In Ozu's final film of 1933, we meet "Kihachi", as portrayed by Takeshi Sakamoto. Kihachi becomes Ozu's own sort of little tramp in the four movies he made in '34 and '35. Unlike Chaplin's iconic creation, Kihachi is always someone's father, an irrepressable screw-up, and a hard-luck guy all around.
Takeshi Sakamoto as Kihachi in Passing Fancy
29: Passing Fancy (1933)
Dekigokoro
status || fully preserved: script, original negative, and prints survive
on disc (USA) || Criterion's Eclipse Series 10: Silent Ozu (~$28 USD on Amazon) also includes Tokyo Chorus and I Was Born, But...
streaming (USA) || Hulu Plus (requires subscription)
how to watch || Hulu for US, non-US should import the Silent Ozu set
In Passing Fancy, Ozu introduced Kihachi (Takeshi Sakamoto), one of his most indelible recurring characters. Kihachi would appear in lead roles three more times, in A Story of Floating Weeds, An Innocent Maid, and An Inn in Tokyo. In his subsequent iterations, Kihachi's fundamental nature is common between the films. He's irresponsible, unreliable, and not a success at much of anything for very long. The stark difference between Sakamoto and Chaplin is that whereas the Tramp is often very sympathetic, Kihachi is more often than not an indefensible bastard. We love watching him regardless.
We'll learn about Takeshi Sakamoto more in an upcoming Appendix article, but I should mention a couple of his appearances in earlier Ozu silents that are relevant here. Of the survivors, his most prominent role was in I Was Born, But.... Sakamoto was the company President whose ass had to be kissed. Sakamoto earlier worked opposite his Passing Fancy co-star "Tokkan Kozo" in the film of the same name, where he played the crime boss who was utterly tormented by Kozo.
"Kihachi I" is a single father who works as a day laborer. His son Tomio is played by hellion Tokkan Kozo (aka Tomio Aoki), who begins the movie with an eyepatch that eventually disappears. I wonder if Tomio's eyepatch is a result of unseen, neglectful parenting. It would appear to indicate just that: Kihachi is an absent-minded, careless parent who allows his kid to get eye injuries.
Kihachi's buddy Jiro (Den Ohikata) helps him raise the kid. Stumbling around drunk one night, Kihachi comes across a pretty young woman named Harue (Nobuko Fushimi). She is destitute and homeless. Kihachi is immediately smitten, and he convinces cafe owner Otome (Choko Iida) to take the young girl in for the night, with Kihachi's reputation as collateral.
The dashing Den Ohikata as Jiro
Harue promptly takes to the handsome Jiro, but Jiro rebuffs Harue's overtures at every turn. Meanwhile, Kihachi continues to nurse delusions of a future with Harue's as her true love. Kihachi remarks early on that she reminds him of one of his ex-lovers. The fondly-remembered flame could be son Tomio's mother or someone else, but here we start to wonder what on earth happened to that woman in particular. Did she die? Did she abandon them? Is Tomio even his kid? Kihachi's level of indifference toward Tomio makes you wonder.
Tomio is much smarter and more pragmatic than his dad.
When Kihachi gives his kid "50 sen" to do with as he pleases, Tomio spends it all on candy. Tomio becomes gravely ill, and gets very close to death. His dear old dad can't seem to be bothered to care.
While all of this is going on, Kihachi learns both that Harue isn't interested in her "Uncle" in a romantic way, and that Jiro probably does have feelings for her. The reason that Jiro resists acting on those feelings is that he's too good a friend to abandon the clearly needy Kihachi and son. Everything I saw in the movie reinforces Bordwell's argument that the title would be more accurate and better translated as "Impulse". In a weird alternate universe where all the Kihachi movies were re-titled to include his name, I would have called this one Kihachi Goes With His Gut.
Tokkan Kozo's trademark "nyah nyah" pose, previously seen in Ozu's I Was Born, But...
I wonder whether Choko Iida's Otome the cafe lady will ever succeed in capturing Kihachi's attention. The movie makes me wonder along with dozens of other "what if?" scenarios. That's what Passing Fancy does so well: provoke one's imagination about mundane life. Like I Was Born, But..., Passing Fancy is one of the most accessible titles in Ozu's filmography.
