel to this would be Tokyo Story, considering both films' final acts. However, I feel like the two major throughlines (and the third minor one) are separate here and don't intertwine. Noriko's story gets forgotten for a long stretch (not the most uncommon thing in an Ozu film, to be fair) in favor of watching the growing reacquaintance of the two older lovers. However, I don't see how the two storylines really mesh. Noriko's failed attempts at meeting suitors feels disconnected from Kohayagawa and Sasaki deciding that they should reconnect. If I squint, I suppose I could say that it's about embracing the now, the present, the real, very Ozu-like ideas, but Noriko's resistance to arranged suitors feels more like a clash than an integration.

Now, that's not to say that these things do not work. I just feel like this is made from disparate pieces, all of which entertain in their own way, but don't come together neatly as a whole.

Kohayagawa, in particular, is the comedic highlight of the film, continuing Ozu's embrace of the influence of Jacques Tati, especially the combination of the image of him shuffling down a street in his kimono with the accordion music playing over the sight. His devil-may-care attitude to his family's tut-tutting of his time spent with Sasaki, something Fumiko is more than willing to note made her mother cry endlessly while she was alive, is infectious. Noriko has that young, strong-willed feminine aspect that Ozu obviously enjoyed seeing in his younger female characters, and she holds her own in any conversation as one would expect. And, of course, there's Setsuko Hara as Akiko, all smiles, no matter the situation, politely moving through life whether it's unwittingly meeting a potential suitor or promising to find paintings of oxen in the gallery in which she works. She's a charming presence that's always nice to observe.

The comparison to Tokyo Story I've made is obviously intentional, and I point to my complaints about the film's disconnected nature when I note that I felt much less here than I did in Ozu's earlier, much better known film. When someone gets pulled from this world, it seems to have less of an impact. Perhaps it's that the film leans more towards comedy for so long. Perhaps it's the incompatibility of the stories as told. Perhaps it's all in my head, but I have a muted, respectful reaction rather than a surprising emotional one.

It's a nice film, but ultimately, once Chishu Ryu shows up in a cameo as a farmer looking up at a smokestack, waiting for the funeral to end with the cremation, the film's expansive cast feels more like an excuse to get as many Toho stars and Ozu regulars into one movie as possible (though, the fact that Takashi Shimura didn't get in makes me sad).

So, it's good. Ozu was simply far too skilled at this point to make anything less than that. However, this feels like a film bred from something other than his desire to refine his technique, an attempt to take advantage of a unique professional situation rather than a story he needed to tell once more, though it does share a lot of the same motifs.

Sometimes, you just want the ability to rate things one step higher. Late Autumn hit me hard with about thirty minutes to go, and it never stopped hitting me until the final Japanese character showed up on screen. Obviously, this is an Ozu film, so the story is deceptively simple while hiding a wonderful depth of emotion, and this one just hit me right. A reworking of the central idea of Late Spring, a child being convinced to marry only once their widowed parent agrees to remarry, Late Autumn is probably my favorite film by Yasujiro Ozu.

Akiko (Setsuko Hara) is mother to Ayako (Yoko Tsukasa) and widow to Mr. Miwa whose memorial dinner, six years after his death, we start the movie. This is attended by his three friends, Mr. Mamiya (Shin Saburi), Mr. Taguchi (Nobuo Nakamura), and Mr. Hirayama (Ryuji Kita) who all notice that Akiko, a not-so-secret crush from many years before for all three men, is still a beautiful woman and that Ayako has grown to be a beautiful woman herself. So, they decide, almost idly, to find a husband for the 24 year old Ayako, starting with a young man Mr. Taguchi knows. The problem is that Ayako has no desire to marry, mostly because she knows that marriage for herself would mean separation from her mother, something she has no desire to rush towards. But, the three older men will not be dissuaded.

Like all of Ozu's work, the focus is on small moments, but what sets this apart, stylistically, is a creeping influence that was pretty obvious in Good Morning. If Ozu hadn't fallen in love with Jacques Tati's films about M. Hulot, I'll eat my hat. Late Autumn and the previous film aren't full-on Tati homages, but the influence, especially in the music which sees the introduction of an accordion giving it a distinctive French flavor, have this light comedic air that pushed the former film fully into comedy but which Ozu balances with a stronger dramatic focus here. That balance, keeping the emotional focus on Akiko and Ayako and their decisions, while giving us these three older men who, very stately and with great grace, fumble their way through their plans.

First, the young man that Mr. Taguchi thinks of is taken. Then Mr. Mamiya thinks of a young man in his office, Goto (Keiji Sada), but Ayako dismisses the prospect without seeing his resume and picture. However, Ayako and Goto actually have a mutual friend who ends up setting them up anyway, and they start dating. All this while no one speaks to Akiko about what's going on and the three men are operating on the correct assumption that Ayako is being held back by her desire not abandon her mother. So, Mamiya and Taguchi convince the widowed Hirayama to try and marry Akiko. A lot of the comedy here, light, amusing comedy (like how Ozu imitated Chaplin in the silent period), is about how no one actually says what they want to whom they want. So, Hirayama never actually talks to Akiko. Taguchi talks to Akiko (off-screen), and we're left with flustered reactions to the stories of Akiko crying at talk of her dead husband rather than being open about remarrying.

However, what gets me is the more dramatic side. Never heavily told, allowing for a deft movement from the comedic moments to the dramatic ones, the character journeys of Akiko and Ayako as change is constantly delayed but never prevented is so well told. Both women are wonderfully well drawn, Akiko dedicated to her daughter's happiness, wanting her to move on, but never quite enough to push her into accepting marriage. Ayako dedicated to her mother's happiness, but slowly discovering the incompatibility of her desires, her age, and her growing affections for Goto. There's a small subplot dealing with Ayako's office friend who gets married, Ayako and her other friend, Yuriko (Mariko Okada), ruminating on how she could forget them so quickly when they don't see her waving her bouquet from the train like she had promised after her reception. Will things really change after marriage? Is marriage worthwhile if previous relationships falter in its wake? Can you even stop it?

Well, not with friends like Yuriko (another wonderful source of comedy) and the three older men when combined with her genuine affection for Goto. It's going to happen, and delay can only take so long.

And the film's final moments are crushing as the inevitability of change mixes with a state of permanence that leaves someone alone. It's the only choice she could make, and it's surprisingly crushing.

The combination of light comedy and clear-eyed character work that drives the drama creates this emotional impact and catharsis by the end that carries me for the final half-hour. It's subtle, deeply moving, funny, a remarkable film. It's one of the greats.

A nearly shot for shot remake of Ozu's own silent masterpiece A Story of Floating Weeds, Floating Weeds has all of the original's positive qualities while finding space to deepen the action ever so slightly using the tools and conventions of the sound era. It takes a great foundation, adapts it to a new medium, and makes it even better by using those tools of the new medium.

So, it's the same story of an acting troupe coming to a small Japanese town, staying there for a year, and then falling apart because of internal tensions brought to the surface because of the patriarch's connections to the town itself. The same subplot arises about the patriarch's mistress trying to ruin the patriarch's son by having the young actress of the troupe start an affair with him. It's all exactly the same.

Which raises the question why Ozu would do it? Why slavishly remake one of his best films?

I think it comes down to Ozu's larger approach to film. It's been obvious that when Ozu had as much control as possible (like, when studios didn't force him into making melodramas like Tokyo Twilight or he wasn't lending himself out to Shintoho, though this was a lend to Daiei Studios), he was interested in refining what he did. It wasn't about experimentation. He resisted change narratively as well as technologically (he refused to make sound films for several years in the early 1930s), and I think it's because he had found what he thought worked for him relatively early. He was using film as an extension of his approach to life, in particular his view of life a cast through Zen.

Much more than I will ever be able to write has been written about the obvious Zen influences in Ozu's work, especially its approach to aesthetics and meaning, especially through the use of negative space and quiet. So, I won't go into it other than to say that the influences are obvious and pervasive. What interests me more is that Ozu was more interested in refining how he achieved it, to the point of wanting to and actively working towards remaking a film he had already made.

So, where are the differences? The biggest differences are those of color and sound. The sound part is probably the most important because it allows for more naturalistic delivery of dialogue. Intertitles break up the action, but spoken dialogue is an extension of the action we already see. So, Ozu is less limited by how much dialogue he wants delivered, allowing for more to be spoken which creates more detail for specific characters. Color is also obviously important, providing another vehicle for meaning in subtle ways. For instance, there's a group of flowers outside the old lover's window that she curates. They're red, and their placement outside the house implies an old passion that she still holds onto even if they're not in her house anymore, implying her love for the patriarch over the years.

In terms of performance, we have a different group of actors like Nakamura Ganjiro as the troupe leader, Machiko Kyo as his mistress, Haruko Sugimura as his former lover, and Hiroshi Kawaguchi as his secret son, and they're all giving the solid, committed, and low-key performances Ozu regularly got from his actors. There are in jokes about acting styles, especially around the troupe's demonstration of their Kabuki-like play that we see, but ultimately it's not a big change. However, that may be the exact kind of change that Ozu wanted: a refinement without grand change.

There are no twists, no grand changes. It plays out exactly like the first with the same denouement, and it is perhaps even more effective in this refined form that it was originally. That refinement applied to something already great made it simply better in small but important ways. It deepened the action without changing it.

One day, I'll watch them back to back. It'll be an interesting comparison, but as it stands, both are high achievements from a filmmaker who knows exactly what he wants from his art.

