The last of Ozu's 1929 films and the first half of those he made in 1930 reveal a filmmaker in transition. He is in search of his voice in addition to how he can push that individuality out around the edges of the studio system's staid templates.
Sadly, out of the seven movies discussed in this chapter, only two survive in complete form. Fragments of three survive, and yet two more are completely, irretrievablty lost.
From 1930's I Flunked, But...
9: Fighting Friends: Japanese Style (1929)
Wasei kenka tomodachi
status || partially preserved: script and original negative are lost, but a print of 14 minutes survives
on disc (Japan/R3) || OOP 6-DVD set w/o English subs
how to watch || 2.5 minutes are on YouTube (embedded below), but it'll inevitably get taken down.
how to release it in Region 1 || It would only make sense as part of a set, possibly bundled with the other "fragment" films as additional content.
Fighting Friends: Japanese Style is the first of a short run of Ozu titles that technically survive, but in extremely truncated forms.
Ozu's go-to script collaborator, Kogo Noda, had an idea for a movie about two roommates who fall for the same girl. The film ended up being about two truck drivers who are buddies and at once fierce rivals.
"I think we just hit someone."
They hit a dirty, homeless girl with their truck. They then take her home to live with them. Watch a few of the surviving minutes and then continue on (so as to not spoil what there is to spoil).
Once she cleans up, they both fall for her, only to be disappointed that she falls for a young man in the neighborhood. The truckers patch up relations with one another and their friendship is renewed. Not seen in the footage above is that the truck drivers subsequently catch the young guy chatting up a bar hostess. “It's a scandal, it's a outrage.”
The “scandalous misunderstanding based in inference” plot is used to similar effect in A Couple on the Move (Feature #5).
They eventually find out that the bar hostess is the young man's sister. Everyone calms down, and the couple gets married.
We also see the birth of an Ozu staple: the ending involves a trip on a train.
The young couple heads off on their honeymoon, cheered on by the truckers, who follow alongside in the vehicle that hit the girl in the first place. What a heartwarming attempted-vehicular-manslaughter romcom.
Again, we find this to be an antecedent of a future Ozu feature (Passing Fancy, #29), and the use of another buddy movie dynamic, like we saw in Days of Youth (and unfortunately can't in the lost Dreams of Youth). Bordwell considers the story an homage to the buddy pictures that costarred Wallace Beery. Based on the few remaining minutes of Fighting Friends, I couldn't agree more. I should add that "Japanese Style" in the title was Ozu and Noda acknowledging that the style of the story was considered stale and old-fashioned at the time. It was their way of saying "we know you've seen this a million times before".
10: I Graduated, But... (1929)
Daigaku wa detakeredo
status || partially preserved: script and original negative are lost, but a print of 10 minutes survives
on disc (UK/R2) || BFI's Ozu Student Comedies (13.99 GBP, or ~$23 USD) also includes Days of Youth, I Flunked, But..., The Lady & The Beard, and Where Now Are the Dreams of Youth
on disc (Japan/R3) || OOP 6-DVD set w/o English subs
how to watch || BFI's Ozu Student Comedies set is the only real option to see the whole thing, with an 8 minute re-cut on YouTube.
how to release it in Region 1 || Package it with the other "Student Comedy" movies like the BFI did, since none of the Ozu films included are available in the USA.
In the first of three films suffixed by "But...", Ozu returns to the theme of marital strife, but this time with a more contemplative, emotional grounding than in the comedies he'd previously done. Bordwell notes that the synopsis of the film indicates this to be Ozu reworking Dreams of Youth (Feature #2) in a rather more realistic context, starting the story just as the couple is about to begin their life together.
The title comes from a commonly-used expression from the late 20's in Japan, where there were more college graduates than jobs in which to put them. This is a subject many could relate to in the modern world, even before the global recession set in a few years ago.
The 8-minute cut embedded above finds the YouTube uploader removing the intertitles to fit the clip within YouTube's time constraints at the time it was uploaded. None of the on-screen action is removed. There's a fair amount of connecting dots and gap-filling for the viewer, with abrupt jumps in the middle of shots. Regardless, the "salvaged footage" version of Graduated is easier to follow than that of Fighting Friends.
Takeshi Sakamoto, who is seen at right here playing the boss’ assistant, will become a major figure in Ozu’s early movies.
The story concerns a young man named Minoru (Tetsuo Nomoto), who graduates college and takes his first interview with a company. They offer him a position as a receptionist. He balks, insisting that the job is beneath him, and he leaves in a huff. He returns home to find that his fiancee and mother have paid him a surprise visit.