After having seen all three movies in the Eclipse Series 10 set, all of them are worth owning and revisiting: this one, I Was Born, But..., and Tokyo Chorus. Each of them has more going for it than merely historical, academic value. all three are now available on Criterion's Hulu Plus channel, which makes watching them an easier and cheaper proposition than before.
Nobuko Fushimi in a bland performance (even for a stock ingenue) as Harue
For the sake of reference, I should mention that another "pretty young woman" named Harue appeared previously in Woman of Tokyo (as played by Kinuyo Tanaka). We'll see some more character names recycled in the next few Ozu films, often played by the same actor each time. Nobuko Fushimi, who plays Harue here, never appears in another Ozu film. Her acting career ended in 1939 for a reason unknown to me.
The next feature only features Kihachi in a cameo, and is tragically missing some important parts.
Mitsuko Yoshikawa as mother Chieko
30: A Mother Should Be Loved (1934)
Haha wo kowazuya
status || partially (7/9 reels) preserved: script, and prints of reels 2-8 survive
on disc (USA) || not available
on disc (UK) || on the R2-locked DVD included with the BFI's Blu-ray of Late Autumn (Region B locked 10.50 GBP, ~$16 USD at Amazon UK)
streaming (USA) || Hulu Plus (requires subscription)
how to watch || US: Hulu, UK/importers: Grab the Late Autumn Blu-ray, which includes a short essay in the booklet
how to release it in Region 1 || Package it with a Late Autumn Blu-ray like the BFI did, as a pair of under-recognized movies along a theme
The first and last reels of A Mother Should be Loved are nowhere to be found, which make watching it a little weird and difficult to evaluate.
The movie opens with a fairly affluent family eating breakfast: a father (Iwata Yukichi), a mother named Chieko (Mitsuko Yoshikawa), and two young brothers (Den Okikata and I Was Born, But...'s Seiichi Kato). They plan a family trip before going their separate ways for the day, but the father abruptly dies around lunchtime. The surviving film elements begin here, just as the boys are called out of class.
Years pass. One of the brothers discovers that he is actually the son of his father's first wife. He refuses his stepmother's comfort, and keeps the news from his stepbrother. Chieko's biological son resents the pronounced amount of preferred treatment that he sees his brother receiving. The stepson resents the favor from Chieko because he knows that she is trying to overcompensate.
Prostitute Mitsuko. In the background, a poster for Julien Duvivier's 1932 classic Poil de Carotte, which is about a sad, unloved child.
Choko Iida as "brothel maid"The brothel's maid (Choko Iida) invokes the title, insisting that "a mother should be loved". Iida herself will embody that point a couple of years later in The Only Son. The stepson, in turn, is wracked with guilt. He goes back to his stepmother's house once again. This is where the surviving film cuts off.
Everyone makes nice, and they all move to the suburbs together three years later.
Ozu later acknowledged that the basis of the story (the disintegration of an affluent family) was more interesting than the intrusive "B" story he plugged in about the "brotherly" rivalry. As Bordwell notes, it's tough to really put together a verdict when you can't see two crucial sections (the beginning and the end). The first is, of course, the introduction to the family at the beginning and the second is the resolution and ending that presumably explains why there's a "three years later" coda.
Takeshi Sakamoto in Kihachi's few seconds of screen time
Even imagining as much as I can into the narrative, A Mother Should Be Loved didn't do much for me. I'm eye-to-eye with Bordwell in feeling it just drones on and on, melodrama oozing out of every pore.
The most effective or interesting piece of it was Mitsuko Yoshikawa playing the put-upon mother, Chieko. She has nothing on Choko Iida's performance in The Only Son, which ranks for me as one of the most powerful "mother" performances I've seen in Ozu's work. In some respects, one could see Ozu clipping off the bare element of A Mother Should Be Loved, and from that, up sprouted The Only Son. He took a mother trying to do right by her adult son, as seen in this movie, and focused exclusively on the complexity of that relationship.
The Only Son's DVD release from Criterion was the egensis of this series when I started my first pass on it in 2010. It's one of my favorite Ozu pictures, having now seen them all. We'll get into why soon.
