Dekigokoro
Brief Synopsis
A widower's new romance is threatened by his son's jealousy.
Cast & Crew
Read More
Yasujiro Ozu
Director
Takeshi Sakamoto
Nobuko Fushimi
Den Obinata
Yasujiro Ozu
Writer
Hideo Shigehara
Cinematographer
Film Details
Genre
Drama
Romance
Silent
Release Date
1933
Production Company
Shochiku Company, Ltd.
Technical Specs
Duration
1h 41m
Sound
Silent
Color
Black and White
Theatrical Aspect Ratio
1.37 : 1
Synopsis
After the death of his wife, a man struggles to raise his son in nearly overwhelming poverty. When the father meets a beautiful young woman, the son becomes jealous of his father's attentions, and conflict arises between them.
Director
Yasujiro Ozu
Director
Film Details
Genre
Drama
Romance
Silent
Release Date
1933
Production Company
Shochiku Company, Ltd.
Technical Specs
Duration
1h 41m
Sound
Silent
Color
Black and White
Theatrical Aspect Ratio
1.37 : 1
Articles
Passing Fancy aka Dekigokoro
Ozu's gift for defining characters with mundane gestures is very much in evidence during the opening scene of Passing Fancy. The camera tracks past a largely working-class audience attending a performance of naniwabushi, which consists of an actor singing a long narrative accompanied by a shamisen player. We first see Kihachi thoughtlessly but good-naturedly keeping time to the music by tapping a small board against his sleeping son's body. Comic business ensues when one audience member spies a purse lying on the ground. He picks it up, finds it empty, and tosses it aside, whereupon another person picks it up. When the purse lands near Kihachi he picks it up and peeks inside like everyone else, but afterwards he picks it up again and exchanges it for his own purse, which is smaller and more badly worn. Here and elsewhere in the film Kihachi also scratches himself almost constantly, the kind of expressive tic that Ozu often used to give characters individuality. Sakamoto worked with Ozu on at least 17 films, starting with Ozu's second feature Dreams of Youth (1928, now lost) up to Late Spring (1949).
The child actor Tomio Aoki (1923-2004) also contributes much to the film's poignant comedy. Here Aoki plays a young boy who is in some ways smarter and more perceptive than his father, but not always well-behaved. Aoki made at least 10 features with Ozu, starting with The Life of an Office Worker (1929, now lost) and including all four Kihachi films. Here the credits list him as "Tokkan Kozo," referring to the rambunctious persona that Aoki established in the 1929 film Tokkan Kozo/A Straightforward Boy (1929, survives as a fragment). (The film scholar David Bordwell explains that the name literally means "a boy who charges into you.") Given Aoki's disarming but hardly sentimental performances in Passing Fancy and I Was Born, But... (1932)--another of Ozu's great masterpieces from the silent era--it is easy to see why Ozu created so many roles for him.
Passing Fancy's visual style is slightly more relaxed compared to the rigorous formalization for which Ozu's postwar films are known. While the later films almost invariably use stationary camera setups, in Passing Fancy Ozu and his cinematographer Shojiro Sugimoto employ several lateral tracking shots, including the very opening shot mentioned above. Still, the film uses mostly static shots with low camera placement, as is typical for all of Ozu's later films. Ozu also punctuates scenes with what are often described as "pillow shots": carefully composed exterior shots which depict the surrounding environment and provide a brief pause in the narrative. Examples here include shots of a pair of large water tanks and lines of laundry hanging out to dry. Ultimately, Passing Fancy remains one of Ozu's funniest and most moving features. The Japanese film journal Kinema Junpo ranked it first in its annual poll, the second time Ozu had received first place; the first was Young Miss (1930).
Directed by Yasujiro Ozu
Story by "James Maki" (Ozu)
Script by Tadao Ikeda
Director of Photography: Shojiro Sugimoto
Art Director: Yoneichi Wakita
Film Editing: Kazuo Ishikawa
Cast: Takeshi Sakamoto (Kihachi), Nobuko Fushimi (Harue), Den Obinata (Jiro), Choko Iida (Otome), Tokkan Kozo/Tomio Aoki (Tomio), Reiko Tani (Barber), Chishu Ryu (Man on Boat).
BW-100m.
by James Steffen
Sources
Richie, Donald. Ozu. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974.
Bordwell, David. Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema. London: BFI, 1988.