Choko Iida appears once again, playing Minoru’s housekeeper.
Rather than let on that he's jobless and without prospects, he tells them that things are great and that he’s gotten a good job. He pretends that he has a wonderful job, not unlike various episodes of The Simpsons.
Minoru plays ball with a couple of kids instead of looking for work.
The poster for Lloyd’s Speedy appears repeatedly, reminding us what an Ameriphile Ozu was.
Minoru’s mother is proud that he appears to have become successful, and the couple marry with the assurance of his financial stability.
Once mom leaves, Minoru drops the bad news on his now-wife by pointing to a headline in the paper about people out of work. He admits that it applies to him as well, and that he never had the job in the first place. She understandably blows her top at him. They bicker about money, and she gets terribly depressed about having promised the rest of her life to a dishonest jackass. She then secretly gets a job to support them, since her husband won't "lower" himself to common work.
Minoru finds out that his wife has dared to work in a bar...behind his back!
Minoru goes to a bar with one of his friends and sees his wife working there as a hostess. He watches her from across the room and becomes embarrassed as she lights a cigarette for a stranger. He discovers that he's actually riddled with guilt about the whole thing.
That night, he reprimands her for taking such a seedy, unseemly job and hiding it from him. Through the course of the argument, he peels away his machismo and comprehends the extent of the sacrifice that she has made for them. He confesses his laziness and misplaced pride through tears.
He heads back to the company he interviewed with previously and backpedals into accepting the "lowly" receptionist job. In a ripped-from-Hollywood twist, the boss tells him that they were testing his character and decide to give him a full salaried position. The couple live happily and, one expects, financially stable thereafter.
Ozu's train imagery at work once again.
According to Bordwell, the papers sharply criticized the picture for having an 'unrealistically happy ending', citing the 60%+ unemployment rate for college graduates at the time. To them, the situation was roughly similar to Confessions of a Shopaholic coming out on the heels of the 2008 recession.
I Graduated, But... was released just 23 days before the great stock market crash of 1929.
The issue of its bad release timing relative to then-current events aside, if you chop off the ending, the surviving footage and script have a lot in common with later, more refined Ozu pictures. The promise of the son's success as seen by the mother is echoed in The Only Son (1936), and the put-upon wife in Woman of Tokyo (1933).
11: The Life of an Office Worker (1929)
Kaisha-in seikatsu
status || completely lost: no script, prints, or stills survive
In yet another lost five-reeler, Mr. Sakamoto (Tatsuo Saito once again) comes home with great news: he got his semi-annual bonus! It also turns out that he has been fired.
Shortly after Sakamoto starts pretending that he hasn't lost his job, his pal Okamura (who works for another firm) drops by to offer Sakamoto a job. Mrs. Sakamoto politely turns it down on her husband’s behalf, since she thinks that he is doing so well where he is. While Sakamoto searches for another job, he finds out about scam outfits that exist solely to prey on the unemployed.
One of Sakamoto's former coworkers drops by the house to let him know that other pals are trying to get his job reinstated, and Mrs. Sakamoto blows her top. Okamura drops back by coincidentally, re-offers the job, and all is well for husband, wife, and their four bespectacled sons.
The structure and result here are strikingly similar to Ozu's last film, but unlike Graduated, the critics seemed to really enjoy Office Worker very much. Some may forward the idea that film criticism is "dead", but it's the only reason that we know much about various lost films (these included) throughout cinema history. Saying that is tantamount to dismissing the historical record completely.
The critical reaction would indicate that Ozu's immediate return to the salaryman genre was in the interest of getting a "do-over" on I Graduated, But...'s unrewarding, complete cop out ending. My personal speculation is that the studio pushed the happy ending of the previous movie on him to satisfy audiences, and this was Ozu’s opportunity for doing it his way. The ending still works out for the protagonist, but the good luck isn’t the result of some unrealistically easy “test of character”.
12: A Straightforward Boy (1929)
Tokkan kozo
status || partially preserved: script & original negative are lost, but 14 minutes of footage survive
on disc (UK/R2) || March 2013 release BFI's Ozu Collection: The Gangster Films set (23.99 GBP, or ~$39 USD) also includes Walk Cheerfully, That Night's Wife, and Dragnet Girl.
on disc (Japan/R3) || OOP 6-DVD set w/o English subs
how to watch || Watch the embeds below and get BFI's Ozu Collection: The Gangster Films set once it's out.
how to release it in Region 1 || Package it with the other "Gangster" movies like the BFI did, since none of the Ozu films included are available in the USA.
