L'épouse de la nuit

While the characters themselves are stock figures (the good man pushed to criminal activity, the faithful wife, the dutiful but understanding cop, etc.), the execution of this one-room thriller is superb stuff. It has a noirish vibe that feels nothing like Ozu's more famous postwar work. While not a must-see, it is taut, entertaining, and enough of an anomaly in the career of one of cinema's masters to warrant a single viewing from cinephiles.

...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.

"That Night's Wife" (the English title) is actually a poor translation of the Japanese "Sono yo no tsuma". A better one might be "My Wife on That Night". Briefly, the film revolves around a desperate man who commits a crime in order to support his family, and the moral dilemma the policeman who tracks him down finds himself in. The film abounds with cultural inconsistencies like Japanese wearing their shoes in the house, etc. It seems Ozu was trying to do a Japanese film in the style of the German realist films he must have been seeing at the time. There is very little of what one associates with the later style of Ozu. Still, it is taut and entertaining.

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.

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.