This might be Ozu's smallest film (though it's an ensemble film, so the cast is actually fairly large). Its topics are the most down to earth and almost mundane, and yet through the observation of characters going through small things, Ozu finds great meaning and emotional impact. It's an endearing little comedy, full of fart jokes and human moments as people navigate small issues while revealing larger truths.

Being an ensemble, there's no real central actor to take up the mantle of protagonist, but the closest would be the brothers Minoru (Shitara Koji) and Isamu (Masahiko Shimazu), children to Keitaro (Chishu Ryu) and Tamiko (Kuniko Miyake). They are school-aged boys who have a game with their friends where they push their forefinger to their foreheads and fart. They frequently undermine their own English studies to go to the neighbor's house to watch sumo on their television since their own house doesn't have one. Angered that their parents refuse to buy them a TV of their own, they take vows of silence in protest. Their lives get harder when they run out of money for food and can't ask for more, and they get into a bit of a scrape when they steal rice from their own kitchen. It's all innocent and nice, and it has these impacts on other stories.

Like, for instance, there is a kerfuffle amongst the women of the suburban neighborhood because dues meant to be paid to an association (what this association actually is or does is never very clear), dues given to Mrs. Haraguchi (Haruko Sugimura), were never actually turned in. Suspicion actually falls on Keitaro, though, since everyone remembers giving their money to her and the family just got a new washing machine. The boys silent protest of Keitaro actually ends up fueling the rumors around Keitaro because people think that she's instructed the boys to be dismissive and rude to her neighbors. It elevates the subtle conflict between neighbors until Keitaro starts talking about moving away.

There are other little subplots, like the boys spending time studying the translator Heiichiro's (Keiji Sada) house who has an obvious thing for Setsuko (Yoshiko Kuga), the office girl who brings him the texts to translate, and like when a perennially jobless neighbor gets a job as an electronics salesman (who happens to sell televisions). And they're all little slices of life without any real plot movements. They are small character pieces of little emotion that all interconnect in mechanical (through the boys, mostly) ways as well as pointing to Ozu's thematic obsession.

Change and permanence are the dueling ideas that he attacks again and again in film after film. Here, it's told in the smallest possible way with stories of the interconnectedness of life. The children's desire to watch sumo is connected to the jobless man's need to feed himself which is connected to the translator's yearning for the pretty girl. It's all about creating this sense of life revolving around small things, people finding meaning in small things. It's this wordless effect where people's lives are moved in different ways through small actions, sometimes the removal of impediments (speech) or the introduction of new relationships (Heiichiro and Setsuko speaking about something other than work on the train platform).

There are no grand gestures. It's really just little events that form this series of moments in time that can lead to change. The television itself feels like a central image around the changing of Japan into a new era with some placid acknowledgement that change can't be stopped when it finally comes into the house. It can't be all bad, of course. It might not all be good, but it can't all be bad.

And this feeling of resignation sweeps over the audience that never feels like defeat. The subject is too light, the outlook to positive for that. It's just a resignation that change can't be stopped, so one might as well make the most of it.

It's a weird thing in retrospect, but it's very Ozu in nature. And that it has this wonderful power by the end is kind of remarkable. It's full of fart jokes, little business, and hardly any story at all, and yet, in the end, there's this swell of emotion as life just...plays out. Good Morning is probably Ozu's hardest film to categorize and describe. It seems so slight and even unimportant on the one hand, but it still ends with this wonderful sense of catharsis by the end.

He was really, really good at making movies.

Ozu leaves behind the overt melodrama of his previous two films and returns to shomin-geki films more focused on grounded family issues. Watching these in order back to back creates a certain unfair sense of whiplash after the larger dramatics which then get followed by the quiet, small issues of Equinox Flower: a father's approval of a daughter's marriage. Ozu's ability to manage these small emotions in his accomplished way make it work remarkably well by the end, and I had been wanting Ozu to return to this kind of thing. I'm just in this weird headspace as it plays out wonder, "Is this it?" like it's a bad thing. It wasn't a bad thing.

Wataru (Shin Saburi) is the patriarch of the Hirayama family with his wife Kiyoko (Kinuyo Tanaka) at his side. Theirs was an arranged marriage, and despite their impersonality and lack of understanding upon their first meeting, they have grown into a stable relationship with two unmarried daughters, the elder Setsuko (Ineko Arima) and the younger Hisako (Miyuki Kuwano). The film actually begins at a wedding Wataru is attending as a stand-in for a friend who did not want to attend, giving a dignified and short speech describing how the bridal party found their own love instead of having an arranged marriage. Things get thrown out of sort when, one day at work, a young man, Taniguchi (Keiji Sada), visits Wataru declaring his intent to marry Setsuko. Wataru is instantly against the impudence of the young man, and he will not bend.

Like all Ozu films, there are parallels to be drawn. The most obvious are the travails of Yukiko (Fujiko Yamamoto). Her mother, Hatsu (Chieko Naniwa), tries to set Yukiko up with every eligible bachelor she can find, going through every means to get them together even if it means going through a full physical with a doctor in a Tokyo hospital just to get Yukiko and a young doctor in the same room. Yukiko tells Wataru that she actually has her heart set on another young man, an arrangement that Wataru hypocritically encourages her to pursue. And it's just kind of obvious, you know. It's very on the nose. Even Tokyo Twilight, an outright melodrama, didn't have parallels this exact. And it's why it took until the final movements of the plot, including a fun reveal, for me to turn around on it. Don't get me wrong. I didn't think this was bad. However, it was never more than nice and kind of obvious.

And that's most of the film. Wataru talking about how he doesn't want Setsuko marrying Taniguchi because he doesn't like him for no good reason. Setsuko being mad at Wataru for it. Kiyoko being the good wife and mother by pretending acquiescence to Wataru's wishes while scheming with Yukiko to find a way around his intransigence. It's small moves punctuated by nice moments like the family going on a small vacation to a country spot, perhaps the last they'll ever take because Setsuko will get married soon (presumably, at that point, to the man her parents choose, not Taniguchi).

And then it's revealed that the family has taken Wataru's agreement with Yukiko about her situation as clearance for Setsuko to marry Taniguchi. The ending of the film, the final twenty minutes or so, is Wataru's slow movements from hating the situation to acceptance to celebration, and Wataru's character, established over the first hundred minutes or so of the film, blatant though the comparisons may have been, make the finale work, elevating the material in that familiar Ozu manner. It's a wonderful ending to a film I found mostly just nice through most of the running time.

So, it's a weird moment for me: wanting Ozu to return to his famous little genre and getting somewhat disappointed at that return. I mean, it's still very good, especially helped by an ending with a laser-like focus on what makes the story important. I suppose my slight (very slight) distance on the film comes from the exacting parallel between Setsuko and Yukiko. Ozu's films thrive on subtlety, and that made the whole thing less subtle. It's not the focus of the film, and it does end up being a ruse, but it just doesn't involve me as much as Ozu's other choices in other films.

Still, it's very good. Almost like Ozu on autopilot. But his autopilot is better than most people's best efforts.

Another step towards melodrama from Ozu, Tokyo Twilight has all of the big sweeping pieces but none of the emotional swings, the director keeping to his restrained style even as he includes more expressive lighting and shadows. The actors are keeping things in check, and it's Ozu's secret sauce to making this stuff still work. Filling the film with side-characters that don't really have their own stories but do help fill out the edge of the frame both practically in helping to make the world feel bigger and more alive as well as thematically in giving greater context and a larger canvas for character decisions and thoughts to connect. It's really an exceptionally crafted piece of melodrama.

Shukichi (Chishu Ryu) is a single father with two adult daughters, the elder Takako (Setsuko Hara) and the younger Akiko (Ineko Arima). He also had a son who died several years back in a mountain climbing accident. The children's mother is never talked about in the house. Takako is estranged from her husband, Yasuo (Kinzo Shin), and raises her two-year-old daughter in Shukichi's house. The actual plot of the film revolves around Akiko, though. She has a somewhat secret boyfriend in Kenji (Masami Taura), and her life is suddenly over when she discovers that she's pregnant. She can't tell her father about it because he'd disapprove. She can barely say it to Kenji himself because of Japanese culture. She can't go to anyone for help explicitly, begging for 5,000 yen for reasons she won't explain directly to the people she's begging because it's for an abortion which she can't mention. And, on top of this, their mother, Kisako (Isuzu Yamada) is discovered to be in Tokyo, having lived there for two years without telling anyone, and remarried to Sakae (Nobuo Nakamura).

Pure melodrama would focus on Akiko, but the extra moving pieces, especially Kisako, deepen things. There are common threads in time, drawing parallels between, in particular, Akiko and Kisako that align but don't match exactly (I'd have just rolled my eyes if they had matched exactly). And then they actually start interacting directly while revealing bits of information about their pasts, especially how Kisako ended up leaving the family. These details deepen the action and characters in their journeys, especially in how they have to suffer quietly and largely alone, Japanese conventions of shame preventing communication.

What seals it for me, though, is that Akiko is not actually the heart of the film. What she goes through is horrific and tragic, especially when she sees Kenji again after she's made her big decision, but it's Takako who ends up being the main focus in the end. She's caught in the middle of all of the action, unable to help Akiko because Akiko has kept her plight secret while being the vector for all of the moral lessons veering through her family. She has the advantage of already knowing her mother's story, the revelation of which to Akiko sends her over a cliff emotionally, but she's also in this place where her own relationship with her own husband needs re-evaluation. What's important in the light of Akiko's situation, the reappearance of her mother, and the tragic outcome of it all?

