The next few Ozu films cover the last four movies he made in 1930 (out of seven), and the three that he made in 1931. They are a diverse mix of crime, melodrama, romance, an attempt at a character franchise, and the story of Japan's cultural progression.
Check back on this entry in March, when I get my hands on the BFI's latest Ozu Collection release and add screengrabs from the first feature in this in batch...
Satoko Date in 1931's The Lady and The Beard
16: That Night's Wife (1930)
Sono yo no tsuma
status || fully preserved: script, original negative, and prints survive
on disc || UK/R2: BFI's Ozu Collection: The Gangster Films set (23.99 GBP, or ~$39 USD) also includes Walk Cheerfully, A Straightforward Boy, and Dragnet Girl.
Japan/R3: OOP 6-DVD set includes surviving work from Days of Youth (1927) through Dragnet Girl (1933), but with no English subtitles ($270 USD minimum)
streaming (USA) || Hulu Plus (requires subscription)
how to watch || Hulu if in the US, otherwise BFI's Ozu Collection: The Gangster Films set on 18 March 2013
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.
That Night's Wife is based on a crime thriller short story called From Nine to Nine, full of guns and hair-trigger decisions. It's also a domestic melodrama with hand wringing and overwrought crying. Like his run of silent comedies, he turns the cliche into the unique by giving it weight and a serious approach. Ozu compounds moral crises here for the first time, with multiple people pulled in opposite directions by their respective consciences. It's also bleeding Americanized Japan, with the only prop evidence of the movie's "Japaneseness" being the female lead wearing a kimono.
A father commits a robbery to get enough money to pay for medical treatment of his very ill daughter, Michiko. His wife doesn't approve, but cares bout the health of her child above all else. The cop who eventually tracks down the father has a choice to make: should take the guy in and risk the stress killing the kid? The father is likewise faced with the choice of flight from justice or doing his time.
Tatsuo Saito appears in yet another brief supporting role as the family doctor. The kid playing Michiko really sells the agony of a terrible illness. The Detective (Togo Yamamoto) steals the movie out from under everyone else. He only appears in one more Ozu film, and a lost one at that (Young Miss). Chishu Ryu makes an appearance as another policeman.
Now for The 3 Lost Films of 1930: The Vengeful Spirit of Eros, Lost Luck, and Young Miss.
Ozu's three final films of 1930 are irretrievably lost. David Bordwell, once again, is the only Ozu authority (in English, at least) to give us clues as to what we're missing out on these 80 years later.
A production still from Ozu's 19th film Young Miss. Note the looming presence of Harold Lloyd.
17: The Vengeful Spirit of Eros (1930)
Eroshin no onyo
status || completely lost: no script, prints, or stills survive
I'm going to once again engage my re-titling/re-interpretation abilities and say that this one should have been translated as Cupid's Revenge. After reading the synopsis, this was not so serious a film as to require a title likeThe Vengeful Spirit of Eros. Ozu's boss ordered him to take a mandatory time off at a spa and at the same time, return from the vacation with a finished film. In later interviews, Ozu couldn't remember the plot, which he says often in regard to his early films.
Tatsuo Saito and Satoko Date play a couple who fall for each other and commit "lovers' suicide" for an unclear reason (based on surviving reviews and descriptions). Date, you'll recall, played Kenji the Knife's nasty "bad girl" ladyfriend in Walk Cheerfully. The boyfriend's pal finds his body washed up on the shore. He has just barely survived. The boyfriend fears that his girlfriend's spirit will haunt him, but he finds that she's quickly gotten a job in a dance hall and has also been slutting it up big-time. I get the impression that she never planned to kill herself and just wanted to be rid of her boyfriend. This proves the necessity of female empowerment, since it appears that in Japan of this time period, the only way a girl could dump her guy was by having him killed.
So, furious and vengeful, he plots to scare her with rubber snakes. Yup, rubber snakes.
She sees through the ploy and tricks her now ex-beau into fighting with the friend who rescued him. The next day, he sees her walking with two new boyfriends.
No one seems to know how long Ozu's original cut was, but it was apparently sexy and saucy enough that the censors cut out a fair amount of footage. What was released was only three reels long (half an hour, maybe a bit more), and has been stamped the most disposable of all Ozu's work. The movie's loss of its most salacious parts resulted in a sexy perverted comedy becoming just a mediocre "nonsense" comedy short on actual laughs.
18: Lost Luck or The Luck That Touched the Leg (1930)
Ashi ni sawatta koun
status || completely lost: no script, prints, or stills survive
Tatsuo Saito and Mitsuko Yoshikawa play a couple for the fourth time in an Ozu film here. Their first three pairings were all in lost films like this one, but their fifth turn together as a couple survives, and is really excellent (I Was Born, But...). The first Ozu film that Yoshikawa can be seen in is The Lady and the Beard, which we look at further down in this installment.
