Sono yo no tsuma

It's one of Ozu's gangster movies from the early 1930s... only it's really about a father whose daughter is so sick he commits a robbery to pay the bills, then gets easily tracked down at the child's bedside.

A brief survey of online discussion refers to this as one of Ozu's "early, non-typical silents." It's the same attitude I complained about in my review of DRAGNET GIRL as if John Ford got off the train from Maine in 1915 and announced "I'm ready to direct How Green Was My Valley. What do you mean this is Azusa?"

It's slow and contemplative and allows the audience to get inside the characters' heads and is a fine little movie. What it doesn't do is use the same, low perspective and simple shots that Ozu would cultivate after the Second World War.... almost certainly because it would not occur to him for fifteen or twenty years that they would work. It's too bad he didn't talk about it with the geniuses on the Internet. They know everything.

A desperate man with a sick daughter decides to commit a robbery in order to help her. He begins to feel remorse though, which makes him question his decision.

Ozu made twenty-six movies in his first five years as a director, including this one. He made silent films after silent films began to go out of style, and he made crime films before he went on to do the things he is better known for.

Here we have a mixture of crime and love, and a bit of necessity. Is it wrong to steal bread if you or a loved one are starving? Some would say yes, some no. This story brings that question to the forefront, though it steps it up a notch when the father has to physically confront his victim.

Ozu makes the best of what appears to be an uncharacteristic potboiler assignment involving a man (Tokihiko Okada) driven to crime to help his wife and ailing daughter, chased down by a cop (Fuyuki Yamamoto who looks like a Japanese Charles Bronson) who suddenly faces a moral dilemma. The characters are clearly played for genre type, but great performances make it special -- especially by Emiko Yagumo as the fiercely protective wife -- and Ozu achieves a feeling of moral resolve and atonement through personal sacrifice similar to what he did in WALK CHEERFULLY.

Those of us who are both attracted to and repelled by auteur-ism are challenged by this very early work of Ozu. Japanese cinema was still silent in 1930, and here an Ozu in his mid-20s got his start making crime films clearly indebted to those of German expressionism as it manifested itself both in Germany and in the US, in the form of the silent American works of Murnau and Von Sternberg.

None of the cinematic trade-marks of Ozu's sound-films are present here, and this challenges some auteurist notions of Ozu as a mandarin-renegade who resisted all western influence. Indeed, this crime tale has a fair amount of camera movement, an action-driven plot (at least for the first half), and chiaroscuro lighting and compositions much more reminiscent of German expressionism than traditional Japanese paintings, the key influence on the mise-en-scene of the director's "mature work" (from an auteurist perspective).

About a third of the way in to this short feature, it gets really meta-. The walls of the apartment of the couple that is the story's focus is covered in Hollywood movie posters. Ozu, that "home-grown Japanese auteur" started off as just another early cinema nerd- advertising his "influences."

Turning to the narrative, you can view it as either wholly unrelated to, or as a forerunner for Ozu's famous family driven meditations. The characters are united in poverty and crime, as with so much noir, but this ultimately proves all of their humanity, rather than the negation of it, as '40s Hollywood would have it. Having said that, we should remember this was made at the end of the silent era. Griffithian sentimentality may also be an influence on this movie's narrative. This struck me as I had always interpreted those bits of Ozu's mature works viewed by most western audiences as "sad" to instead be an Asian negation of "tragedy" and the western fetishization of death. Perhaps, I acknowledge sadly, such scenes were a disguised adoption of that western fetish.

Whether one attributes it to Ozu's authorship, or to dependence on Hollywood faux-optimism, this is a powerfully humane, if sentimental, work.

...with this crime drama from Shochiku. A man (Tokihiko Okada) commits a daring armed robbery before escaping into the night. But this isn't your average brazen criminal, but rather a desperate father with a small, terribly ill daughter (Mitsuko Ichimura) and a despondent wife (Emiko Yagumo) at her wit's end. Will motivations even matter, though, when the police come knocking, in the form of detective Kagawa (Togo Yamamoto).

Like all of Ozu's films, the scale is intimate, and the focus is on domestic relationships. However, this adds a criminal element to the equation, and it makes for some interesting character dynamics. There's also more maturity in Ozu's technique, evident during some proto-noir street scenes, using a lot of shadow to create tension. The end result is satisfactory, if a bit too slight, and the continued use of the silent film format was quickly making Japanese cinema seem anachronistic.