And she gets that guidance through her father. Shukichi has been protected from knowledge of almost everything, operating without fully understanding what's going on, and yet, he still ends up the most even-headed character. He provides that bits of wisdom that recast events and situations for Takako, and Ozu slows and quiets everything down. Her reflection at the events of the film, as melodramatic as they might have been, reveal that wonderfully subtle emotional weight and power of Ozu doing his best work.

So, this is Ozu being slightly less interesting by embracing melodramatic convention but pulling off the assignment with his normal flare, that quiet, introspective flare that deepens the action and characters. Really, the value of just having shots of people looking off into the middle distance after something has happened is just great, and Ozu uses that perfectly. I mean...this is great melodrama. I just prefer it when Ozu is telling more restrained stories.

The Japanese film industry was changing, and Ozu's comfort zone of the family drama was falling out of favor. So, he was convinced to make something more facially melodramatic. Now, I remember my more muted (but still somewhat positive) reaction to the last time he did this sort of thing, lending himself out to Shintoho for The Munekata Sisters, and I was a bit worried about Early Spring. And yet, this is Ozu more adeptly transitioning to the more melodramatic space. Perhaps it's because this is an original script by Ozu and his collaborating writer Kogo Noda instead of an adaptation of someone else's work, but this works just so well. It's a subtle, quiet effect that digs deep as it plays out in surprisingly unconventional ways. It ends up feeling, on the surface, like another Ozu film, but is actually a surprising departure that he lands rather perfectly.

Shoji (Ryo Ikebe) is married to Masako (Chikage Awashima), and they are not a happily married couple. They lost their only son to a sickness some years before, and it's obvious that they simply stopped having sex. There's no passion, and there's a slight amount of henpecking from Masako (it's not as pronounced as in some of Ozu's previous films). They essentially live separate lives with Shoji spending is days at work in the accounting offices of a brick manufacturer, playing mahjong with his friends afterwards, and going on little sojourns with them on weekends while Masako mostly stays at home, visiting her mother who owns a small restaurant nearby. And then Shoji decides to start an affair with Chiyo (Keiko Kishi) whom everyone calls Goldfish, a member of the group of friends.

It's not a surprise that Ozu doesn't show our characters in the middle of the throws of passion, and that's where the unconventionality ends up appearing. Given a view of Shoji's homelife as passionless and largely unloving and Goldfish as warm to Shoji, the affair makes sense. However, outside of their first kiss in a restaurant's private room and the morning after a night they spent at a hotel, we actually don't see them together through most of the affair. They don't share a scene for over an hour after that. And this is where Masako's suspicions of Shoji's infidelities rise. She knows something's going on, but every night she's suspicious of him, he's actually doing what he says he's doing from visiting his sick friend Minoru (Zen Murase) or having an evening with his war buddies drinking (bringing home a couple of them to sleep).

And that irony is what drives the film. It's an ironic film where contrasts are constantly at play. From the duality of modern Japan still embracing its traditional aesthetics in terms of garb and building to the contrasts of health vs. Sickness (Minoru), domicile vs. Workplace, youth vs. Age, single vs. Married, and even Tokyo vs. The countryside. Within those ironic spaces, Ozu is inviting introspection and meaning, and the spaces of time he injects between them accentuate that. It's a series of events where we have the time to consider how our central character, Shoji, is supposed to navigate between all of these opposing forces. It's one of the reasons why the film has this quiet power. Shoji is caught between things, much more than just his wife and his lover.

And that space between scenes that Shoji and Goldfish share has this great effect of refocusing the film. Ozu establishes the relationship well and early, but then we spend so much time with Masako that our views of Shoji's affair as understandable gives way to sympathy for Masako. That's made all the more complicated by the fact that she's right in general about Shoji being up to something but wrong about the specifics on the nights she's the most suspicious. So, when the film moves into its final act with Shoji accepting a transfer to a remote corner of Japan, we don't have villains or heroes, we have people navigating a complex series of events and circumstances who used to love each other and rediscover each other through their actions over the course of the film.

There's no grand gesture or swell of music to underline the effect. Ozu just presents it simply and quietly as things resolve, time moves on, and people have grown. I think the quiet way that this film ends makes it even more powerful for me. There's no death to refocus characters. It's a predicted movement, the end of the temporary, and the reassertion of something larger. It hits me.

So, this might be Ozu having to modify his work to bend to the popular will, but thankfully the popular will wasn't bending that much. It's not like Shochiku was forcing him to make a kaiju movie, or something (though...what if,...?), but he bends the slight change in genre directly to what he wants and does well. The quiet, subtle way this film touched me really surprised me. It's great.

Yasujiro Ozu's most famous film, Tokyo Story is an exemplar of his style and appeal. A quiet, small story of family, changing times, and lost opportunity, the movie is a subtle affair that creates characters to explore these themes with intelligence and a deep well of emotion that never comes close to melodrama. It's a simply great film that requires patience and attention but rewards the viewer greatly upon that investment.

Shukichi (Chishu Ryu) and Tomi (Chieko Higashiyama) are the elderly parents of five children. The two eldest, Koichi (So Yamamura), a doctor and Shige (Haruko Sugimura), a beautician, live in Tokyo. Their middle son, Shoji, died during the war, but his wife, Noriko (Setsuko Hara), also lives in Tokyo. Their fourth, Keizo (Shiro Osaka), lives in Osaka. And their youngest, Kyoko (Kyoko Kagawa), lives with them in Onomichi. Shukichi and Tomi have a planned visit to Tokyo to see all of their children, and they arrive first at Shukichi's house.

Most writing on this emphasizes the connection with Leo McCarey's Make Way for Tomorrow, a film about an elderly couple visiting their children in the big city (which ends in a divorce), but I was struck by the remake-aspect connecting Tokyo Story with Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family where, for different reasons, the adult children of an older couple shuffle their parents from one house to the next, all because of inconvenience and disconnection. The earlier film was more facially melodramatic, but the structure is surprisingly similar. The movement isn't because the parents are being pushed out, though. It's because they do not wish to be a burden.

Koichi is busy. They plan an outing for Sunday, but he must rush to see a patient, so the day is canceled. Noriko ends up filling in most of the time, taking them on a bus ride and tour through the metropolitan city, the only one to take a day off of work to help the elderly couple around. Shukichi and Tomi are full of understanding for the busy lives of their children, only quietly bemoaning the distance that has grown between them over the years since they left home, but only when they're alone and always in the most polite of terms even to each other.

Their week in the city ends with them having spent most of their time alone, shuffling from one house to another, and even splitting up for a night with Shukichi going off on his own, finding some old friends, and reverting to an older form by drinking heavily. He seems happy, Ryu always performs with this smile on his face, but there's an underlying sadness that he can only connect to random encounters with old friends instead of his own children.

And then the final act of the film is reminiscent of Ikiru where someone dies and everyone gathers to talk about it. Much like Kurosawa's film, Tokyo Story leaves its emotional impact here, where people come together to realize what they've missed. However, the impact comes from very different directions. Ikiru is about people discovering worth in someone they never really knew. Tokyo Story is about people discovering what they missed in their own blindness to the people closest to them. The melancholy is deep, and it's achieved without anyone crying in exaggerated terms. It's people sitting quietly as the realities of missed opportunities wash over them. That encompasses more than just the events of the film, the visit to Tokyo that everyone brushed off to continue their own lives, but the dramatics of the film, those quiet moments where people decided that their jobs were more important than showing Shukichi and Tomi around on their one trip to the big city, are what provide the dramatic power. There are implications of more regret, but we have this very concrete regret that people are living with, their final chance to connect with a parent before they died.

It's really expertly done, written, and executed.

And its execution is once again the quiet way that Ozu makes his films. Performances, as noted, are very restrained. He uses his tatami-mat shot for most of the film. It has that familiar effect of making the audience feel like they're part of the family, watching things play out in the same room without relying on more obvious cinematic tools like closeups to sell every moment. Ozu brings us into these people's lives so that we can see them as real people, see them struggle with reality, and then deal with a tragedy. And it's that subtle approach to delivery that makes it work so deeply and well.

And one thing I haven't been writing about while watching is how, while the films are deliberately paced slowly, they never feel that slow. We're not being bombarded with action, but there's meaning in everything. His breakaway shots of the outside give us a moment to pause and reflect. The way scenes can be consumed with the mundane like unpacking after a trip have this weird effect of making the action more immediate when combined with well-defined characters. It's a vital part of the package, and it invites observation. That observation into these characters and their lives creates this overall aesthetic that makes the mundane more compelling. It's not about expecting something to go wrong, like a plate crashing, but looking for the subtle movements of the actors to imply something. A scene where nothing happens in an action movie will stand out and drag, but a scene where nothing happens in a small, quiet family drama about people not quite saying what they mean to each other can have great interest and even power. And Tokyo Story is filled with these moments.

So, yes, Tokyo Story is a masterpiece. It very likely could be Ozu's greatest achievement. It's touching in a deep, subtle way. It's miraculously made. Ozu's intelligent approach to his stories makes them far more compelling than I imagine almost anyone else could make them. He was a gem of cinema, and this may be his crowning achievement.