Before we get into the plot of Ozu's child abduction comedy, I should take a moment to tackle the title, which I do not believe translates well going from Japanese to English. I don’t speak Japanese, but my point is that I think that colloquial differences result in a rather…ill-fitting title for something that is a much simpler expression in its native language.
“Tokkan kozo" is an expression for "a boy (or brat) who charges into you". Apparently, there is a nickname for the kind of kid that just knocks you on your ass in Japan, a place where little boys are as likely to run into you headfirst as look at you, it would appear. This movie is about a little boy who turns out to be more trouble for his kidnappers than he is worth.
The most common translations I've found for it have been "A Straightforward Boy" (used by Bordwell) and "The Charging Kid" (used by IMDb and others). I'd like to add my own interpretation-laced option to the mix: The Knock-Down Kid.
Mine uses a mix of a Western-inspired "The [insert phrase here] Kid" template and the fact that the movie is really about how this little boy knocks these guys for a loop, off their game, and so on. The trouble of getting around the cultural specificity of the title results in me just wanting to refer to it by the Japanese one.
This will probably remain my favorite still in the series. Senbo taunts the crime boss as if saying "I will devour your sanity whole!". Kidzilla here thinks that the kidnappers want to play a nice game of "Gojira in a China Shop".
While playing hide-and-go-seek, Senbo (the titular kid, played by Tomio Aoki), is lured away by kidnapper Bunkichi (Tatsuo Saito once again). The bad guy buys the boy candy and toys galore. Here's the first half of the surviving footage (from a TV broadcast):
He plays the kid off as his own to a suspicious cop and gets the brat back to his boss (Takeshi Sakamoto). Sakamoto appeared in some of Ozu's first films). The boss' head seems to be strategically shaved solely for the purpose of attaching suction darts. They appear to employ the kid as something of a servant, but he turns out to be a bigger annoyance than help. Unseen in the second clip below is that the fake-mustached Bunkichi tries to return the kid to his father, but Senbo's dad tells the weirdo kidnapper to keep the boy because he's such a pain in the ass.
I never expected I'd find a Texas connection in Ozu's work, but the movie is clearly an adaptation of O. Henry's The Ransom of Red Chief. I should note for the interested that Red Chief was made for TV in the US by Bob Clark back in '98, with Christopher Lloyd and Michael Jeter kidnapping Haley Joel Osment.
Desperate, Bunkichi tries to dump Senbo off with the friends he was playing with at the beginning of the movie. The kid tells his pals that this guy will buy you all the toys and candy you want, and we end with the kids chasing after the kidnapper to hilarious (?) effect.
Most amazing today is the fact that you could make such a thing as a "child abduction comedy" at a Japanese studio in the 20's. The vaudeville-style "mustache disguise" is just one example of various things that, in this day and age, you don’t expect to see paired with something as serious and horrible as human trafficking. You could string a picture like this together with some of the original Our Gang and Dogville shorts and have a nice little "is this real?!" marathon.
As with those American shorts, this movie was successful enough to make its young star immediately famous. Aoki became so well-known for this role that he changed his stage name to Tokkan-Kozo after the movie's title. Aoki initially got Ozu's attention as one of the four kids with glasses in Life of an Office Worker. Apparently, what tickled Ozu was that Aoki kept falling asleep in the middle of takes to hilarious effect. Below is an un-subtitled 1991 TV interview with Aoki-san that's still interesting to those who only speak English due to Aoki's still-evident impish personality.
The movie was only four reels, so it's among the shortest movies that Ozu made. Also notable is that they shot the whole thing in three days.
13: An Introduction to Marriage (1930)
Kekkon-gaku nyumon
status || completely lost: no script, prints, or stills survive
Here we have yet another lost film, which once again deals with marital distrust and mistaken assumptions.
A dentist and his wife are stuck in a stale marriage. They decide to hit the spa to liven things up. The spa idea fails. On the train ride home, the dentist flirts with a young woman who rebuffs him and leaves, forgetting her gloves on the table. The dentist pockets them.
The young woman returns to her own home, where her professor husband (Tatsuo Saito) barely acknowledges her. She makes mention of her tooth hurting.
Uh-oh, we see where this is going already, don't we?
So, the professor's wife happens to end up going to the dentist who came on to her. He returns one glove to her, but as he's going to give the second one, the dentist's wife shows up and interrupts.
The dentist hits a pub that night and strikes up conversation…with the professor, of all people…and they become fast friends.
The professor invites the dentist over to his place to hang out, which they do. The dentist freaks out when he recognizes the young woman he's been hitting on as his new pal's wife. The dentist gets the hell out of there.