From this point, we see a more direct reworking and remaking of his own movies as an essential element of what Ozu does cinematically. He picks apart the outer layers and focuses on the juicier fruit at the center, moving further away from melodrama and toward lighter framing of serious subjects.
We'll return to the subject shortly, but it is very important to note that Ozu's father died on the 2nd of April, 1934, just weeks before A Mother Should Be Loved was released, while he was still in post-production. This came before A Story of Floating Weeds would be shot. His father's death did not affect him in remotely the same way that his mother's later passing would, but it marked an important moment of personal growth for Ozu.
31: A Story of Floating Weeds (1934)
Ukigusa monogatari
status || fully preserved: script, original negative, and prints exist
on disc (USA) || Criterion's 2-movie DVD collection, which includes 1959's Floating Weeds (around $29 on Amazon), spine #232
on disc (UK) || not available
streaming (USA) || Hulu Plus (requires subscription)
how to watch || the Criterion DVD set, which includes a great commentary by Donald Richie
Both Ozu's next movie and its much later remake are considered masterpieces. They're effectively the same story, but rather different experiences. The differences in experience are not limited to one being a black & white silent and the other being a color sound picture.
I had a great time discussing both this film and its 25-years-later remake with the guys at CriterionCast back in June 2010.
When asked which we would save if we could pick only one, I instinctively said that I'd sacrifice myself so they both could live. As many similarities as the two movies share, they are at once distinctly brilliant. I'll withhold the lion's share of my comparison of the two for the later film, which is on of Ozu's last. There's plenty to talk about with regard to this one on its own.
I love the performances and the costumes in the "Kabuki" sequences
In the 1983 feature documentary I Lived But..., we hear Ozu's own voice explain his feelings about Kihachi and the rapid changes happening in Japanese culture. His life as a native of Fukugawa (where Kihachi is from) made the character possible. After the war, people simply no longer existed in the way that they do in Passing Fancy or A Story of Floating Weeds. I Lived But... is included in full on the second disc of Criterion's Tokyo Story DVD set, which appears to be the only way to get it on disc, since it isn't on any of the existing BFI Ozu Collection sets.
The wearing of kimono and the focus on cleanliness over sloppiness are two of the most apparent visual changes he notes, along with the universal adoption of Western dress, like trousers and jackets. Particularly vivid is an image that Ozu describes of how people would regularly sit around chatting and eating tofu in the evenings next to wood-burning stoves. He gives so much flavor to those bland chunks of tofu by using just a few spare words. Indeed, we see noticeable shifts in Ozu's native society during and after the war, but in these past few films, we've seen a more dire, hopeless progression that climaxes in The Only Son.
Tomio Aoki as a kid playing the crucial role of "dog"
Ne'er-do-well Kihachi is less petty and selfish in his second starring here than he was in Passing Fancy. At first, he is restrained and downright gentlemanly as the leader of a traveling acting company, but his ingrained persona surfaces eventually.
Kihachi (riding piggyback, l.) and son Shinkichi (r.)
Kihachi's troupe has returned to a town that he first visited nearly two decades earlier. The result of meeting a young woman named Otsune on that trip is a modern-day son who is now of age to go off to university. The young man, Shinkichi (Hideo Mitsui), is oblivious to the fact his father is not, in fact, dead.
Kihachi (l.) drinking sake at Otsune's (r.) place
Kihachi with new mistress Otaka earlier in the movie
Otsune, now a middle-aged mother, has happily raised her son in ignorance. She is played by Choko Iida, seen here in one of her first substantive roles, not merely playing the maid or housekeeper. Kihachi now has a different mistress, Otaka (Rieko Yagumo), who performs with the troupe. Otaka finds out the truth regarding Kihachi's fathering habits and declares war, bribing younger actress Otoki (Yoshiko Tsubouchi) to seduce Kihachi's kid. A violent exchange of words happens, and Kihachi's lone act of violence in his quadrilogy (a slap) is seen only in its after-effect.
One of the few horses I've seen in Ozu (albeit human on the inside)
We anticipate the interaction of the two groupings of stars in this film to be one of passing orbits. When all is said and done, however, their relative gravity causes involuntary collisions that change the universe irrevocably for them all.