Essentially the same movie as What Did The Lady Forget?, The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice is the story of a long-married couple as seen through the ideas of a young woman. It's not quite the same thing, the emphasis here falling more on the couple than the ideas of the young woman, and I think that's why I like this more than the earlier take on the similar idea. The emotional catharsis seemingly lied with the young woman in the earlier film, but here it rests fully on the couple, allowing them to rediscover their equilibrium but with greater understanding. It's a more emotionally satisfying way to end the story.

Mokichi (Shin Saburi) and Taeko (Michiyo Kogure) are a middle-aged married couple without children. They almost live separate lives as he goes to work every day and comes back exhausted, eating long after she has finished her meal, and she spends most of her time with her friends. She doesn't even know that Mokichi likes to pour his sauce over his rice, a habit she sees as uncouth, something from his upbringing outside of Tokyo. There's not a lot of story, but what little there is revolves around Taeko working with some friends to help her niece, Setsuko (Keiko Tshushima), find a husband through a matchmaker, and Mokichi mentoring a new employee to his organization, Noboru (Koji Tsuruta).

Much like Ozu's previous films, especially Early Summer, the effort to create a world around our main characters ends up working very well in the film's favor. It's a thematic underpinning and, in this case, even a counterpoint to some degree. We get a similar discussion between Taeko and Setsuko about the value of marriage as we heard in the earlier film, with an even more pronounced form of marital discontent playing out. The bit with Noboru never touches on marriage explicitly, but when Mokichi and Setsuko go out for an evening together, Setsuko wrangling Mokichi into taking her to dinner while Noboru is along as well. They end up walking down a street together at the end, the two young people, without anything close to a promise of marriage or even a declaration of a relationship, happily teasing each other wordlessly as they go.

It creates this framing around the idea of marriage that works within the film and its central relationship between Mokichi and Taeko. Her treatment of Mokichi, as seen by Setsuko, is dismissive and manipulative, lying to him about the health of a friend (first Setsuko and then someone else when she just turns up at the house all fine and stuff) as an excuse to go a spa retreat for the weekend. It's a blatant, obvious lie, and Mokichi seems to fall for it. But, Mokichi simply doesn't mind. He'd rather his wife not lie to him, but if she's going to lie, perhaps she can make it more convincing. She also henpecks him, complaining about how he eats his rice and what brand of cigarettes he smokes, and it's a bubbling mess that is bound to explode.

And it does explode, but in that trademarked, restrained, Ozu fashion. It comes to a head with a discussion using strained voices where both sides out their issues. And then the film gets quiet again, and this is where Ozu's propensity for being still manifests, once again, as being so valuable to how his films work. There's this extended moment of reflection as Mokichi and Taeko take a break from their fight to prepare a late night meal. It's mostly done in a single shot of the two puttering around the kitchen as they bring dishes to the central island. It's nearly silent, only accentuated by the sound of cabinets opening and closing and some small incidental dialogue about what's going on in terms of the food, and yet it provides this time to consider the situation. To calm down from the emotional high. To reflect on meaning.

So, when the two end up apologizing and finding common ground, it's actually quite affecting, and it has everything to do with the pause, with Ozu embracing the quiet moments.

I do think Setsuko ends up more like a distraction, though. She largely disappears through the important parts, and yet she's so front and center through the early parts. She feels more disconnected from the important parts of the story. It's a niggling issue.

Still, this is Ozu demonstrating his mastery of his art once again. Probably not the very top of his output, but this is still a touching look at a relationship told with quiet reserve: exactly what I want from an Ozu film.

Returning to Shochiku after a one film deal with Shintoho, Ozu also returns to his more restrained and original storytelling, as well as his new leading lady, with Early Summer. It's a further example of Ozu being master of what he wants to do: telling small, domestic stories with large implications, quiet emotions, and a steady pace that allows the audience to take in all of the fine details and implications of small movements with large impacts. No one mess with Ozu's process again, please. This is where he's at his best.

Noriko (Setsuko Hara) is an unmarried adult daughter in the Mamiya family, living with her father Shukichi (Ishiro Sugai) and mother Shige (Chieko Higashiyama), older brother Koichi (Chishu Ryu), and his wife Fumiko (Kuniko Miyake), as well as their two small children. The focus on the film is Noriko's status as an unmarried woman aging out of the point of desirability for most eligible men, and the family's efforts to arrange a marriage for her without her knowledge.

As with most of Ozu's films, there aren't a whole lot of events to talk about. There are, however, a fair number of tiny subplots to touch on. None of them really matter to the central plot, but they create this image of a family, a reality of life that is precariously being kept in place by supports that no one really realizes are there. Take the plight of Koichi's eldest son who desires new train tracks for his toy train. The family is not in a situation where it can toss money at him for toys, but he doesn't care. Koichi comes home with a package that looks like it could be train tracks. The boy opens it with excitement only to find out it's a loaf of bread, so he goes into Koichi's office and kicks the loaf around defiantly, eventually getting scolded harshly. The pair of children run away for a few hours and don't come back until nightfall, worrying everyone in the process. What does this have to do with Noriko's friend, Aya (Chikage Awashima), working with Koichi to set Noriko up with a 40 year old man that we never see? Literally, nothing, but it provides this contextual and thematic space for the central story that informs the importance of what Noriko is going through.

Because it all comes together in the end when Noriko makes a sudden decision (that her family considers rash and ill-advised) to suddenly accept the hand of the established widower Kenkichi (Hiroshi Nihon'yanagi) who has a daughter from his first marriage. Of course, this happens without Kenkichi's knowledge, going through his mother Tami (Haruko Sugimura). However, the subplot of the boys and their train tracks is the reality of the world that the family itself is trying to end without realizing it. Noriko is a key pillar to that family life (she helps resolve the issue in the end), and her acceptance of a marriage proposal means that the delicate balance of the household is going to come to an end. The irony, of course, is that when the family is bemoaning how her rash decision will tear apart the family when she moves away from Tokyo to Akita, they were going to make it happen anyway. Noriko was never going to just stay at home.

And that's where all of the interactions Noriko has with Aya and her other two friends. The group of four are broken into two groups, the unmarried (Noriko and Aya), and the married. There's light teasing both ways between the two groups, especially calling one's husband Mr. Carrot because of his hatred of the vegetable, but ultimately it's this conflict between two outlooks: independence and coexistence with a mate. And it resolves with the unmarried finding themselves cut out of the marrieds' lives because, despite their long friendship, their lives just don't mesh anymore. It's never made explicit, but this is tied to what would happen with Noriko should she marry no matter what. Her life and those of her family will diverge.

It's inevitable. It will lead to more happiness, but it's also very sad at the same time. And Ozu gives us this time to reflect on the decisions and implications as the film plays out. It's the key to his small stories: his methodical pacing. Without a lot of major plot twists, Ozu really gives us and the characters time to consider what's going on and what it means. It deepens the film's emotions and makes these small moves, especially in the final moments, impact all the more strongly.

Really, Ozu was a master at this stuff. He worked well within his little box. I think he knew it, and he was powerful enough to never leave it again. That's not a bad thing.

Ozu is always dancing on this line of melodrama, and he very typically rests on one side, the reserved and constrained side of things. However, with The Munekata Sisters steps fully on the other side of the line into full melodrama. I can imagine another form of this film more in line with Ozu's typical sensibilities that starts about 80% of the way through it as it currently is, and then spends 100-minutes to retell the current form's final 20 minutes. I think I might have liked that version better. That's not to dig too much on this film though. It's well-built melodrama. It's solid and mildly effective. It's just not up to Ozu's better standards.

The titular sisters are Setsuko (Kinuyo Tanaka), the elder, and Mariko (Hideko Takamine), the younger. Setsuko is married to Mimura (So Yamamura) who is unemployed and has been for a while at the same time that the bar that Setsuko owns is seeing an extended down period. The film actually begins with Setsuko rushing out of Tokyo to meet with her uncle, an oncologist, who has diagnosed the girls' father (Chishu Ryu) with cancer, not telling him about the diagnosis which was the practice in Japanese medicine at the time (think Ikiru).

Knowing Ozu's films, it's obvious where this film is going to go: the sisters dealing with the impending death of their father. And yet, that's not what happens. Instead, the focus turns to an old love of Setsuko's, Hiroshi (Ken Uehara), who has recently returned to France, divorced, and present as a contrast to Mimura's downtrodden status. It becomes a story about two sisters fighting over views of the world, centered around the question of what to do about Hiroshi and Mimura.

And what makes Ozu's take on this melodramatic material about a failing marriage and a potential affair, with the added spice of the younger sister getting mad at the older sister and trying to marry the old lover, is the specificity of character. Setsuko opens the film with her interactions with her oncologist uncle, worrying about the state of her father. Their father helps provide thematic context for what happens. Mariko is frustrated at Setsuko's situation and wants her to break free from Mimura to make herself happy, presenting this contrast between old ways and new ways that the girls have to navigate through.

It all provides this great grounding for the large swings in emotion that end up dominating the final act. No one is milking the giant cow in terms of overacting, but there's much more shouting and obvious tension at play here than Ozu has shown in a long time. I suspect no small part of this change in direction is the sudden move to Shintoho, the offshoot of Toho Studios in the late 40s that was designed to compete directly with Toho, though Ozu had been working for Shochiku since the silent era (he'd return to Shochiku with his next film). Another issue is that this is one of a very few number of films Ozu made based on someone else's work (the novel by Jiro Osaragi of the same name). He obviously felt some kind of desire to preserve as much of the original novel as possible, refusing to make it completely his own like someone like Kubrick might have done.