The next day, the professor's wife goes to see the dentist to ask what is going on, but the dentist's wife sees them talking. The dentist's wife then rings up the professor and reports the incident of the glove loss/attempted exchange.
The prof gets suspicious and goes through his wife's things, only to find a single glove. He gets all bent up and demands to know what his wife has been up to. She tells him that she wants to leave him, but little does he understand that it's due to him being a lousy husband and not due to another man getting her between the sheets.
The professor drops by the dentist's house to verify his suspicions with the dentist's wife. She surprises him by assuring the professor that his wife hasn't strayed. She explains the mix-up and provides him with the missing glove.
The professor rushes to catch the same train his wife is taking to go visit her father. They meet in the dining car, the wife feels the glove in her husband's pocket, and they reconcile, laughing the whole time.
Cue the happily ever after for them, while the movie apparently forgets all about the unhappy dentist's wife and her moron husband.
Ozu's Lubitschian symmetry is seen once again here. I didn't mention it above, but the initial flirtation occurred in a dining car (just as the happy ending does). The most important landmark in Introduction to Marriage is that it's Ozu's first film that dwells entirely in the world of the upper-middle class, a place where he gets good and comfortable for a while. He would revisit little touches seen here later on in What Did the Lady Forget? and The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice.
Kenji the Knife and the girl he falls for
14: Walk Cheerfully (1930)
Hogaraka ni ayume
status || fully preserved: script, original negative, and multiple prints survive
on disc (UK/R2) || March 2013 release BFI's Ozu Collection: The Gangster Films (23.99 GBP, or ~$39 USD) also includes A Straightforward Boy, That Night's Wife, and Dragnet Girl.
on disc (Japan/R3) || OOP 6-DVD set w/o English subs
streaming || Hulu Plus in the US (requires subscription)
how to watch || Hulu Plus, or import BFI's Ozu Collection: The Gangster Films once it's out.
how to release it in Region 1 || Package it with the other "Gangster" movies like the BFI did, since none of the Ozu films included are available in the USA.
Walk Cheerfully is a story about a "good bad man" who changes the direction of his life for a woman.
This is a movie that I'd personally deem Noir Lite, based on the shooting style and subject matter. It doesn't get remotely as gritty, violent, or dark as true Noir, so it's best to think of this as a light romantic comedy merely painted in Noir aesthetics.
Walk Cheerfully is the first of very few "gentleman criminal" movies from Ozu. Based on my limited tiptoeing into Japanese cinema of the period, they didn't have full-on, tommy gun-toting killers like we did in the US during the same era. The Yakuza worked in groups that were more like secret societies than "gangs" and went by the code of bushido. They were truly the most honorable among thieves.
In the 1920's, street hoods dressed in American-style suits and hats. They were thoroughly westernized in manners in addition to style, as is this movie. Again, those who only know Ozu’s later work are largely oblivious to how much he was into Hollywood’s brand of mass market junk food.
"Kenji the Knife", a name obviously inspired by Threepenny Opera's Mack the Knife.
In Walk Cheerfully, Kenji the Knife (Minoru Takeda) and his brother Senko (Hisao Yoshitani) are among these gentleman street hoods. They're racketeers, but good of heart. One day, they come close to or actually hit a young girl with their car.
The girl's attractive older sister Yasue (Hiroku Kawasaki) catches the eye of Kenji, who already has an annoying, petty girlfriend named Chieko (Satoko Date). The gang boss, Ono (Takeshi Sakamoto), takes a liking to Yasue, who has less than no interest in him. She also resists Kenji's overtures, insisting that she'll have nothing to do with him until he makes an honest living.
The thrust of WC is how much better an option it is to live life on the straight and narrow than give into the temptations of the underworld. There are plenty of structural elements in the story that remind me of Ozu's disowned first feature, Sword of Penitence (which I think translates better as The Edge of Regret). I watched WC in complete silence on an Italian TV bootleg, really wishing there were some sort of musical accompaniment like there is on Criterion's Silent Ozu Eclipse set, and all of the BFI’s silent Ozu discs.
I almost split myself laughing at the brief appearance of Tatsuo Saito as a Pomeranian-carrying, cigarette holder-twirling gang leader. I’m covering Saito in his very own Appendix piece soon. Once that piece goes up, and thereafter, his name in all Discovering Ozu entries will link to that article.
Bordwell indicates heavy influences from Josef von Sternberg's Underworld (1927), which is credited with launching the American gangster genre (and which Criterion released on DVD in 2010). There's a bar sequence that is visibly "quoted" in Walk Cheerfully, among other bits. I've recently seen Underworld via Criterion’s outstanding Josef von Sternberg set, and the references are really lovely.
