Hogaraka ni ayume

I don't know if I'm being too harsh on these early Yasujiro Ozu films, but they just haven't really been doing the job for me. I don't think the really early ones are anywhere close in quality to his later ones, and it's also hard to draw many comparisons between his very early films and those later ones.

Watching a filmmaker's early stuff can be rewarding, even if the films are flawed, if you can watch their style take shape... but in 1929/1930, I feel maybe it was still at least a few years away from happening for Ozu. I might try one more of his films from this era before going back to his later period; could well be worth watching a filmography like this backwards, who knows.

A genuine rarity, an Ozu gangster movie, in which a conman falls for one of his targets, achieving redemption through love in a way that is highly reminiscent of Frank Borzage's tales of romantic salvation. Ozu achieves a variety of moods, from the playful hand signals and spontaneous dance routines that gangsters use to greet each other, to the passion of not only romantic love but fraternal devotion between the conman and his best buddy, resulting in one of his most macho movies as well as one of his most tender. Incidentally, Ozu gives a lot of visual time in this film to close-up shots of people's feet, a motif I don't quite understand in its relation to the movie but is certainly striking.

An interesting film where Ozu is still working towards his later skills. The gangster scenes are wholly unreal- a never-land out of Hollywood films where gangsters play golf and billiards and pick pockets or hold up people now and then- certainly we don't see them making enough to keep them in the style to which they appear accustomed. The most interesting aspect is that the demure and innocent heroine and her family are the only unwesternised characters in the film: they live in a traditional house, wear traditional clothes- indeed, in contrast to her criminal rival for Ken's love, she even uses a Japanese-character type-writer in the office they work in.

George Fox, the founder of the Society of Friends -- better known as the Quakers -- wrote:

"Be patterns, be examples in all countries, places, islands, nations wherever you come; that your carriage and life may preach among all sorts of people, and to them; then you will come to walk cheerfully over the world, answering that of God in everyone; whereby in them you may be a blessing, and make the witness of God in them to bless you."

and from that text, Yasujiro took this sermonizing movie. It's the story of a gangster who falls in love with a nice girl, and she with him. When she finds out what he does, however, she tells him that unless he reforms, she will never see him again. He quits the underworld, and gets a job as a window washer, but his old buddies want him to come in on a job....

Looking at Ozu's post-war movies, it's hard to picture his pre-war output. His camera is in almost constant motion. His characters wear modern clothes and travel by car, and Japanese society is not struggling to maintain its balance and traditional values, under siege by international forces. His characters seek to learn what they can from the outside world, whether they be from movie posters on the wall, or radical Western theologian. Given that Ozu was making a modern drama in an essentially Western medium, this has an inner logic. Yet the rather straightforward and optimistic attitude of this movie rings false. His stronger works in this era were more complicated, more darkly humorous, almost sardonic in their attitude when happy, and bleak when tragic.

The performances are fine, particularly that of Hisao Yoshitani as the protagonist's pugnacious and loyal friend. However, the optimism of Japanese society in this era turned out to be arrogance, and the easy answers of this movie a chimera.

Yasujiro Ozu takes on the gangster movie, and it's just about the most Ozu gangster movie I can think of. A quite, melodramatic look at a man making a key choice without violence in the name of a woman, Walk Carefully is a wonderful little movie from Ozu's silent period that demonstrates that while he works as a contract director in the studio system, he can still make films his own. By the time the finale rolls around, there's no question that Ozu's talent was being allowed to flourish.

Kenji (Minoru Takada) is known as Ken the Knife by his fellow hoodlums, particularly Senko (Hisao Yoshitani), his main partner in crime. They work together to pickpocket or intimate anyone who gets between themselves and money while Kenji has something like a romance going with Chieko (Satoko Date), the female member of their gang. That all changes when Kenji sees Yasue (Hiroko Kawasaki) on the street one day, buying a ring on her company president's orders. Ono (Takeshi Sakamoto) is obviously trying to use his position of power to get Yasue to fall for him, a situation so bad that Yasue considers quitting, only choosing to stay at the protestations of her mother (Utako Suzuki).

Where the film doesn't work best is in the beginning. Mostly in the short nature of Kenji's infatuation of Yasue and their nascent romance (along with the coincidence that brings them together) and some details of how Chieko works in the Ono office seeming completely coincidentally. They're lingering questions and concerns that the film never really addresses. However, once the things are laid out, Ozu focuses on his characters, and things really end up meshing very well.

The story ends up being simply that Kenji decides to leave the life, and he struggles to make ends meet while refusing to meet up with Yasue, despite their warm relationship, until he has become a better man, as she insists he must be. Well, how does one become a better man when one has led a life as a thug?

There's a moment a little more than halfway through where I moved from appreciation to fully getting on the film's wavelength. It's the scene where Kenji decides to cast aside the life of a hoodlum, a decision witnessed by Senko. Kenji announces it, Senko responds by packing up, and they have this extended scene together that feels brimming with the emotion of two friends preparing to never see each other again. Ozu lets the moments linger, no one acting up, and it lands shockingly well. It implies these deep relationships, the movie having done a halfway decent job of building them up to that point, but that scene ramping it all up to a much higher degree.

The story goes on with separations, reconnections, new directions in life, and even one bout of violence. However, it's only ever going to one place: Kenji actually becoming a better man for Yasue and that question of what make him better. Just walking away from a life of criminality, is that enough, or is more required.

And I found it quite touching in the end. I bought the characters, even if the early introductions felt a bit abbreviated, and I bought the final movements of the plot, even if the middle parts relied on some connections that I honestly just didn't understand. I wave them away, point to the emotional core of the film, and say, "That's worth much more than some plot logic I don't get."

It's a small triumph of character overcoming plotting, and a lot of that has to do with Ozu's direction. He didn't need to make these scenes of characters changing last as long as they did. He could have made them brief and abbreviated to get the point across and move on. But Ozu was showing, even in this early stage of his career, that he prioritized getting a quiet moment rather than barreling through a plot. And I appreciate that a lot.