So, when we get to the ending that includes an unexpected death that allows for a reunion, it's so heavily melodramatic that it kind of feels...out of place. Ozu's approach to filmmaking makes it feel out of place in the film itself, and Ozu's body of work makes it feel out of place there. That's not to say it doesn't work. It works fine, but it does not have the subtle power of the smaller movements of Ozu's work in general.

Essentially, The Munekata Sisters works fine as a small melodrama, but it feels like some kind of compromised work. Ozu, working for a new studio trying to gets itself off the ground, adapting a book that doesn't quite match his sensibilities, does the best he can and comes out with a respectable result. It's never going to be rediscovered as one of his great films, but it's a fine little entertainment in its own right.

Most famous as Ozu's first collaboration with Setsuko Hara, a collaboration that they would continue for more than a decade and include most of Ozu's most famous films, Late Spring is another example of Ozu's technical mastery in service to a quiet, intimate, familial story of change, unwelcomed, necessary, but inevitable change. I don't quite get the emotional gut punch of A Hen in the Wind, but the small story is still affecting and emotionally involving nonetheless.

Noriko (Hara) lives with her father Shukichi (Chishu Ryu), and she is eminently happy with the situation. They live in the suburbs of Tokyo. They take the same train into town to go to their jobs. They share a meal most nights. She has little need for anything else. And then her aunt, Shukichi's sister Masa (Haruko Sugimura), decides that she is going to play matchmaker for Noriko, and Noriko's life falls apart. The description makes it sound too melodramatic, but Noriko really doesn't want to shake up her life. She loves living with her father, and she feels no need to change anything. Shukichi understands that she can't live like this, especially with him getting older. What will she do when he dies? So, he plays along.

This is the first film from Ozu that I get an impression is born from his own outlook on domestic affairs. He never married and lived with his mother until she died two years before he did (they share a grave). He probably felt pressure to marry, though he never gave in, and Noriko ends up feeling like a kind of cipher character for him. Tie that in with the Zen approach to his themes and storytelling, especially around the co-existing relationships between permanence and change, and you've got what may be his most personal story yet.

Anyway, the plot, of course, resolves around the effort to convince Noriko to marry Satake (who is never seen by always compared to Gary Cooper). Noriko has a little fling with Hattori (Jun Usami), Shukichi's assistant, riding bicycles and kind of falling for him, which helps provide more friction for Noriko's thinking. However, Shukichi himself decides to lead her on by saying he's planning on marrying as well. He's boxing her in, telling her that the domestic situation they enjoy is coming to an end no matter what.

And that force of change is, of course, the point. Noriko must accept it. She hates it. She doesn't want to. She never screams or yells about it, though, once again showing an actress falling in line with Ozu's acting philosophies. She's almost always smiling, even when discussing how she finds a man divorcing and remarrying as scandalous, until she realized that she has no other choices. Then she retreats to a sitting room and cries quietly to herself. That reserve in displaying emotion, only coming out at key moments, is what gives these emotional moments power for the audience, especially with Ozu's filming techniques implying that we're in the room as observers, unmentioned members of the family who see the drama play out.

And the inevitable plays out, with an interesting twist about Shukichi's motive and purpose, and we're left with this quiet feeling of resolution, all while the niggling feeling that things will continue in their own way. It's very Zen in a very real sense. This embrace of being part of something much larger, a Natural world like weeds in a river or a hen caught in the wind. The use of a seasonal name for the title (away from titles that feel like lines in haikus) is also an indication of his motive. It's about a moment in time, but that moment in time is part of the year, a year that will blend with others.

It's a very good film, one that works on its own, subdued terms to draw specific portraits of people who feel real, putting them through emotional wringers, and never lets things spiral out of control in terms of tone. Ozu's assured hand keeps things right and on point, and we're left with time for contemplation of the effects of life on us all by the end.

It's really good, is what I'm saying.

For a while, I've felt like Ozu's titles would work well as lines in haikus. Well, the English versions. Maybe the Japanese originals also retain the right number of syllables, but A Hen in the Wind is five syllables, like the opening line of a haiku. It's also an evocative image that instantly calls to mind potential symbolism, symbolism that follows through from the film itself, a woman caught up in circumstances outside of her control, trying to find some way to land. I do think the film, though, is one of Ozu's unsung masterpieces. This movie crushed me a bit. It's right in this perfect place between melodrama and character-based storytelling, the sort of thing Ozu is not as famous for but could obviously handle really well.

Tokiko (Kinuyo Tanaka) is married to Shuichi (Shuji Sano) who has not been home in four years since before the end of the war. Their son, Hiroshi, has no living memory of his father. Left alone for years, Tokiko has managed to carve out a half-way decent, but impoverished life, maintaining a household that feels like a home for Shuichi's return. Things go wrong with Hiroshi suddenly becomes sick, requiring medical help including ten days in the hospital, something she simply does not have the money for. Through her friend Akiko (Chieko Murata), she knows of a madame who runs a geisha house on the far side of Tokyo. Desperate, Tokiko takes the job for one night to get the money, a choice she does not share with Akiko. And then, of course, Shuichi comes home.

So, what's going on here? It feels like slightly heightened melodrama, delving a bit into the realm of scandalous with Tokiko going into prostitution (all off-screen, of course), but what elevates it above melodrama is the characters and how Ozu approaches telling stories in general. He's not interested in sensationalism (I'm actually regularly reminded of how Clint Eastwood films things), telling his stories in purposefully reserved terms, so when he does deal with stronger emotion, it stands out more. Throw in the fact that these actors are holding back, even at their most emotional moments, and you've got a recipe for drama without melodrama. And that's where emotional power rests quietly.

So, Tokiko has to reveal to Shuichi what she did. It's just the right thing to do, even though she knows it could completely tear her entire life apart. Shuichi gets depressed and angry, confiding in his friend at work, Satake (Chishu Ryu), and deciding to track down the geisha house where she worked. Why? Maybe to find out if she's telling the whole truth and not holding something back. Maybe to get back at her by submitting to temptation. It's not clear, and it's not supposed to be because it's not clear for Shuichi. He's angry, and he's acting out. Until he meets the prostitute he could have relations with, Akiko (Chieko Murata), and he calms down, talking to her about her situation.

There could be a reading that the film excuses prostitution (Ozu apparently wrote about using comfort women while stationed in China in his published diary), but I don't think that's what he's doing. He's telling a story after a war, a time with countless terrible things having happened, and no word at all about Shuichi's involvement in any kind of specifics. What did he do? What did he do that would anger Tokiko? Surely there's something...including comfort women (none of this is explicit, by the way, I'm just trying to approach the material intelligently). He can't rule his emotions so quickly after a shock, but he can learn to get past them.

And the movie actually ends with a surprising shock of violence (melodramatic touch), and then the quiet of an Ozu film. That period of reflection is always key to an Ozu film, and here it's vital. We, along with the characters, consider what has happened, the implications and the potential consequences, all while the film is still going. It's a wonderful way to approach things, and one that's so easily done wrong. Ozu just knows exactly where to put these pauses, and he uses them exquisitely.

Really, this is a marvelous gem of a film. It's one I'd never heard of, and one I think deserves more attention. It's great.

Apparently, this title is a mistranslation of the original Japanese title which would more closely translate to A Who's Who of the Backstreets, which, I think, fits better. Ozu's first post-war film, after a pause of five years where he was sent to Singapore to make a propaganda film (which never finished on purpose), Record of a Tenement Gentleman is really the story of Japan as it picks itself back up after defeat in war. It completely sidesteps the war part except for a couple of mentions, but the reality of building something out of detritus is very tied into the reality of Tokyo two years after defeat at the hands of the American armed forces.

In a very slowly rebuilding section of Tokyo lives a small group of disconnected people. One of them, Tashiro (Chishu Ryu) brings home a small boy, Kohei (Hohi Aoki), who lost his father. He tries to pawn the kid off on his roommate, Tamekichi (Reikichi Kawamura), but only manages to get Kohei under the roof of O-tane (Choko Iida), an older woman who describes her distaste for children upon first seeing Kohei. The first half of the film is essentially O-tane trying to get rid of Kohei, Kohei being a little boy, doing little boy things (like peeing himself at night), and the rest of the residents pawning off more responsibility for the kid onto her. Determined to get rid of him, to hopefully find his father, they draw lots to see who will take him to his last home in Chigasaki, but to no luck.

This is really Ozu's busiest film in a while. It has the largest cast of characters, the most movement from different places, and the most plot points. It's the least Ozu film he's made since the start of the sound era, but that's not to say that it's distinctly Kurosawa, or anything. I was reminded of Kurosawa's adaptation of Gogol's The Overcoat into The Lower Depths because of the focus on characters living on the low-end of the economic ladder in Japan, but that's kind of where the comparison ended. Kurosawa's later film was more about technical experimentation than anything else, but this is about his characters.

And I think all but our central pair of Kohei and O-tane are so pushed to the side that, when combined with the very short running time of 71-minutes and the more accurate translation of the title which implies a broader story than just focusing on one pair of characters, I wonder if the film was cut down (perhaps by US censors). Because this central story of a woman growing to love a little boy who relies on her is nice. It progresses in all the right directions and has the right kind of bittersweet ending that requires sacrifice while also providing hope for the future. And then you wonder why there are so many other characters. I feel like they had subplots as well.

