If all you know of Yasujiro Ozu, Japan's national treasure of a film director, is
the quiet restraint and rigorous simplicity of his sound films, then you only have
half of the story of the director's remarkable career. The artist called the most
"Japanese" of Japanese directors was a voracious film buff more interested in
Hollywood movies than his own national cinema early in his career. He was hired as
an assistant cameraman at Shochiku, Japan's biggest film studio, in the early
1920s and (after a year off for military service, which he largely spent in the
infirmary) soon worked his way up to assistant to director Tadamoto Okubo, who
specialized in "nonsense" comedies." He made his directorial debut in 1927 with a
period picture (it would turn out to be the only one in his career) that has not
survived and was soon making every type of genre: lighthearted college comedies
(
I Graduated, But... and
I Flunked, But...), crime dramas (
Dragnet
Girl), romantic melodramas (
Woman of Tokyo), and even social dramas of
the hard times of economic desperation (
An Inn in Tokyo), as many as six
features a year in his initial burst of filmmaking. All were influenced by his
love of Hollywood movies (he was a big fan of Ernst Lubtisch and Harold Lloyd) and
he was flexed his creative muscles with tracking shots and dramatic angles and
dynamic compositions while looking for his own voice and style.
Perhaps his most beloved films of the silent era, and certainly his most enduring,
are his lively family comedies.
Silent Ozu: Three Family Comedies, a
collection released by Criterion's no-frills Eclipse label, features some of the
director's richest and most delightful productions from the period.
Tokyo Chorus (1931) opens with a scene of familiar college humor (students
horsing around as a teacher eyes them and carefully marks out their demerits in
his notepad) and segues into salaryman movie territory. Hapless college boy Shinji
(played by Tokihiko Okada) is now a husband and father of three (including a very
willful son) working for an insurance company and eagerly awaiting his bonus (the
gags of adult men attempting to discreetly count their bonus money suggests they
haven't matured much since their college days). The father stands up to his boss
over the unfair firing of an elder employee (Ozu regular Takeshi Sakamoto) and,
after a childish game of tit-for-tat played with folded fans escalates into a
comic scrap, joins the ranks of the unemployed (the "Tokyo Chorus" of the
title).
Directing from a screenplay by Kogo Noda, who went on to write many of Ozu's
greatest films (including
Tokyo Story, 1953, and
Floating Weeds,
1959), Ozu fills the film with deft sight gags, many thanks to the antics of the
son, yet there's undercurrent of desperation to the comedy. As father struggles to
find work to support his wife and children, and is forced to sell his wife's
kimonos to pay the doctor when their young daughter falls ill (the sick child is a
classic dramatic crisis in Ozu's silent films, invariably illustrated with the
image of a bag of ice water suspended on the child's forehead with a string). And
when the wife sees Shinji marching the streets with an advertising banner, reduced
to the lowest form of day labor, she's first humiliated by his spectacle and then
shamed by her attitude to his sacrifice for them. For all the comedy, the film is
filled with tender and delicate moments in such seemingly simple scenes as a
round-robin of patty-cake with the kids or sing-song at the teacher's banquet.
It's still very traditional filmmaking compared to his later style, more Lubitsch
than late Ozu, but you can see the director mastering his tools and finding his
voice. In the words of Japanese film historian Donald Ritchie, "With this film,
what Ozu called his "darker side" and what we would call his mature style began to
emerge."
Young father Shinji begins the film as something of a clown but matures along the
way, learning to subsume the emotions and his impulses of his youth and join the
adult world of duty and deference. There is no greater contrast to this
sensibility than the children of Ozu's films. They are forces of pure id:
impulsive, obstinate, willful, at times downright rude to parents and often
destructive when they don't get their way, as when the young son throws a tantrum
when he doesn't get the bike he wanted. He makes a show of his indignation by
poking holes through the paper walls and methodically eating the scraps.
In
I Was Born, But... (1932), the portrait of self-absorbed childhood is even
more comically egocentric and creatively crafty. This "picture book for grown-ups"
(as the opening titles read) follows two young sons of salaryman Yoshi (Tatsuo
Saito, the schoolteacher from
Tokyo Chorus) as they move to a Tokyo suburb
and a new school. These boys are truly little rascals, skipping school to avoid
bullies, faking homework assignments to fool their parents, bribing a delivery boy
to take care of the biggest bully on the block. Ozu's lively peek into the social
dynamics of the juvenile world is full of private games hand gestures, taunting
poses, comic faces that define the playful milieu of their social competition.