Passing Fancy aka Dekigokoro
The world of Yasujiro Ozu's Passing Fancy (1933) is a far cry from the comfortable middle-class milieu of Ozu's later films, but the director evokes it with every bit as much affection and acutely observed detail. It is the first of four films that Ozu made featuring Takeshi Sakamoto as the character named Kihachi. The other films in the series include A Story of Floating Weeds (1934), An Innocent Maid (1935) and An Inn in Tokyo (1935). As played by Sakamoto, Kihachi is surely one of Ozu's most memorable creations. In Passing Fancy, the illiterate and semi-employed Kihachi lives in the working-class Fukugawa district of Tokyo and raises his son Tomio mostly on his own, though with some help by neighbors such as the local barber. In an interview Ozu recalled: "There used to be, in Fukugawa where I was born, lots of people like the Kihachi character, though they're rare now [...]. They owned one fundoshi [loincloth], dressed any which way, drank shochu." Another aspect of the film that indirectly reflects Ozu's experiences is the notion of a broken home; as the scholar Donald Richie points out, for much of Ozu's childhood and adolescence his father worked as a merchant in Tokyo while he stayed with his mother in the town of Matsuzaka.
Ozu's gift for defining characters with mundane gestures is very much in evidence during the opening scene of Passing Fancy. The camera tracks past a largely working-class audience attending a performance of naniwabushi, which consists of an actor singing a long narrative accompanied by a shamisen player. We first see Kihachi thoughtlessly but good-naturedly keeping time to the music by tapping a small board against his sleeping son's body. Comic business ensues when one audience member spies a purse lying on the ground. He picks it up, finds it empty, and tosses it aside, whereupon another person picks it up. When the purse lands near Kihachi he picks it up and peeks inside like everyone else, but afterwards he picks it up again and exchanges it for his own purse, which is smaller and more badly worn. Here and elsewhere in the film Kihachi also scratches himself almost constantly, the kind of expressive tic that Ozu often used to give characters individuality. Sakamoto worked with Ozu on at least 17 films, starting with Ozu's second feature Dreams of Youth (1928, now lost) up to Late Spring (1949).
The child actor Tomio Aoki (1923-2004) also contributes much to the film's poignant comedy. Here Aoki plays a young boy who is in some ways smarter and more perceptive than his father, but not always well-behaved. Aoki made at least 10 features with Ozu, starting with The Life of an Office Worker (1929, now lost) and including all four Kihachi films. Here the credits list him as "Tokkan Kozo," referring to the rambunctious persona that Aoki established in the 1929 film Tokkan Kozo/A Straightforward Boy (1929, survives as a fragment). (The film scholar David Bordwell explains that the name literally means "a boy who charges into you.") Given Aoki's disarming but hardly sentimental performances in Passing Fancy and I Was Born, But... (1932)--another of Ozu's great masterpieces from the silent era--it is easy to see why Ozu created so many roles for him.
Passing Fancy's visual style is slightly more relaxed compared to the rigorous formalization for which Ozu's postwar films are known. While the later films almost invariably use stationary camera setups, in Passing Fancy Ozu and his cinematographer Shojiro Sugimoto employ several lateral tracking shots, including the very opening shot mentioned above. Still, the film uses mostly static shots with low camera placement, as is typical for all of Ozu's later films. Ozu also punctuates scenes with what are often described as "pillow shots": carefully composed exterior shots which depict the surrounding environment and provide a brief pause in the narrative. Examples here include shots of a pair of large water tanks and lines of laundry hanging out to dry. Ultimately, Passing Fancy remains one of Ozu's funniest and most moving features. The Japanese film journal Kinema Junpo ranked it first in its annual poll, the second time Ozu had received first place; the first was Young Miss (1930).
Directed by Yasujiro Ozu
Story by "James Maki" (Ozu)
Script by Tadao Ikeda
Director of Photography: Shojiro Sugimoto
Art Director: Yoneichi Wakita
Film Editing: Kazuo Ishikawa
Cast: Takeshi Sakamoto (Kihachi), Nobuko Fushimi (Harue), Den Obinata (Jiro), Choko Iida (Otome), Tokkan Kozo/Tomio Aoki (Tomio), Reiko Tani (Barber), Chishu Ryu (Man on Boat).
BW-100m.
by James Steffen
Sources
Richie, Donald. Ozu. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974.
Bordwell, David. Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema. London: BFI, 1988.
Silent Ozu: Three Family Comedies on DVD from Eclipse
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
Silent Ozu: Three Family Comedies on DVD from Eclipse
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