Still the actual movie that's here is still nice. It's not deeply moving. It doesn't have the subtle power of The Only Son or There was a Father, but it does have some catharsis in the end. It's an ironic twist that goes against a lot of dialogue throughout the film about Kohei's father, providing this nice outlook on humanity's basic goodness that Ozu obviously held dear. Perhaps it was aspirational on his part, having been part of the Imperial Army in China before the outbreak of hostilities against America and seen war firsthand. He was a hopeful man who wanted the future to be good, even as he had his characters trying to figure out ways forward in the middle of the rubble.

I just kind of wish the focus was readjusted on the writing. Because it's a nice progression of events tied to an emotional core, but there's just other stuff running around that seems to get picked up in the beginning (Tashiro's job as a fortune teller and his demonstration of his singing skills at a local meeting where he's told that he could go professional, all of which just disappears by the end). There's a distractedness to the proceedings that could come from censors, the post-war period's effect on Ozu personally, and perhaps an effort on his own part to reach into more experimentation again. I did notice that his filmmaking style had gotten more active here when compared to There was a Father with more "interesting" compositions that seem to be inspired by Orson Welles' Citizen Kane, which he reportedly watched and loved in Shanghai.

So, it's good. It's not as affecting as we all know Ozu can be. It's something of a step backwards for him. But it was still worth the 71 minutes.

This is a very good example of Ozu's quiet power. It's a very simple story with a very small cast of characters. There's hardly any emotion shown. And yet, the small movements of plot end up creating this wonderful well of emotion by the end. Sparsely told with little adornment, There Was a Father is a sneaky little emotional gut punch.

Shuhei (Chishu Ryu) is a widower with a son, Ryohei (Haruhiko Tsuda as a child and Shuji Sano as an adult). He teaches math to high schoolers and decides to give up his decently paid job when, on a school trip, some students are killed when their boat overturns in a lake. He takes Ryohei to a remote village where he fixes doors for what little money he can get until he realizes he's simply not making enough for Ryohei's future. So, he takes a job in Tokyo to fund Ryohei's education in the remote district from afar. More than ten years pass. Ryohei graduates and becomes a teacher himself, and the two begin to try and reconnect.

They'd never fallen out, or anything, but the physical distance between father and son over the course of the son's formative years has created an emotional distance that both wish to bridge.

And the bulk of the film is them trying to bridge that gulf, learning who each other is over the course of a week. There are highs, and there are lows. All of the emotions are held in reserve, as was Ozu's wont, and it creates this undergirding of specific detail that, even though told in these reserved tones, will come to fruition as the film reaches its final moments.

This is also the moment where Ozu seems to have completely and totally dedicated himself to his style. Almost every shot is told from that angle from the ground like we're sitting in the room with the characters. Shots last for a long time as Ozu lets his characters inhabit their surroundings like they belong there. He still does cross-cutting from time to time in dialogue sequences, something he relied on fairly heavily in his silent period, but they're used effectively when he does resort to them.

The emotional power ends up sneaky because of this extremely reserved approach to visual storytelling. He's using very few tricks to pull of the emotion, relying on his writing and performances. And those performances are important. Ozu is preventing his actors from using melodramatic tricks to inform the audiences what they should be feeling. He's operating on a much more subtle plane where emotion is withheld until actual emotional moments.

So, there's a moment where Shuhei admonishes Ryohei because Ryohei has decided that he's going to quit his own teaching job (in chemistry) and move to where Shuhei lives. Shuhei gives an impassioned little speech, in only the smallest of heightened tones, that one is to be dedicated to one's job, no matter what it is. I know that the film got cut down slightly by Imperial censors, but this feels like one of only two moments in Ozu's filmography that has edged into propaganda. Dedicate yourself to your job! It's just what good men do! But, anyway, it's this admonition between father and son that provides depth to the relationship. It's not happy all the time. It provides this wrinkle to the relationship that gives it a stronger feeling of reality. And, the performances help. Shuhei doesn't scream. He simply speaks sternly while Ryohei looks down in shame.

So when the film moves into its final act, a sudden change in the state of things that enters into tragedy where emotion does end up running high, Ozu still approaches the material in the understated way. It's where long looks gain this great emotional power as people reflect on what's happening, what's being lost, and how things can never be the same again.

Ozu was...really good at this.

I suppose that if I have to explain my less than perfect score on the film, it has to do with Shuhei's life as a teacher. It comes back later in the film with him visiting with a former colleague and some students, but it was so long before that I don't think it quite connects. It has everything to do thematically with what's going on, Shuhei reflecting on his regrets for having done what was best for his child, seeing a glimpse of what he lost, but I think Ozu was going for an emotional connection here that I didn't quite feel. That's it.

Still, this is very good work from Ozu, proving very quickly that he's a master of the sound era without any flash or showmanship. He's assured and confident in his stylistic approaches, and he makes it work with the stories he's choosing to tell.

There's a three year gap between Ozu's previous film, What Did the Lady Forget?, and this, and it's because Ozu went to war in China. He was part of a chemical weapons unit, was stationed in or near Nanking, and...probably committed war crimes. Heck, just the chemical weapon part is a war crime. I wouldn't bring it up, but one character does have a line about needing to put people in China in line, so...Anyway, the movie itself is another family drama, well written and performed in Ozu's increasingly understated way. Taking a dramatic point that could be used to start a melodrama, Ozu instead moves it in his own direction.

The patriarch of the Toda family, Shintaro (Hideo Fujino), suddenly dies after his 69th birthday, leaving his wife (Fumiko Katsuragi) and youngest daughter, Setsuko (Mieko Takamine), largely helpless in the face of his overdue financial burdens. The rest of the children, all adults, have to figure out how to deal with this, and it amounts to selling their mother's house and then accepting her and Setsuko into their homes.

The problem is a human one. Little dramas break out that make the situations intolerable.

It starts with Shin'ichiro (Tatsuo Saito) and his wife Kazuko (Kuniko Miyake). They're happy to bring them in, but Kazuko is particular about the new arrivals not to interfere with their lives as set out. The big detail is that the mother and Setsuko must not interrupt her when she has guests over. Which...they don't. They come home one night from being out, trying to avoid the party completely, and sidestep the party that has gone on too long. This irritates Kazuko because they should have known to introduce themselves, a disagreement that leads to Kazuko kicking the two out of the house to go to the next youngest sibling.

This gets repeated a few times, and it's weird how petty everything ends up feeling. That's obviously the point in the end, but it's weird how we can get caught up in it at the same time. It's not that we're siding with Kazuko. It's obviously petty in the moment, but the understated tone is what helps sell these moments. No one is screaming. The worst things get is some heightened voices. It's restrained and intentional, which gives the moments believability without delving into melodramatics.

The voice of reason comes from Shojiro (Shin Saburi). He didn't believe it when Shintaro's health suddenly deteriorated and missed his final days. He left shortly afterwards for China (he's the one saying that people in China need to get slapped around a bit) under the assumption that his family would take care of their mother and younger sister as was their duty (Shin-ichiro is first because he's the eldest and it's his responsibility). When he discovers that the family has shunted their mother and youngest sister to a house on a property they own that's been essentially condemned, he's angry and does what he has to.

And it's a satisfying moment where things play out in a cathartic fashion, proving that Ozu was still able to play by normal dramatic rules.

But that's never the point of an Ozu film. The point is this examination of change within the context of family, and it's where the meat of the film always resides. The idea of responsibility in times that move on despite our desire to keep things the same, this film's change initiating with Shintaro's death, all told in this restrained style, increasingly told from cameras placed on the floor. Perhaps the effect is a bit muted because of Shojiro's absence and the pettiness of it all, but it does end up working in the end. It's not Ozu's best work, but it's another example of his commitment to style and effectiveness in storytelling.

A small film about an outsider discovering the unspoken rules of a long-standing marriage, What Did the Lady Forget? Is a little thing with quiet emotions that don't dig very deep but provide some nice pathos by the end. It's something like a ditty on Ozu's part, nothing too challenging but something that feels like he could pull off in his sleep. It's not his most memorable film, but at 71 minutes long, it's one of his shortest and fills that time well.

Komiya (Tatsuo Saito) is a professor of medicine in Tokyo. His wife, Tokiko (Sumiko Kurishima), is a nagging woman who never bore him a child and almost gleefully henpecks him every second she can get. Komiya, though, never seems that bothered by this. When their little existence is interrupted by a visit from his niece, Setsuko (Michiko Kuwano), a modern girl who smokes and generally just gets on Tokiko's nerves. There are some other small subplots in the opening act that feel designed to just eat up time and never pay off, like Okada (Shuji Sano), one of Komiya's students, offering tutoring lessons but having the worst time with some basic math word problems. It's a weird thing to notice at the end of a film, that a solid chunk of the opening had very little reason for being there, especially when the film is so short. But, anyway.

Tokiko insists that Komiya go away for the weekend to golf. Komiya doesn't feel like going away to golf, so he hangs out in a bar, runs into Okada, and convinces his student to take his clubs and mail a postcard from the course resort to Komiya proving his presence.

The dramatic aspect hinges on weather, though. Komiya writes in his postcard that the weather is great. It ends up that most of Japan is drenched in rain the whole weekend. So, what's Komiya to do about this postcard? It's made all the worse by Setsuko finding Komiya and getting him to take her to a geisha house, an activity that Tokiko would surely never agree to.