When the brothers finally establish their dominance in the childhood pecking
order, they are appalled to see their father submit to his boss (Takeshi Sakamoto
again). "You tell us to become somebody, but you're nobody. Why do you have to bow
so much to Taro's father?" they demand in an epic tantrum, and they finally
staging a hunger strike to protest this unfair social order. (The hunger strike
was reworked as a silent protest for a TV set in Ozu's 1959
Ohayo, aka
Good Morning, not quite a remake but certainly a family comedy indebted to
this film.)
Behind the deft comedy and spirited performances of the two boys is a rather
somber engagement with the compromises adults make to the demands of the social
order. Yoshi has no illusions of his place in the company hierarchy and dutifully
kowtows to his boss and plays the clown in his home movies. But his attempts to
explain the realities of the adult world to the boys leads to an introspective
talk between husband and wife after the boys have fallen asleep. Their faces glow
with innocence as father blesses them with the wish: "Don't become an apple
polisher like me, boys." Perhaps that ambivalence over such compromises explains
the parents' astonishing tolerance of the boys' brazen impertinence and bad
behavior. "I started to make a film about children and ended up making a film
about grownups," observed Ozu in a 1958 interview.
I Was Born, But..., which
Ozu developed from his own story, is a social satire of comic delights and
melancholy resignation to the innocence lost as the boys face up to the
compromises that await them. The film won first prize at the
Kinema Jumpo
awards the first of six such prizes he would eventually win and is regarded as
Ozu's first genuine masterpiece.
Familiar Ozu character actor Takeshi Sakamoto takes the lead for the first time in
Passing Fancy (1933), playing easy living single father Kihachi with a big,
guileless grin. "I'm not as useless as people think," he claims with a smile, but
his actions say otherwise, especially when he falls for a pretty young homeless
woman (Nobuko Fushimi) who is attracted Kihachi's younger best friend, Jiro (Den
Obinata). Tokkan Kozo, who played the younger brother in
I Was Born, But...,
is Kihachi's son Tomio, a kid who does more parenting than his father. A night,
dad piggy-packs the boy home from the bar, and in the morning the boy is forced to
become a human alarm clock to rouse Kihachi for work. His method is quite
effective: a sharp blow to the shin with a club. The story takes a melodramatic
turn in the third act when Tomio gets ill, thanks to an act of generosity gone
wrong. "It's so horrible not having an education. I got my son sick and I can't
pay for the doctor." Sakamoto went on to play variations of the same character in
A Story of Floating Weeds (1934) and
An Inn at Tokyo (1935).
The film's sentimental streak lacks the conviction Ozu brings to the other films
in the set, but the street milieu of day laborers and working class men living
paycheck to paycheck and drinking their evenings away in the local bar is
fascinating. Like the other films of the set, it is utterly contemporary to the
times, a stylized snapshot of working class life in 1933 Japan, and Ozu's details
of their subsistence existence (not to mention little touches such as the
eye-patch that Tomio wears in the opening scenes never explained but surely
another example of Kihachi's benign negligence) creates a rich atmosphere.
A release of Eclipse, the budget-minded branch of Criterion, the discs come in
separate thinpak cases in a paperboard sleeve. The sad truth about the state of
film preservation in Japan is that most silent films were not well preserved and
the existing prints are not in the best of condition. The master prints used for
this set are of varying quality.
Tokyo Chorus is the most scuffed and
scratched, with splotchy frames (the result of chemical degradation) and seriously
damaged sequences, but the image is always watchable and is generally steady
throughout.
Passing Fancy is much better, with minor scuffing and chemical
splotching, but a couple of sequences look as if a blizzard has suddenly erupted
on the screen. A few frames have been briefly held as still frames to cover
damaged footage.
I Was Born But... is the cleanest and brightest of the
prints, with only minor scratching and image degradation. The framing is overly
tight on top throughout, cutting off the tops of heads in some scenes.
There are no supplements on the no-frills discs apart from the piano accompaniment
composed and performed by Donald Sosin His original scores match the mood of each
film with bright, upbeat music (a little more restrained in
I Was Born,
But..., instilled with a torchy saloon-song lilt for
Passing Fancy).
There is an option to watch the films silent or with the score. The films feature
the Japanese intertitles with optional English subtitles. The option also gives
subtitle translations of some of the notes and signs in the film.
For more information about
Silent Ozu - Three Family Comedies, visit
Eclipse Films. To order
Silent Ozu -
Three Family Comedies, go to
TCM Shopping
by Sean Axmaker