Rieko Yagumo as Otaka
Rieko Yagumo, who plays jealous and scheming Otaka the new mistress, seems to have appeared in only this film. Despite my best efforts, I can't find any biographical information on her whatsoever. Maybe she was a famous theatre actress who had a brief brish with cinema.
Ingenue Yoshiko Tsubouchi, who plays Shinkichi's love interest Otoki, begins a 16-year stretch of collaborations with Ozu, ending with 1950's The Munekata Sisters.
"Tokkan Kozo" as Tomibo, piggyback riding on his father, played by Reiko Tani
Various other Ozu regulars appear as has been custom, from Tomio "Tokkan Kozo" Aoki as a company member's son "Tomibo", to bit players like Reiko Tani, who plays Tomibo's dad. Tani previously played businessmen, company presidents, and most recently, a barber in Passing Fancy.
Yoshiko Tsubouchi as Otoki
The only actor in this movie who returns in the remake is Hideo Mitsui, who plays Kihachi's illegitimate son. The actor would later be credited as "Koji" Mitsui a quarter century later, where he plays a character nothing like the fresh-faced innocent that he is here. Mitsui appeared in a pile of Kurosawa films, from Lower Depths to Dodes ka'den. He even shows up in the first installment of the epic and astonishing The Human Condition trilogy.
Chishu Ryu in a three-second cameo as "shouting man"
Most poignant to me here was the most profound instance of generational disappointment yet found in the cinema of Ozu.
In this case, a father (Kihachi) wants nothing but the best for his son, but actively works against that possibility unknowingly. If you have seen Iida in The Only Son, Stray Dog, and Drunken Angel, you can almost hear her voice in you head, wailing at certain points in this silent film.
I agree with Bordwell that this movie is a great deal more "serious" and "Japanese" than what we've seen from Ozu to this point. That this is the most widely-seen Ozu silent is one of the reasons that he is erroneously termed "the most Japanese" of directors (by no fault of the film itself). That's the only thing that troubles me about this movie. Due to it being readily available for some time, A Story of Floating Weeds has been used to miscast Ozu's entire career. Using one especially ethnocentric film as the primary lens of analysis, it's easy to generalize and offer a less-than-comprehensive wholistic assessment of anyone's work. One of the primary reasons I'm writing this series is my belief that, generally speaking, Ozu's filmography is one of the most universal in all of cinema.
Now we come to the next to last currently-lost Ozu film, An Innocent Maid. It was a failure in more than one sense. After that, I should have articles up this evening that take us all the way through tomorrow's Criterion release of The Only Son.
32: An Innocent Maid (1935)
Hakoiri musume
status || completely lost: no script, prints, or stills survive
Information on this one from Bordwell's book is more limited than usual for a lost film. I would assume that this is mostly due to its utter failure critically and commercially. Kihachi has very little to do with this intended franchise-starter. Takeshi Sakamoto once again plays the can't-catch-a-break rascal whose son Tomibo (Tomio "Tokkan Kozo" Aoki) is, as always, more mature than his father. They live in a back alley making rice cakes, overhearing and prying into the developing events in a love triangle.
Shochiku decided they were going to make a rapidly-produced, and no doubt generic, romantic comedy series out of An Innocent Maid. The movie ran eight reels in release form, after apparent heavy cuts from censors. My extrapolated theory is that Kihachi and Tomibo were the portion of the movie in which Ozu actually had some investment. They no doubt had some little bits of business (or else why have them?), but all indications point to a very limited presence of either actor outside the periphery...until the finale, that is.
Kinuyo Tanaka plays Oshige, a young woman torn between two suitors. She prefers the young Arata (Ryoichi Takeuchi) to the cotton merchant Murata (Kiyoshi Seino). Her mother Otsune (Choko Iida) pushes her toward the much older entrepreneur. This is the second out of three times in the Kihachi cycle where Iida plays "Otsune" and Tokkan Kozo plays "Tomibo".
Just as the heroine is set to marry the man she doesn't love, Kihachi interrupts the proceedings, insisting that everyone listen to each other's feelings. The ending is presumably neat, tidy, and happy. The movie was almost Kihachi's swan song, but we get one more go-round with him before the war changes everyone and everything, both inside and outside cinema.