So, there's something like a race (only like one, this is a mature, sound Ozu film we're talking about, no one rushes) to get to the postcard, but it can't be got to in time, and we have a dramatic showdown with Setsuko in the middle of it.

So, what's the point of this? As with most Ozu films, it takes a while to clear up, but it certainly does. It's this look at a marriage that seems unhappy from the outside with a henpecked husband and an overbearing wife, all without children, but Komiya, having come to terms with his existence, knows how to navigate the little dramas of his married life. Setsuko wants to upend that, making Komiya more obviously powerful in the relationship with his wife, but Komiya knows that it can't work like that with Tokiko.

It's acceptance that things will be the same, and that going through Komiya, the quiet, good-natured main character, it ends up working. If he can retreat to his corner of the house with a smile, knowing that things will work out, he'll find his happiness. It's an outlook that accepts things as they are with quiet reserve, a very Zen outlook on things.

And it's nice. It's not deeply moving like The Only Son. The stakes are lower, and watching a henpecked husband smile at his state is not as emotionally effecting as the only son of a woman understanding how to properly show his gratitude. However, I think the emotional catharsis is actually achieved through Setsuko learning that she doesn't know everything about a relationship she's only just stepped into. It's humbling for her to think that she knows how everything should go and insisting on changing everything only to realize that she doesn't know anything.

I think that points to how Ozu can create these multi-layered stories so easily. It's not his best example, but it's a solid one.

I've been saying for a while that Ozu really needed the sound era to come to Japan, and in 1936, he was finally able to make a sound film (though, reportedly, the lost Until the Day We Meet Again was a sound film, but it's lost and didn't contain dialogue being only music and sound effects). He was too heavily relying on dialogue in his late silent films, his writing requiring a lot of specificity in character interactions that ended up using intertitles to break up the action and bring the audience up to speed. Well, The Only Son is exactly what Ozu needed to make. It's a quiet drama about a family facing changes (both personally and culturally), and Ozu gives it that steady pacing that allows the audience to consider the action. I find it remarkably effective.

Tsune (Choko Iida) is a single mother raising her only son Ryosuke (Masao Hayama as a child and Himori Shin'ichi as an adult). When Ryosuke tells a fib to his teacher Okubo (Chishu Ryu) that his mother will pay for him to go to middle-school, Tsune decides to make the hard choice and sacrifice everything so that Ryosuke can get that education, move to the big city, and become a great man. Years later, after graduating and getting a job, Tsune decides to visit her son unexpectedly. The bulk of the movie is a few days that Tsune spends with her son, his wife Sugiko (Yoshiko Tsubouchi) and their infant child. The problem is that Ryosuke only has a job as a night-school instructor, makes almost no money, can barely support the family he already has, and needs to borrow cash from his boss just to show Tsune anything around town.

The thematic underpinnings of the quiet drama are about expectations vs. Reality in the modern world. Tsune sacrificed everything, to the point of living in a factory tenement instead of the house her husband left to her upon his death, to pay for Ryosuke to be that great man. And yet, he's just a night school teacher. What happened to this great promise? And it's playing out dramatically as Ryosuke borrows money from his own boss to take his mother to see a talkie (that she falls asleep in), Sugiko is being the dutiful Japanese wife and making the best of it, and Ryosuke's fallen promise is mirrored by Okubo. Okubo also moved to Tokyo, but instead of making a great life for himself as a great man of cultural importance, he has a family and sells pork cutlets in a shop.

Ozu has pretty consistently had a social message in his films, and The Only Son is no different, but this feels more generalized than specific like in An Inn in Tokyo. It's about the dehumanization of modern, city life, about how there are so many people in competition for so few positions in 1930s Tokyo that the promise gets squished out of you. And yet, Ozu will never be a defeatist. Promise isn't about material wealth for him, and it won't ultimately be for his characters, though some will carry with them the idea that material advancement is that proper measure of life, for a time.

And that all changes with a nice, little human moment. Ryosuke is preparing to take Tsune on another outing when one of Okubo's children is kicked by a horse. Ryosuke does the good thing and takes care of the child, taking the money he had intended to spend on his mother to pay the doctors for the child's care. This is the kind of thing Tsune realizes she wanted from Ryosuke, not to become a man of great importance to the Japanese Imperial state, but to be a man of good moral character. His mother's reaction is enough to give him the kind of hope in his own future again.

And we have this mix of change, the idea that things will always remain the same anyway, and characters moving beyond charged emotional moments, told in restrained style, into quiet acceptance of a new reality that reflects the old reality in many ways at the same time. It's a surprisingly emotional mix that keeps getting me as Ozu continues to refine his style.

Speaking of which, this is the first time I've noticed Ozu putting the camera near the ground consistently. He might have been doing it before (I know he did it when people were sitting in shot), but this is the first time where people are walking around with no one sitting and the camera is just positioned like an observer resting in the room. And that's how we're supposed to take in this movie. We're observers of life, visiting in someone else's life to see how they react. Ozu has always had shots of random things to punctuate quiet in his films, but this is also where he takes that into overdrive as well (a curious word choice since it's about all stillness, not motion). We'll get this moment of great dramatic importance to the story, and then Ozu will just watch the corner of a room for twenty seconds. It's intentional, and it gets the audience to reflect on what has happened. I think it's wonderfully effective.

And it slows the film down. That's going to turn people off, but I love it when a movie knows what it's doing and understands how to do a slow pace well. Ozu understood that implicitly, and here, in the sound era at long last, he uses it rather perfectly. This quiet reflection on life, its disappointments and hopes, is a marvelous achievement in film.

Ozu's final surviving silent film (College is a Nice Place seems to be both silent and lost), An Inn in Tokyo feels more like a return to socially conscious filmmaking from the Japanese director, more bluntly dealing with poverty as a central motif than he had in A Story of Floating Weeds where the poverty felt more situational and tied to character. Ultimately, the film ends up working very well, but An Inn in Tokyo kind of feels like Ozu taking a step backwards, trying to be timely rather than pursuing his own stories.

The second movie featuring the character Kihachi (Takeshi Sakamoto) who first appeared in Ozu's Passing Fancy, the story is about the single dad trying to find work while penniless and in charge of his two boys, Zenko (Tokkan Kozo) and Masako (Takayuki Suematsu). He can work a lathe, but no one will hire him, and the family of three have to choose whether to sleep in a field and eat or to sleep in the titular inn and not eat every night in order to save what little money they have. When Zenko spends a chunk of their remaining cash on a hat for himself, their dire situation is made all the worse. And Kihachi can't get mad. They're just kids. It's not their fault. He's responsible for them, and it's his fault that they're having to choose between food and a roof over their heads, with dwindling resources every day.

They're joined by Otaka (Yoshiko Okada) and her daughter Kimiko (Kazuko Ojima), another parent/child impoverished pair who wander the fields of the industrial area outside of Tokyo. Kihachi's salvation, though, comes from an old friend, Otsune (Choko Iida), who owns a small tea shop and can provide him and his boys (and quickly thereafter Otaka and her girl) with a place to sleep and some food.

What's interesting about the character journey here is that it's a realization on the part of Kihachi that...he shouldn't be a father. He can't take care of his own children, and he makes all of the wrong decisions to the point where he decides that his kids are better off being raised by someone else. It's the sort of realization that hurts once it comes, but come it does.

The path is around Otaka disappearing for a while when she gets a job, Kihachi taking it quite badly, and Kihachi, gotten a job through Otsune's influence, deciding that he needs to take drastic measures to help Otaka when she reveals that Kimiko is having health problems.

His string of decisions leads to that quiet ending where Kihachi has to reflect on what he's become, looking mournfully at people he's betraying to do what he thinks is right, and making his big choice about his family's future. That Kihachi has been so well-drawn, the situation so well established, and the supporting characters so well integrated that there's real emotional weight to those final moments. It's an accomplished ending that actually does move me.

I just feel like the opening is kind of heavy-handed with the portrait of poverty. Which is a contrast to A Story of Floating Weeds where the poverty felt so easily integrated, even while the portrait of the acting troupe's poverty was so instrumental to the drama of the story working out. Maybe it's simply a factor of how long Ozu wallows in the poverty at the beginning of An Inn in Tokyo. There's little else for the first twenty minutes or so. There are far fewer characters and far fewer things for the characters we do have to do (the deal with the hat essentially gets repeated when Zenko and Masako argue over carrying a bag, just leaving it on the road and walking away as their solution).

So, the opening is drawn out and slightly repetitive, but at the halfway point, Ozu brings things into the proper gear and moves along at the right pace to get us to the emotional climax. It's almost like he didn't quite have enough story idea and his cowriters (Masao Arata and Tadao Ikeda) didn't know how to fill that opening act with enough material. Still, the overall package has the right kind of punch, a very good way for Ozu to say goodbye to the silent period (again, minus College is a Nice Place).

Still, he's been aching for the sound period for a while. Characters really need to speak. It's time.

Ozu had been making good movies for a while. He'd been doing things in those movies that were distinctly Ozu consistently, but A Story of Floating Weeds is where things really seem to gel completely in that well-known Ozu-way. Previously, he'd either been working between genres (gangster movies, predominantly), leaning too far into melodrama (like in A Mother Should be Loved), or using comedy that bordered on slapstick. I don't think most of these things are bad, or that his earlier films are less than good, or anything (well, a couple), but this is where he balances the melodramatic elements with characterization most perfectly without bending to what feel like the whims of popular taste. He finally feels like he's leading. All that's left is refinement, now.