Of all the brief synopses among Bordwell's pieces on the lost films, this is the shortest and also the most difficult to imagine. I'll paraphrase:
Salaryman Furugawa (Saito) finds a bundle of 4000 Yen wrapped in newspaper and returns it to the owner, who rewards him with 500 Yen. Furugawa's pals and coworkers leap on him like a swarm of mosquitoes and bleed him for all but 180 Yen. His wife (Yoshikawa) is less than pleased.
The next morning, Furugawa's boss offers him everything he'd need to start a chicken farm for only 100 yen. What luck! Unfortunately, Furugawa returns home to find that his wife spent the 180 Yen on fabric and a sewing machine so that she can make herself kimonos. The next morning, Furugawa happens upon another bundle wrapped in newspaper. This time, it's a ball of rice. Cue the wah-wah trombone.
In later interviews translated and cited in various articles, the director admits that not even he remembers what this one was about. The reviews from the time agree. They indicate it was a tragicomedy that didn't really have any sort of audience in mind, just focusing on ironic misery.
19: Young Miss (1930)
Ojosan
status || completely lost: no script or prints exist, but a limited number of production stills survive
The longest Ozu film so far, Young Miss ran 12 reels (over two hours). Bordwell, of all people, has considerable difficulty condensing the plot into a simple synopsis. As best I can tell, Shochiku had a couple of up-and-coming comedic stars in Sumiko Kurishima and Tokihiko Okada and they wanted a very "modern", American-style movie to plug them into.
Kurishima plays the titular Young Miss, a female journalist using a pen name who beats a couple of veteran reporters to various scoops. Okada and the ever-present Tatsuo Saito play the buddy reporters. The three of them team up to expose an underground gentleman's club for ultra-wealthy voyeurs.
There is no indication of an intelligible (or actual) conclusion. Bordwell quotes one of the ads saying that it "brings you the nonsense of modern life". Regardless, the reviews called it one of the best movies of that year. The studio plugged tons of money, three of their top writers, four top stars, and a far longer running time than usual.
A last thought based on looking at filmographies: Kurishima would only re-team with Ozu once more, in 1937's What Did the Lady Forget?. After her next movie in 1938, she would not appear on screen again for 18 years. As with many silent-era Japanese actors, WWII likely had a lot to do with her abrupt semi-retirement. Her final film was Mikio Naruse's Nagareru.
Tokihiko Okada as Okajima, "The Beard" of the title.
20: The Lady and The Beard (1931)
Shukujo te hije
status || partially preserved: script fully preserved, and 75 minutes out of the 8-reel (~88 minute) negative survive
on disc || UK/R2: BFI's Ozu Student Comedies set (13.99 GBP, or ~$23 USD) also includes I Flunked, But..., The Lady & The Beard, Where Now Are the Dreams of Youth, and I Graduated, But...
Japan/R3: OOP 6-DVD set includes surviving work from Days of Youth (1927) through Dragnet Girl (1933), but with no English subtitles ($270 USD minimum)
streaming (USA) || Hulu Plus (requires subscription)
how to watch || if in US, Hulu Plus, but otherwise BFI's Ozu Student Comedies set
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.
It spoils absolutely nothing to say that this Ozu picture ends with a quotation by Abraham Lincoln. The hero ("The Beard" of the title) is an old-fashioned, traditionally Japanese guy who means well, but has not adapted to the "modern" suit & tie way of life that has become popular in Japan. I like that the identity of "The Lady" in the title is open to interpretation. It could be all three female supporting leads, or just one of them.
The movie begins at a kendo tournament. Bearded competitor Okajima (Tokihiko Okada) bests all of his opponents, and a couple of guys watching approach him afterward to congratulate him. One of the guys, Teruo (Ichiro Tsukida), invites Okajima to come along to his sister's birthday party. On his way, Okajima saves a girl named Hiroko (Hiroko Kawasaki) from being robbed by Satoko (Satoko Date as yet another "bad girl") and her henchmen.
"Bad Girl" (as she is officially credited) Satoko and her "Bad Dudes"
At the party, Teruo's sister Ikuko (Toshiko Iizuka) and her friends make fun of Okajima. Okajima does shave his beard at one point, and the grand question is which of the three ladies he will end up with. Since he ends the film beardless, does this mean that the woman he ends up with is no longer a "lady" by traditional definition?
A small aside: two of the ladies have marriage proposals already offered, though they are drawn to Okajima "The Beard". One of them meets her potential husband and asks him if he knows kendo. To wit:
She: "I won't marry a man who doesn't know kendo."
Him: "Why?"
She: "So he can protect me."
Him: "The Police can protect you. They have the law."
She: "Then I'll marry the police, or the law."