33: An Inn in Tokyo (1935)
Tokyo no yado
status || partially (8/10 reels) preserved: script, original negative, and prints survive
on disc (USA) || not available
on disc (UK) || not available
streaming (USA) || Hulu Plus (requires subscription)
how to watch || Hulu Plus
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.
Ozu's single surviving feature (out of two) from 1935 is Kihachi's swan song. In it, he has grown quite a bit in selflessness and maturity. This time around, he has two sons. One is played by "Tokkan Kozo" once again, but is not named Tomibo. There's less screwing around and more drifting in desperate seek of work.
Father and sons
The narrative somewhat mirrors parts of Passing Fancy, with Kihachi meeting an attractive young woman (Otaka, played by Yoshiko Okada) and re-connecting with an old ladyfriend (a third instance of "Otsune", played byChoko Iida once more). This time, the young lady has a toddler daughter, and is similarly in dire need of work, shelter, food, and income. Kihachi and the boys meet Otaka walking through a field. The children play for a bit, and they part ways.
Kihachi and single mom Otaka watching their kids play
Kihachi and sons eating after losing the bundle of their few material possessions.
One night, Kihachi and sons choose food over shelter, and it begins to rain. By chance, Kihachi runs into Otsune, who offers them a roof and sustenance until Kihachi can get them back on their feet. Kihachi once again harbors an infatuation with the young woman, but here, it comes off as less creepy and selfish. He seems more concerned with providing a mother for his boys and comes off as genuinely sympathetic for the single mother with a young daughter. As Kihachi cranks up his courting engine, the mother and daughter disappear due to the little girl getting dysentery.
Kihachi resumes binge drinking his sorrows away, and finds Otaka has become a sake bar hostess (it's implied she's also become a prostitute) to pay for the girl's treatment. He makes a valiant (though questionable) sacrifice of himself by stealing the money needed, which Otsune would have undoubtedly loaned had she known the circumstances.
Kihachi walks off into the night. In the context of the film, he's going to give himself up to the police, but in cinematic history, he's fading into the mist forever.
The boys. "Tokkan Kozo" (l.) sure is growing up a lot.
Even considering the shortsighted, foolish decision that Kihachi makes, Inn in Tokyo transforms him from a selfish, petty cretin into a noble savage just as he is retired. Sakamoto will go on to perform in more Ozu films over the next couple of decades, but predominantly in supporting and bit parts. An "Appendix" piece on Sakamoto is in the offing this week, so watch for that.
Children make the most of what they have to play with and fixate on. In this movie, they fixate on a hat.
The themes of despair and the struggle to survive among the poor working classes becomes yet more pronounced in this film and peaks in the next two Ozu features. The mid-30's were a time of great economic hardship in Japan, and the unemployment rate had been steadily climbing for years.
As discussed in the entry on the Fallen Women movies including Until the Day We Meet Again, Japan had been getting more and more serious about full-on war with China, and in a non-rhetorical way, since 1931. It's my assertion that the economic downturn that followed The Manchurian Incident was a contributing factor to the further escalation of war with China, since the age-old solution for economic woes had always been starting a new war.
Chishu Ryu's quick cameo as a policeman
There are these massive, empty spindles that litter the landscape of this film (seen in the first couple of images embedded in this article). They're the type used for giant masses of rolled cabling. The rapid modernization of Japan has produced this inorganic industrial waste that is as prevalent here as buildings and actual functional structures in previous films. Ozu could never be accused of self-imposed tactics of overt imagery, and I would caution against assuming that Inn in Tokyo is some sort of subtle "statement". If anything, it stands out compared to other films of the era in terms of realistic "this is how people are living", but there is no blunt sociopolitical "message movie" disguised here. The desolate "industrial desert" (as Bordwell puts it) is a powerful precursor to The Only Son.
Next up for Choko Iida: one of the most selfless, tragic mothers in cinema
To me, this final appearance of Kihachi seems to characterize the quiet extinction of the "old style" scrappy laborer type that happened in the run-up to WWII. Unlike Chaplin's Little Tramp, the character Kihachi would never speak (though Sakamoto would in many Ozu pictures).
Farewell, Kihachi.
Up Next in Discovering Ozu
We've finally reached the last Ozu film that is considered completely lost, and it's a real tragedy: College is a Nice Place is both his final silent film, and it co-stars Chishu Ryu in his first major role.
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".
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