Dekigokoro


1h 41m 1933
Dekigokoro

Brief Synopsis

A widower's new romance is threatened by his son's jealousy.

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.

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


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.
Passing Fancy Aka Dekigokoro

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


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

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

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