Coincidentally, and thanks to watching the more recent movie just yesterday, this reminded me of a particularly Mamet-ian exchange between Alec Baldwin and Anthony Hopkins in The Edge. I'll have to paraphrase:
Baldwin: "A few days ago, if a bear had reared up on you like that, you would have called your lawyer."
Hopkins: "No, I wouldn't do that to any animal."
It's not the topic of conversation that felt similar, it's the snap-crackle-pop intellectual payoff. Good, smart writing always works.
One of the opponents at the opening Kendo match
While watching The Lady and the Beard, it isn't difficult to guess who he ends up with, but I see no reason spoiling it here.
The movie starts out lighthearted and comedic, but grows more serious and grounded as we go on. This is a progression that is among the only steadily developing trends visible within the subset of these early years of Ozu films. He jumped from genre to genre, trying this and that, and Bordwell rightly pokes a hole in the idea that Ozu steadily developed into the fully-formed artist that made his postwar films. Here we see a spiritual predecessor to Ozu's later career focus on wondering "what's so bad with old culture?".
In the surviving films and fragments, we can see little touches here and there that he would use later on, but until now, we haven't seen much that is indicative of what I consider the Signature Ozu period that he is known for. Bordwell notes that first seen here is the device Ozu used extensively: dividing portions of rooms with items in the extreme foreground (glasses and cups in this case). Ozu's Hollywood influence remains blatant at various points. Something I didn't have time to include is a screencap of the girl Bordwell points out as doing a "Dietrich" pose at the party early on.
Okada, who plays Okajima, looks nothing like he did in That Night's Wife when he has the beard on in TL&TB. He does some really wonderful work here, and it's a shame he wasn't in more films overall. Okada only made a total of five movies with Ozu, the last being Tokyo Chorus, which closes this installment of Discovering Ozu.
Honest "Lincoln-sama"
21: Beauty's Sorrows or The Beauty and The Sorrow (1931)
Bijin aishu
status || completely lost: no script, prints, or stills survive
I should hope that my affection for Ozu and his work is obvious by now, because this article is going to roll around in his biggest creative and critical failure (up to this point). We're still in the early years of Ozu's career, and as I've said previously, he was nothing if not a dabbler. I've seen the title of Beauty's Sorrows also translated as The Beauty and the Sorrow, but either way, it's a perfect moniker for the first (and last) romantic melodrama from Ozu, which ran a whopping 15 reels (over two and a half hours!).
Bordwell's synopsis made me laugh repeatedly, with about three "oh, Je-sus"-es muttered. Tatsuo Saito and Tokihiko Okada play two friends (the dual leads). Okada, you'll recall, played Okajima ("The Beard") in The Lady and the Beard. We know Saito well by now.
According to Bordwell, the plot goes something like this: two friends become infatuated with a sculpted work of a beautiful woman, she turns out to be real, and tragedy strikes.
Perhaps I should elaborate, paraphrasing Bordwell's synopsis.
Okada and Saito play buddies Okamoto and Sano, respectively. The alliteration of matching first letters makes it easy to keep up. Okamoto and Sano are friends with an older professional sculptor named Yoshida (Sotaro Okada). Yoshida's newest work takes their breath away, and Sano manages to convince Yoshida to part with it. Okamoto one-ups his pal by wooing and marrying Yoshida's daughter Yoshie (Yukiko Inoue), who was the reference model for the sculpture.
Wait, here comes the first twist.
Okamoto is a jobless deadbeat who borrows money from Sano to live on. The heartbroken Sano begins drowning his ironic despair with booze while his buddy lives off of his money and the happiness he wanted...but not for long.
When Yoshie's dad comes to visit, she is suddenly afflicted with "Suddenly, Tragically, and Incurably Ill Spouse Syndrome"...and dies. The audience should have seen this coming, since one of the wedding presents was a record whose A-side is "The Wedding March", with a "The Funeral March" B-side.
Okamoto is understandably devastated, and orders Sano to give him the Yoshie sculpture. Sano tells him to get bent, and then Okamoto utterly destroys the sculpture in a very alpha male display of "if I can't have 'her', no one will!". The two men then get into a brawl that ends both of their lives. Yoshida finds their corpses among the rubble of the smashed statue. He collects the remaining pieces and returns home, where he buries them.
With a runtime at around the 150-minute mark or more, I can't say I'm completely crushed that I'm not obligated to watch a movie that the critics violently hated at the time. If it were miraculously found all of a sudden, yes, I'd be first in line to see this Greatest Misfire.
Bordwell notes that the critics accused Ozu of doing lackluster work due to a real-life obsession with Yukiko Inoue (who played Yoshie) that echoed the film. In retrospect, there doesn't seem to be much to this claim, which smells like an easy, tabloid-y accusation designed to add spice to a negative review. Inoue would make only one more movie with Ozu, 1932's Spring Comes from the Ladies (also lost).