A signature Ozu technique really starts to take hold in this film. Instead of the terms I've seen used, I refer to it as "image memory". This occurs when objects (in shots of any type) take on different meaning later in the story. Without spoiling much, an example in WC would be the line of taxis seen in the opening shot echoed later in a character becoming a taxi driver. This is very much a minor work, but is worth looking at for the emerging threads of Ozu's overall style.
Previously speculated: In the original iteration of this series, I proposed combining this one with for the purpose of a third Ozu Eclipse set, to wit: “This one could pair nicely with both That Night's Wife and Dragnet Girl as ‘Ozu's Criminals’ or with some other movies as a larger ‘Early Ozu’ set.”
Clearly the BFI beat Criterion to the punch here with their Gangster Films set, but I’d almost prefer that if another Eclipse set were to happen, it would include something on the order of six films and all the surviving salvaged clips.
15: I Flunked, But... (1930)
Rakudai wa shitakeredo
status || fully preserved: script, original negative, and prints exist
on disc (UK/R2) || BFI's Ozu Student Comedies (13.99 GBP, or ~$23 USD) also includes I Graduated, But..., The Lady & The Beard, and Where Now Are the Dreams of Youth.
on disc (Japan/R3) || OOP 6-DVD set w/o English subs
how to watch || BFI's Ozu Student Comedies, period
how to release it in Region 1 || Package it with the other "Student Comedy" movies like the BFI did, since none of the Ozu films included are available in the USA.
The story concerns how failure in one sense leads to the protagonist's great success in life. I consider it to be Ozu’s definitive slacker student comedy.
The movie stars Tatsuo Saito (again) as Takahashi, a college student who tries to cheat himself and his four roommates through their exams. He does this by writing the answers on his shirttails, which the other guys can then see by pulling up the back of his jacket.
The scheme. Great while it works.
Cute waitress Kinuyo Tanaka and rising child star Tomio "Tokkan Kozo" Aoki.
Again, the prominent American movie poster looms.
Takahashi’s landlady sends the shirt off to be dry cleaned, ruining the plan. The landlady’s son (Tomio “Tokkan Kozo” Aoki) is a charming little kid who idolizes Takahashi. Our hero is also doted on by a waitress (I Graduated But…’s Kinuyo Tanaka) who works across the way from where he and his pals live.
Out of the five guys, one flunks, and the group feel bad for him, but move on “growing up” anyway, only to find that they can’t really find jobs in tough times and wish they could go back to college.
The “Gang of Five” greet each other with a ritualistic jig. This is a nod to the choreographed handshakes in the college films of Harold Lloyd.
The floppy-mustached, “Badger” professor character found in I Graduated, But… makes a return here.
Chishu Ryu at center
In addition to including the first notable Ozu role for Chishu Ryu, I Flunked, But... also marks a turning point in Ozu's development as a visual comedian. According to Bordwell, as Lubitschian or Lloydian as elements are here, the complexity of sight gags and situational comedy develop their own distinctive flavor. In particular, Ozu forges his own particularly odd way of misleading the audience.
One guy who flunks his exams tests the sharpness of his scissors against his neck and then turns away from the camera. Ozu quickly cuts to a reverse angle revealing that the fellow is merely cutting his toenails.
You would absolutely not belly-laugh at most of the humor here. The comedy is also tinged with melancholy, emphasizing just how hopeless it is to overcome the adversity of a massive recession. You just have to move on with what you've got.
I Flunked, But… definitely iterates on the themes found in the previous year’s I Graduated, But…. The film is all about the idea that maybe flunking and being stuck in school isn’t such a bad thing, especially if there’s a big recession standing in the way of getting a job once you’re out of school.
Up Next
The next installment of Discovering Ozu covers more lost features as well as further jumps from genre to genre, including more Student and Gangster films, as well as the beginning of Ozu's films that focus on domestic drama. Also coming up this week, our first in a series of Appendix pieces on prominent Ozu collaborators, Tatsuo Saito.
Discovering Ozu is an ongoing series of articles designed to introduce curious cinephiles to the work of Japanese master filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu.
Essential sources include: David Bordwell's book Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema, Donald Richie's Ozu: His Life and Films, and the various booklets and featurettes produced by The Criterion Collection. Quick reference often comes from definitive Ozu fansite "Ozu-san".
If sharing or discussing this article or series on Twitter, please use hashtag #DiscoveringOzu
New to Discovering Ozu? Start at the beginning.