Femmes et voyous

ozu's ultimate triumph of style over substance, a slick gangster/juvenile delinquency picture starring a very young kinuyo tanaka. tanaka's the girl who's an office worker whose boss has a fondness for sexual harassment (in many ways it's a similar role to the one isuzu yamada played in mizoguchi's "osaka story" a couple years later). she meets and falls for a local thug and they turn to petty crime. from what i've read ozu barely remembers this one, one of the many potboilers he churned out in the 20s and 30s, but it still shows he had fun making it. the film may come as a shock to those who are used to the rather static camerawork of ozu's later films - lots of cool dollies, lush photography, great noir-ish lighting, and a meticulous attention to minor detail. ozu's primary influence at this point in his career seems to be joseph von sternberg, there's an extraordinary amount of clutter in almost every frame (look at the later films and you'll see that sternberg's one of the few western influences ozu never quite discarded). still, lots of "pillow shots," direct closeups, along with some low-level shots for those who like to point out that ozu only ever had one camera position. great fun, even if it is silent and i can't read japanese intertitles (a subplot about a friend in trouble lost me).

Josef von Sternberg doesn't get as much mention as Frank Borzage or Ernst Lubitsch as an early Ozu influence, but those familiar with the dense arrangement of objects onscreen in Sternberg films may see the resemblance in both early and late Ozu films. This moody, expressionist pre-noir potboiler exhibits plenty of inspired clutter (most memorably the RCA Victor dog) and stylistic fluorishes (tracking shots, pull shots, and memorable use of shadow) as it tells the story of a gangster and his good-girl-gone-bad moll (Kinuyo Tanaka) as they experience an spiritual awakening through the good graces of an innocent girl. Redemption seems to be a recurring motif in Ozu's gangster movies (WALK CHEEFULLY, THAT NIGHT'S WIFE), and one wonders if bad guy heroes turning themselves in is a convention of the genre or indicative of Ozu's feelings about the criminal life he was assigned to depict. Whatever the case, the climax (involving the single gunshot fired in the entire existing Ozu canon) is as suspenseful and emotionally powerful as anything Ozu filmed.

I've watched a couple of very early Yasujiro Ozu films recently, and wasn't thrilled with them. Dragnet Girl was the last of his silents I wanted to check out, and I was very glad to find this one was really solid. I feel like the director is starting to come into his own here, even if the crime elements of this story are at odds with the more grounded dramas he became best known for making (though there are sequences of Dragnet Girl that do foreshadow the focus on drama to come; it's not "just" a crime/gangster movie).

Maybe the first couple of years of Ozu's filmmaking career were a little shaky, but by the time he got to 1933, he was capable of making some good stuff... and then obviously got even better by the time the 1950s came around. The plot here can be a little muddled, but there are some emotional moments that ring true, and I think it's shot really well for a film of its time, making it an early Ozu film that feels pretty easy to recommend.

Kinuyo Tanaka works in an office, where she has caught the attention of the boss' son. She means to take him for a bundle, because after office hours, she's the moll of Joji Oka, a washed-up boxer and gangster. However, when Sumiko Mizukubo, a nice, old-fashioned shop girl, asks Joji to let her brother, Koji Mitsui out of their gang, the two lovers see a vision of a decent life. Is it beyond their reach?

This movie gives the impression that Ozu was trying to shoot a movie half in the style of Joseph von Sternberg and half in the stye of Frank Borzage -- what would happen if George Bancroft in THUNDERBOLT met a Janet Gaynor character? Visually, it's very Germanic, with lots of half-lit faces and many tracking shots, nothing at all like the style Ozu would adopt after the War. The set design is typical for Ozu in this period, with lots of American posters on the walls.

It has often been stated (which is a slovenly way to not have to cite sources) that Film Noir arose from filtering German expressionism through French Poetic Realism and American Pulp Mystery. Although it did not begin to take shape until the late 1930s, nor flower until the mid-1940s, there's an interesting early sideline in this movie, complete with a femme fatale who leads people to their doom -- who is a nice girl!

DRAGNET GIRL is one of Yasujiro Ozu's early works, a criminal melodrama with a few proto-noir touches. Its story is pretty standard and features a love triangle between a criminal seeking to make good, a respectable young woman, and a moll with a heart of gold. However, those interested in how the gangster picture manifested outside of the United States during its original 1930s golden age will be very interested in this film, not to mention devotees of silent film and Ozu.