22: Tokyo Chorus (1931)
Tokyo no korasu
status || fully preserved: script, original negative, and prints exist
on disc || US/R1: Criterion's Eclipse Series 10, Silent Ozu (Amazon link / Criterion Store link), which also includes I Was Born, But..., and Passing Fancy
streaming || US: Hulu Plus (requires subscription)
how to watch || Hulu Plus if you have it, otherwise the Silent Ozu Eclipse set from Criterion
Bordwell rightfully considers Tokyo Chorus to mark Ozu's birth as a Great Director. It is the earliest Ozu work available on DVD in the USA. Even though Chorus is his 22nd feature (and the earlier Walk Cheerfully is on Hulu Plus), it's not a bad place to start watching his filmography.
Of Ozu's surviving films, this is the first one that really fired on all cylinders for me. The western influence on his work is evident here, since core elements of the plot are very directly inspired by King Vidor's The Crowd. Set during the depressed era seen in previous Ozu features, this was his most effective picture to date that concerned people making do and cutting back.
Okajima (l.) and his former teacher Okamura (r.) later in the film
The movie opens years before the present with protagonist Okajima in school. He is harshly reprimanded by his teacher Okamura (our pal Tatsuo Saito with a mustache and age makeup). Tokihiko Okada plays Okajima, whose surname is shared with "The Beard" Okajima he played in The Lady and the Beard. I like to think that this is a "cousin Okajima", who similarly must evolve to survive and thrive, though in a different way.
Okajima and his elder officemate
Whereas the kendo master of TL&TB needed to modernize, this Okajima must avail himself of his upper-middle-class pride. He works at an insurance firm, and when bonus checks are handed out, he finds out that an older salesman at the firm is being let go, just shy of making pension. Okajima insists that he and his coworkers petition for the old man's reinstatement, but his haughtiness forces him to go it alone. He proceeds to act like he runs the place, resulting in his firing. The sight gags involved in his stealing office supplies remind me just a touch of Chaplin.
Before leaving for work that morning, he had promised his son a bike. In light of losing his job, Okajima instead purchases a much cheaper two-wheel scooter. The son soundly rejects the inferior goodie.
What an ungrateful little emperor...
Bad news in-hand, he goes home to his wife and three kids: a son, daughter, and an infant of unspecified sex. Emiko Yaguma plays Okada's wife here, just as she did in That Night's Wife (the film examined at the beginning of this article). In TNW, she played the mother who would do absolutely anything for her child. In Tokyo Chorus, her mother is dramatically more self-concerned than selfless.
She responds with outright despair that her husband would sell her belongings to save the life of one of their kids. Additionally, she is not merely embarrassed, but disgusted at the shame of "lowering" herself to doing without and seeing her husband do "common" work for their family to survive. Yaguma also appears in Ozu'sStory of Floating Weeds.
Tokyo Chorus is thematically very similar to Ozu's later, better-known films. A portrait of a family set against a backdrop of generational conflict, the static camera that reveals greater internalized emotion, and the well-intentioned father figure are all part of the groove that Ozu would settle into. I got a little choked up for the first time while re-watching this movie, but it wasn't due to the movie's content. I choked up because I knew that this was Tokihiko Okada's biggest success, but his last picture with Ozu. He died just three years after the release of Tokyo Chorus.
Okajima, son, and daughter
Okada really gives one of the finest silent film performances that I've ever seen here, and I say that having watched loads of silent cinema. He was on track to become one of the great stars of Japan's silent era. His character journey from entitlement to humility here is very touching, especially once he begins working for his college instructor Okamura at a curried rice restaurant.
Okajima "lowering" himself to common work, handing out fliers and carrying ad banners
The movie compliments Okada nicely by presenting a perfectly-portioned bento box of different genre: college comedy, salaryman, and family drama. This nice, compact meal is the one that master chef Ozu would refine and perfect over the following decades.
Bordwell closes his piece on this film (quoted in the Eclipse jacket) by saying "From this point on, Ozu is a major director". The major critics voted it the third best picture of 1931, and Ozu's stock rose exponentially following its release, only to culminate in major success a couple of years later with I Was Born, But....
The Eclipse DVD edition retains a great deal of damage that is truly beyond repair. That is, unless one were to manufacture entire frames out of digital cloth. It's perfectly watchable, and I enjoyed Donald Sosin's newly-recorded score from a few years ago. I hope we see his talents employed on future Ozu silent film releases. The Hulu streaming version is comparable in quality to the DVD.
Up Next
Tomorrow brings a standalone appreciation of Tokihiko Okada and the fascinating, heartbreaking, and heartwarming narrative that goes beyond his unexpected early death. The next full installment includes Ozu's next big success and further progression toward the style and form that would make him one of the greatest filmmakers in history.
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.