A traveling troupe of actors arrives at a small, seaside town. Led by Kihachi (Takeshi Sakamoto), they hope to remain there for a year, giving performances, and making enough money to survive. The opening reel of this film is vital to everything that happens (making me question my assumption about the missing reel in A Mother Should be Loved). The life of an actor in this world is clearly defined, and it sucks. They're poor. They're the dregs of society. There's nothing admirable about what they do. And the drama of the film that develops over the ensuing 76 minutes requires that information.

Kihachi walks into a small restaurant owned by Otsune (Choko Iida), his former lover who bore his son, Shinkichi (Koji Mitsui), now a young man. She kept the boy's father's identity a secret, telling him that his father was a civil servant who died in his youth, a decision that Kihachi approves of because he doesn't want Shinkichi to decide to follow his father in his line of work. Again, because the line of work sucks. There are much better things young men can aspire to. Things go haywire when Kihachi's current mistress, Otaka (Rieko Yagumo), follows him to the restaurant, gets jealous that Kihachi has a son, and decides to just create chaos by enlisting another actress in the troupe, Otoki (Yoshiko Tsubouchi), to seduce Shinkichi.

The emotional blowups here are some of the best handled emotional highs in Ozu's silent period in that they're not that big. They're obviously emotional with people getting visibly angry with each other, especially when Kihachi breaks things off with Otaka. It's that kind of reserved shouting Japanese people do, without flying arms or gesticulation, just heavy movements of the head. I can imagine that Japanese actors might have been resistant to it in the silent period, the effort to get points across without being able to speak led to a natural inclination to acting big (I'm sure theater was an influence on that decision as well), but the closeup never made that decision necessary. We can read human faces fine without arms swinging around everywhere.

Anyway, the drama moves on as the months pass, the affair between Otoki and Shinkichi growing from Otoki doing it because Otaka forced her to into a place of genuine emotion while the company steadily loses money. Decisions have to be made about the future of the troupe, Kihachi feeling increasingly isolated, and the information of Shinkichi's true parentage coming out to him. This puts everyone on a glide path towards conflict, and, again, Ozu handles it with tact as emotions run high but he keeps the actual deliveries in check.

And through it all is the familiar themes that Ozu played with (and will continue to play with) regarding change and permanence being intertwined. The emotional weight ends up falling entirely on the shoulders of Kihachi has he has to make serious decisions about his future while protecting his son. And it ends on these quiet notes as people move on, change, and remain the same all at once. It's surprisingly affecting, and really the height of Ozu's silent period.

All that's left is refining his cinematic style. There are still many cuts and angles that later Ozu would never touch, and the central portrait of the broken family rather than one already whole going through change. But still, this is the one film in the silent period that feels like Ozu's completely.

I don't comment on titles much, but I feel the need to comment on this one. A Story of Floating Weeds is the kind of thing I might expect in a haiku. It's evocative and symbolic with the idea of people being the weeds in a body of water, presumably a running water source like a river or a creek, living their small lives as time continues no matter what they do. It's kind of a perfect title for an Ozu movie.

And the movie? It's kind of great.

Partially lost, A Mother Should Be Loved continues Ozu's tap-dancing between the melodrama obviously popular in Japan at the time and his own quiet mode of making human stories. I'm a bit muted on the reaction to the film overall, and I'm not sure if it has anything to do with the missing opening and closing reels. If the descriptive texts are anything to go buy, they're mostly establishing action and reflective action at the beginning and end without touching on the actual drama. I think the issue is more about the melodramatic roots of the action, and the film never quite getting away from them.

A family of four, father Kajiwara (Yukichi Iwata), Mother (Mitsuo Yoshikawa), elder son Sadao (Seiichi Kato), and younger son Kosaku (Koji Mitsui). After planning a vacation trip, Kajiwara suddenly falls ill and dies (this all happens in the first, missing reel, so we never actually see Iwata act, just his photo). Struck by the sudden death of their father, the boys are too young to know how to process things, especially when Kajiwara's friend, Okazaki (Shinyo Nara), shows up and offers to take Sadao and raise him as his own son. There's reason for this, and it's the secret of the film, information that doesn't get revealed until years later after Sadao has applied for college.

You see, Mother is not actually Sadao's mother. Kajiwara was married before he married Mother, and Sadao is the issue from that first marriage. No one told him, though, and Mother kept the secret at Kajiwara's wishes. This is one of those things that seems intimately tied to Japanese culture because I find it hard to believe that this story, transplanted to America, would carry any of the same attempted emotional weight. Because Sadao treats this as a massive betrayal, and the rest of the movie hinges on his brewing hatred of Mother stemming from that lie. That ends up manifesting in Sadao's perception of different treatment between himself and Kosaku.

The main event around this involves dueling plans Sadao and Kosaku have that Mother needs to fund through her own meager means. Kosaku wants to go on a boat trip. Sadao has a friend, Hattori (Chishu Ryu), who lives in a geisha house and is indebted to the madame in charge, a situation Sadao wants to change by just paying Hattori's debt. Sadao's path of anger about it all is where the movie just kind of loses me. He gets really angry that Mother goes from funding Kosaku's trip to handing the money to Sadao for Hattori never really makes sense to me. It's something about Sadao seeing his mother-figure treat him too gingerly, or something?

It's the core drama of the film, and I just don't quite get it, which doesn't help with the surprisingly arch performances, especially from Kato. Yoshikawa is probably the best performance in the film, and that has to do with the fact that she's the most prominent performance working in Ozu's style.

However, aside from the particulars of the core dramatic moments, the film is really just another, accomplished, handsome Ozu production. I think the drama is too Japanese for me to connect with, but I can still get it to a certain degree. This wasn't made for Western audiences, despite Ozu's continued fanboyism of including Western movie posters in people's houses, and it probably worked better for Japanese audiences in the early 1930s. Still, I can admire the craft even if I feel that disconnect. And Ozu's craft is undeniable.

It's an accomplished, handsome film that I don't connect with emotionally. It's unfortunate, but it was bound to happen eventually. Is it because of the missing opening and closing reels? I don't think so.

Ozu tricked me on this one. I read nothing about it before it started, and as the opening act played out, I thought I was getting a romance. Instead, it ended up being a story about a father and his son, a melodrama that effectively works within its box while peeking out beyond its borders to work quite well. It made me think of Woman of Tokyo, the melodrama that simply went too far in my eyes, and it acted as a contrast to something that kept things sedate enough to work more effectively.

Kihachi (Takeshi Sakamoto) and Jiro (Den Obinata) are coworkers in a brewery. Kihachi is illiterate but has a son, Tomio (Tokkan Kozo), who goes to school. After drinking one night, the two men encounter Harue (Nobuko Fushimi), a young woman in need whom they bring to their drinking spot, run by Otome (Chuoko Iida), who gives Harue a job. The opening of the film is about the dueling affections for Harue with Kihachi bending over backwards to make himself palatable to her while the younger Jiro treats her dismissively. The film actually begins with a quote about geishas being both givers and receivers of temporary affection, something I think could have come from Jiro's perspective. There's this distance because he sees her as just selling herself for temporary room and board. It comes back later as well.

But, Kihachi's efforts get rebuffed, and he's angry about it. Partially taking it out on Tomio, Kihachi, in a conversation with Otome, realizes his error and decides to give Tomio a bit of cash to spend on himself, to make himself feel like a millionaire for an afternoon. And this is where the film finds its focus: on the father and son.

Tomio gets sick with some bad candy, to the point of near death, and Kihachi has to face what he actually cherishes. This section takes up a lot of time in the middle of the film, to the point of being most of the rest of the film, and it's done in that typical Ozu way: quiet and heavily reliant on people looking at each other. Kihachi anguishes over Tomio, exchanging little jokes back and forth when he's conscious, and receiving sympathy and whatever help he can get from those around him, mostly Jiro and Harue.

It's these quiet moments that really make Ozu films. He can fill the openings with light comedy of different stripes, to the point where the opening almost feels like a Lubitsch film, but he's always going to return to what obviously came natural to him: the soft, quiet family drama. And this is where the comparison to Woman of Tokyo becomes the most apt, or contrast, I should say. In the earlier film, it's about a character's death and everyone cries obviously and bigly. Here, Tomio gets close to death, and everyone's sedate and reserved in the face of it. It's the stuff of melodrama (a dying child), but it's treated with so much more tact that it ends up working.

And the finale is about making hard choices in the face of a changing circumstances. Jiro took out a large loan to pay for the doctor, and Jiro is going to go work as a laborer in a remote region to pay it back. Can Kihachi just accept that? Can he accept that his son was saved by someone else?

I would applaud the film more for its ending, but it ends up having its cake and eating it at the same time to the point where I don't get the ending. The emotion of the last hour of the film is clear and effective, but then the ending finds a victory that doesn't quite fit. It limits my enjoyment of the melodrama a bit.

But not enough to undo the rest. I feel like the opening is a bit of a sleight of hand, but it's a good trick on Ozu's part (as well as his writer Tadao Ikeda) to establish characters, setting, and a motif that comes back later, giving greater import to a minor characters' actions. It's quite solid storytelling, combining early comedy with later drama. I just wish the ending more fit the film. But, the character of Kihachi apparently became something of a staple for Shochiku Studios as a recurring character. So, even in the 30s, Japanese cinema wasn't afraid of sequels.